Member Article

The importance of using video in digital marketing

It’s online marketing focus week on Bdaily. Here digital content consultant from markettiers4dc, Jessica Feldman, looks at the importance of using video as part of your digital marketing strategy.

There’s an irony in me writing an article about the importance of using video as part of a digital marketing strategy to deliver your messages to your target audience. I suppose, given ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, I should try and get my points across in under 700 at least! But if a picture is really worth a 1000, just how many words is a video worth. For example, apparently, had film producer David O. Selznick included all 423,575 words from the book Gone with the Wind in the dialogue to his Oscar® winning 1939 movie, it would have been 168 hours long!

If marketers haven’t already acknowledged the importance of creating engaging experiences with video for users and potential customers, then they are already way behind the curve. According to Experian Hitwise, in February 2013, the UK spent 323 million hours watching online video content, a 45 per cent increase on the same period last year, with Marketing Week reporting in April 2013 that 16 per cent of all visits to video sites now ending up on a transactional site.

And it’s not just about B2C content. 75% of executives were already watching work-related videos on business-related websites at least weekly back in 2010 according to The Forbes ‘Video in the C-Suite’ so can safely assume those numbers have only increased.

Video can also significantly improve your business’ SEO, with search engines prioritising links that containing rich media content, on the basis they have been tagged appropriately. Similarly, with YouTube now the second biggest search engine, the benefits of video marketing have never been stronger, but video is also being viewed across all social platforms, be that Facebook, Google+ or embedded within a Tweet. Even Instagram is now in on the act with the recent launch of its 15s video offering.

It would seem users of social networks can’t get enough of video, being more likely to engage or embed, share and comment on such content than any written social related posts. Indeed, according to a Simply Measured report from 2012, videos on Facebook are shared 12 times more than status updates that contain just links or text posts combined, something that is extremely important given on average, a status update only reaches 17% of all ‘likes’ according EdgeRank, 2012. Video can therefore help with the viral spread of your content within social media and ensure your advocates are more engaged with your brand meaning the next time you post an update it’s more likely to reach them.

From, a B2B perspective, video can also be used to enrich trade shows, events, sales presentations and collateral, as well as corporate training and internal communications.

Streaming live video content can further improve engagement with viewers and create a buzz within social media, especially if you give viewers the ability to interact directly with the event whilst it is being broadcast. The effectiveness of live content can be further enhanced by streaming into your brand’s Facebook timeline and subsequently into the newsfeeds of those people who have liked your page, enabling them to watch the content without leaving their Facebook page, whilst sharing it with their friend. Similarly, you can now stream live into LinkedIn and Google+, the latter offering its Hangouts tool as a fantastic way to include up to 10 people remotely in your live event, just like video conferencing, but allowing any number of people to view the live stream from wherever you embed it.

As you can see, the opportunities for video marketing are endless and I’m pleased to say I’ve managed to make my argument for it in less than 700 words. However, if after reading this, you still ask need to ask me the question ‘What shall I do’, rest assured, unlike Rhett Butler, I DO ‘give a damn’ and am happy to help!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jessica Feldman .