Can a digital marketer ignore video? In India, total Internet video traffic will be 75 per cent of all Internet traffic in 2020, up from 51 per cent in 2015.
It may be unsurprising given today’s instant world where long-form content is no longer digested as easily as short, concise, snackable bites. And if you’re a marketer in a B2B or B2C industry, video is a way to break through the clutter and capture eyeballs. One of the key enablers of an effective video strategy is bandwidth. With fiber to the home (FTTH), 4G data and high bandwidth enterprise connections, the backbone is already there. Not surprisingly while overall advertising spends are growing by 10% YoY in 2017, digital is growing at 30% and spending on Over-The-Top (OTT) video is set to grow rapidly.
Video content needs to be as compelling (in fact, more so) as anything within a publication, blog, or tweet. Three dimensions need to be kept in mind – relevance, sentiment and quality. If this isn’t kept up, video content reduces to distractions that have the opposite effect – they drive away customers.
Thus, for video content to generate the eyeballs required and not be placed in the ‘just another ad’ bucket, it needs to do five things:
- Find a purpose – clichéd as it may sound, why are you producing this video? If it is a how-to or a case study the answer maybe more obvious than with an awareness objective
- Provide an emotional– you may be selling a biscuit or a software application, but people buy from people and it is always important to create content that has a warm heart. Language choices play a role for India
- Tell a story – even a 30 second video needs to follow the essential 3-act structure of a story – intro, conflict and conclusion.
- Find a verb – what is the video asking the audience to do. Sign up/ Sign in / Call/ Share/ try and find a verb or action phrase that describes the objective of the video
- Fit in – how does this video fit into the overall campaign you are running. Are you targeting video viewers with an e-mail campaign or an sms campaign or sending them an offer?
Choose the relevant video platform that provides rich analytics on video viewing and can allow you to target the right kind of users. Social media platforms optimize your campaign for video views, OTT video platforms allow you to target the right kind of videos that can have your video play as an ad. Also as a marketer, one must seek to learn how many views of the video, the stickiness factor of the video (how many dropped off before completing and where), how many likes, shares in order to gauge it’s effectiveness.
Gauging audience reaction is tricky, even for the best of us. We all recall the backlash Pepsi faced with their recent protest adi but then we also saw Heineken do something similar with a more positive reaction.
Here are some desi digital internet videos ads we love
Google Search: Reunion
British Airways: Fuelled by Love
Mauka Mauka (India vs Pakistan) – ICC Cricket World Cup 2015
If you are a digital marketer in India, integrate video into your strategy, the time is right, the technology is there but as always pay attention to those five rules to get success out of it.
Some interesting stats:
- 78% of all internet users view online videos weekly
- 55% of internet users view online videos daily
- 33% of tablet owners watch an hour of video on their devices every day
- 500 million people watch Facebook videos every day
- 10 billion videos are watched on Snapchat every day
- 82% of Twitter users watch videos on Twitter
- 52% of marketers believe video provides better brand awareness
- Using video in email boosts the benefits even more. In fact, studies show that just using the word “video” in an email the click-through rates increased by 65% and the number of subscribers that unsubscribed decreased by 26% when video was used in the email. Most important, click-through rates increased by 200-300% when a video was included in the email itself.
Source: https://www.business2community.com/video-marketing/video-content-will-king-2017-01724253#B8Abg60hDASx0SdO.97
