Why Video is Relevant to Your Online Marketing Strategy

When you get around to formulating your marketing strategy for the upcoming year, you'll want to have all the most relevant information at your fingertips so you can make good decisions. Of course a big part of this will be an understanding of why video should comprise a huge part of your overall efforts, and how to go about producing relevant videos.Included in the statistics below, you'll find a number of points worth considering for your video content. These statistics specifically address engagement with video on Instagram, viewing habits of Snapchat videos, and a number of other important platform marketing statistics. If you can use the information to your advantage, you'll probably enjoy a more successful year of marketing campaigns, at least with regard to your video productions.

Viewing statistics

It is estimated that by the year 2020, more than 82% of all Internet traffic will come from video. This is an astonishing statistic, especially when you consider that so much effort is put into preparing and publishing relevant text content which is intended to reach audiences. It's also known that at least 45% of all online users will watch at least an hour of video every week, primarily from YouTube and Facebook, although other video sources are also included. It should be pointed out that many users in this group will watch far more than an hour's worth of videos during the course of a week, and that some will actually consume 20 or 30 hours of video material.To gauge the importance of video to platform users, consider the fact that videos are shared on social media more than any other form of content. This is not only an indicator of videos relevance, but also a significant point about how strongly users engage with video, and offer to share it with others. Videos are actually shared on the social media more than 12 times more frequently than text and images combined. This should provide some insight into the powerful relevance assigned to video by platform users.

Business video statistics

Users who routinely view videos claim that product videos are extremely helpful to the decision-making process when they're about to make a purchase. Upwards of 90% of these video viewers confirm that they have reached a purchasing decision after watching a product video supplied by a specific brand. This fact alone should point out the significance of making such brand product videos available to consumers, because it can be the decisive factor in urging them toward making a product purchase.

By the same token, at least 64% of consumers surveyed say that they're much more likely to purchase a product after having viewed a video which contained information about it. Intuitively, it might have been expected that a number of users would want to purchase a product immediately after watching a convincing video about it, but the fact that 64% of consumers are in this category, makes it a compelling reason to produce more of these kinds of product videos.Another somewhat surprising statistic about video marketing is that when it's used in tandem with email distribution, the click-through rate increases by more than 63%. As opposed to sending out emails with text only, this is a huge increase and a solid way to build engagement with a target audience. Since businesses routinely are attempting to increase their mailing lists by acquiring additional users email addresses, this should be a fruitful area of marketing which should definitely be explored by a brand.

Statistics on videos themselves

As you might already know, the huge majority of all online videos will run for less than 60 seconds, and that is regardless of the industry which produces the videos. There's a good reason for this of course, because it's well-known and well-documented by now that the attention span of most users is of short duration, so any points made in the video must be done quickly and directly to the point.In fact, it has been determined that the ideal duration for any video which attempts to encourage full viewing by a user, should last no more than six seconds. While that may not seem like enough time to get your point across, it's these little snippet videos which have proven to be the most effective, in terms of retention and recollection.

Platform statistics

A mere 9% of small businesses currently have any kind of marketing strategy at all which includes YouTube. This means that the vast majority of the small business market has no kind of presence at all on the platform, which leaves a vast untapped potential out there on the biggest video platform. While small businesses have been slow to adopt social media marketing, it can be expected that in the very near future, this figure will begin to rise steadily, as small businesses gain an understanding of how YouTube might benefit their marketing and advertising efforts.An interesting statistic specific to Facebook is that approximately 85% of all video viewers will watch them with the sound turned off. This is an important fact because it means that in order to get your marketing message across to users, you would need to find some way other than audio to make the point. Some business users have already overcome this obstacle by supplying captions with their videos, and others have made the video itself so self-explanatory that the underlying message can't be misunderstood. At any rate, if you're a business user marketing videos on Facebook, you should be aware of the fact that most likely you won't be reaching your audience with any audio message.Videos which are played on Instagram routinely get at least twice the engagement rate which videos garner on any of the other social media platforms. This should tell you that if you're only going to use one platform to upload your videos to, that Instagram would be a good choice, since you can expect much greater engagement from your followers. For any small business with a limited budget, this represents the maximum return for your investment.