The demand for online video content is exploding around the world. Most marketing departments need to be increasing their plans for video marketing, or risk missing out on business.
The statistics are in, and online video is booming! The Wyzowl report, The State of Video Marketing 2021, explored people’s video watching behaviour across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Snapchat, webinars and websites. Excluding online TV such as Netflix, it found that people now watch an average of 16 hours of online video per week! That’s a 52% increase in the last two years.
Two of the core underlying causes of the growth are Covid-19 that has caused people around the world to be stuck at home for extended periods, and increasingly faster internet connections, especially with 4G and 5G connections for mobile users.
For instance, according to Cisco, global mobile data traffic will increase seven-fold between 2017 and 2022. They estimate that a 5G connection will generate 260% more traffic than the average 4G connection, which much of that increase coming from more video content being consumed.
Facebook and Instagram are fast becoming video platforms more than static image platforms.
In fact, last month Adam Mossseri, the head of Instagram, stated, “We are no longer a photo sharing app”. In the same video he said, “The number one reason people use Instagram is to be entertained” and specifically sited TikTok and YouTube as their biggest competitors in the video space.
Giving a very clear indication of what is to come he said, “We’re going to be experimenting with how we embrace video more broadly – full screen, immersive, entertaining, mobile-first video”.
Reviewing video engagement statistics shows why Facebook and Instagram and pushing so strongly into this area. People are twice as likely to share video content with their friends than any other content. And upstart social media platform TikTok has exploded in growth with its exclusive focus on video. It has rocketed up the charts when it comes to the average number of minutes users spend per day on the platform – even beating Instagram in numbers of reports.
With all of this growth in video consumption, it’s no wonder that video marketing is exploding in growth too. Recent research in USA found that as many as 85% of businesses have used video marketing in 2020. This is an enormous increase from 2016 where the figure was just 61%.
Currently, the top types of video include explainer videos, which nearly three in four (72%) of video marketers create, presentation videos (49%), testimonial videos (48%), and sales videos and video ads (42% each).
Studies have found that viewers retain a much higher percentage of a message when they watch it in a video compared to just reading it in text. And 94% of people surveyed in the Wyzowl report said they had watched an explainer video in the last year to learn about a product or service.
What is more, 84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
Way back in 2009, Zappos, the worlds’ biggest online shoe store who sell more than $1 billion in shoes per year, said that adding demo videos to their ecommerce product pages increased sales between 6% – 30%. The videos were simple demo videos with real Zappos employees, not models or actors, making them affordable to create.
So whether it be webinars, explainer videos, demo videos, customer testimonials, sales videos or video ads, as you consider where to put your marketing focus over the next year, make sure you’re considering how you’ll use online video in your marketing.
