Video Marketing – Set to Boom!

Video marketing accounts for the highest level of user-engagement. Nothing could make us feel more engrossed than a video – imagine the hours you’ve spent watching cat fail videos on YouTube…

Being an effective marketing tool, the use of videos should be widespread in the digital marketing industry. But, strangely enough, the industry often takes hiccups when using videos for promotional purposes.

It intrigues many analysts as to why the industry acts in such a laidback manner when it comes to video marketing. The top offerings of a digital marketing agency are search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, social media optimisation and infographics. Video marketing occupies a tiny space in social marketing campaigns, as if it’s not a standalone marketing solution.

Video marketing alone could bolster a campaign, create leads and generate sales. The user-generated channels in YouTube are good examples of what we are talking about here. Many of those channels have more than a million subscribers. Hiring the owners of those channels to promote products and services means reaching out to a significant number of users.

Why then, despite the potential, is video marketing not making it big?

1. Lack of hosting platforms

There are not enough platforms to host videos. A search on Google may yield a list of results, but very few of them are suitable for business promotions, and the majority are only to keep a stock of videos. Just like their image hosting counterparts that are used mostly by ordinary users to store their family photos.

Investing in a video hosting site could be financially burdensome for startups. If a startup couldn’t round up enough venture fund, then offering video hosting solutions to businesses will always remain a distant dream for it. To smoothly run a video hosting site, terabytes of hosting space would be required. Most entrepreneurs aim for the cloud, but only big data centres can offer cloud-based hosting solutions and such solutions are outrageously expensive.

2. Video production is not up-to-date

The chief aspects of video production such as story-boarding, casting, art direction and scripting need to be superior, on top of that, people who work in those departments need to apprehend the requirements of the digital marketing industry. This part is the most problematic one because it’s not hard to find efficient art directors or production designers, but only a handful of them are savvy with the know-hows of the online marketing industry.

Thankfully, the gulf between video production and digital marketing is not unbridgeable. Training could be given to people, who handle video production works, so they understand which areas to highlight in a video for an internet marketing campaign to be successful and what type of message to convey so online users find it easy to decipher.

3. No targeted marketing

The existing video marketing trends and techniques are focused on mass marketing, and not on targeted marketing. The problem with this approach is it fails to help a marketer achieve his ultimate goal, which is, converting leads to sales. Unless mass marketing is replaced by targeted marketing, user-engagement won’t turn in favour of a business.

In one of her articles on Forbes, Erika Trautman sounded optimistic that marketing agencies will soon identify the prospect of targeted marketing and move to it from mass marketing. Erika may be right because the digital marketing industry has become highly receptive these days and is on the lookout of personalised ways of marketing.

4. Separate hosting and viewing platforms

Many hosting companies provide businesses with space to host their videos. They even offer tools so the video uploader could collect all data regarding the video and use them as analytics to shape campaigns better. That’s reasonable but there’s one issue that the majority of video hosting services such as Ooyala, Wistia, etc have failed to address.

The issue is after a promotional video is hosted by a business, it then needs to embed the video in their website. Since visitors can only watch the video after landing on the company website, it couldn’t perform the job that it is supposed to perform, that is, it couldn’t fetch the site leads.

Nevertheless, many of the shortcomings have already been identified, so we can hope the industry will get rid of them and adopt new practices, which will help it thrive and leverage the entire digital marketing industry.