You are already aware of the fact that video marketing is a powerful tool that helps in generating new leads as well as gaining new customers.
So, still, hesitating to use it?
There are many small to medium businesses that fear to adopt the video platform for marketing. The reasons are high price, bulky and hard to track.
Though these seem to be valid reasons, let’s check if they are true today also.
Video technology has become popular in the last few years. Earlier it was just uploading on YouTube in the hope that millennials will find it. Today, there are plenty of video uploading platforms that allow businesses to create, share as well as analyze videos without the involvement of agencies, actors or expenses.
As per some statistics, 88% of video marketers found that video helps them to earn a good ROI. They have found a 5% increase on last year’s figure.
If you aren’t aware of what a video can do for your company, there’s still time to look at it.
In this post, let’s check about the top video marketing myths.
Debunking the 5 Video Marketing Myths
1. Video Marketing is Out of Budget
You might have heard that HBO’s investment of $10 million per episode in ‘Westworld’ helped it lead ‘The Game of Thrones’. Hey, you don’t have to spend so much.
It is not compulsory for a video to be expensive. In today’s world, consumers and buyers appreciate the reality rather than the production value.
Due to the demand for authenticity, there’s a boom in micro-influencer marketing and user-generated content. Both of these marketing strategies enable brands to rely on their own buyers for creating content, basically a bit more as compared to the iPhone.
If you have your own video content and have a valuable message for the buyers, don’t worry about the production budget. For instance, there are many platforms such as Moz that produces Whiteboard Friday sessions where the experts in the industry speak on various topics such as SEO, link building, content marketing, PPC, etc. in front of a Whiteboard. Similarly, even Vidyard produces a show Chalk Talks where they ask their company experts to talk on the topics such as analytics, outbound sales, and video strategy in front of a chalkboard. Such videos get shared thousands of times and the production cost is just a few minutes of the experts, a marker, and a whiteboard or chalkboard.
As per the Heinz Marketing Report: Using B2B Video to Drive Results, 59% of the companies spend less than 10% of their marketing budget on video. Hence you can produce engaging videos with only a small portion of your total marketing budget. This proves the beauty of modern technology which means it is affordable as well as accessible.
2. Video is Time Consuming
Many small business owners say that they don’t have an idea of where to start with video marketing. In fact, they think that it requires a lot of time to create one as you need to work on scripts and storyboards, look for actors and equipment, and hire someone to operate the clapperboard and scream, “Action!”. But today’s video marketing is completely different from this, and you need to take fewer efforts than mentioned here.
For example, you can simply turn on the video option on your phone and shoot a video in less than a few minutes. The in-built video technology of mobile devices makes people think you used a professional camera for shooting a video.
Today, your smartphone devices act as a great substitute for most of the best DSLRs and video equipment. Hence, you can easily capture videos of yourself, events, your office, and customers giving spontaneous testimonials when your sales and account teams visit them.
For actors, don’t worry that you can’t afford a popular celebrity or influencer. Your employees can act better than them as they really know your products, your customers, and your industry in detail. Once they get the confidence of acting in front of a camera, you won’t need to find actors as they will be around you.
Finally, note that you don’t need to script everything. Though writers are great and you need to prepare for good writing, some of your employees too can create a lot of great content with little or no forethought. You might be knowing entrepreneur and internet personality Gary Vaynerchuk, for example. He built a media empire from the selfie videos recorded on his mobile phone. You can check the below video of him where he is giving advice to young entrepreneurs.
3. We Don’t Really Need Videos
You might have watched a product video, a demo video, or a customer interview probably a few times or maybe a lot of times. Videos aren’t always used with an intention of selling a product.
In fact videos are used for top four purposes:
- Customer education
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Buyer education
Most of the brands think that they don’t need to use video for marketing. Video is in great demand and is being driven by people who work within it.
Both B2B and B2C are simply just B2H (business-to-human) and humans love to watch videos. Let’s check the stats below:
- Around 54% of the people want to see more video content from marketers.
- Broadly, 83% of consumers globally prefer YouTube for watching video content.
- 73% of consumers globally prefer watching videos on social media that are interesting.
- In 2019, the video was the most preferred form of media used in content strategy, instead of blogs and infographics.
Actually, the industries in which video isn’t used to have the greatest opportunities. You might have observed the recent explosion of online video in a niche like real estate, where agencies have out of the blue started using all video forms right from drone flyovers to virtual reality walk-throughs. For gaining similar benefits it is important to learn what your customers would like to see.
4. We Can’t Track the ROI of Video
Because video is still a new tool in the toolkit of the modern marketer, it isn’t going to be perfect. But there is a solution to track the value and return on investment (ROI) of a video.
Using a video hosting platform such as YouTube or your website’s video feature, you can easily track the engagement of it. You get to see the total number of views and this is similar to the number of visits made to your website.
Marketers get the scope of improvement with the help of video metrics. You can track attention spans, views, and click through rates (CTR) for identifying which videos work and if they help in breaking into key accounts, generating leads, building pipeline,s or driving revenue.
Also with an actual video enablement platform, you can get an idea of who are the people watching your videos, the device they watch, what they like and didn’t like, and their reaction afterward.
Even video enablement platforms, like TwentyThree and Wistia, can help you know what part of video viewers watched, where they revisited and where they skipped. This will help you to automatically know an individual’s interest in products or value propositions in the video.
With the CRM and marketing system integrations, you don’t need to invest all your time in these analytics. You can improve as per the actions based on – how your viewers watched the video? Did they watch just 25 percent of it? So, send them a different video. Was a part of your video re-watched where the product is shown repeatedly? Ask your sales team to contact those viewers as you might have a qualified lead on your hands.
5. There Aren’t Many Uses of Video
One of the excuses for not using video is that video doesn’t have many uses. Well, let me tell you that video is the most vibrant and repurpose-able content format. Videos have helped many businesses to increase their email open rates, click-through rates for landing pages, encouraged social media sharing, and boosted page time on websites, and driven more leads as compared to only text. With a great video editing platform, it is possible to optimize one video for all channels.
We use videos for customer support to provide a step-by-step guide on using a particular feature or resolve any issue. This makes the user understand everything easily rather than verbal explanation or content. You can check our videos here: https://www.youtube.com/milesweb
With a good video editing platform, small to medium businesses get the tools required for easily cutting up, editing, and optimizing one video into many formats for various channels. This easy because users can easily do the A/B testing of videos similar to an email and can deliver dynamic content for personalizing videos to viewers such as inserting names, logos, or even swapping out different products. Using the right tools, the video offers more uses than you know.
The Bottom Line
Thus, videos are easier than you think.
Once you get the idea that unscripted and low production value videos can be both engaging and trackable, you too will find that videos can be used for something more than just marketing and sales.
Video can be used in your customer support too like we are using to demonstrate how to resolve issues or use a particular product.
After knowing that video is affordable, easy, and trackable, start using it immediately for your business.
Do you still have any doubt regarding using videos? Comment below and let us know them.
