Video marketing has grown exponentially over the last few years. It’s no secret that to stay on top of marketing trends – and results – you should be paying careful attention to including video marketing in your content mix.

Why bother with video marketing? Here’s some interesting video marketing stats to consider…

If you’re unconvinced about the effectiveness and spread of video marketing, consider the following stats from US-based Wyzowl – who conduct yearly research into video marketing:

  • 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
  • 88% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
  • People are twice as likely to share video content with their friends than any other type of content.
  • When asked how they’d most like to learn about a product or service, 73% said they’d prefer to watch a short video.
  • 38% of businesses said they started using video marketing because it had become quicker to create.
  • 87% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI.
  • 86% of video marketers say video has been effective for generating leads.

The rise of unpolished DIY video content

But isn’t creating video-based social media content or ads time-consuming and expensive? Sure, it can be, but there’s been a recent uptake in DIY videos that everyone (especially small businesses!) can get on board with.

Unpolished DIY vids are cheap, quick and effective. As Reckon’s Digital Marketing Manager, Valentina Vurcio tells us,

“A big new trend business owners can get on board with is DIY videos. The trend for self-recorded video content (that doesn’t look perfect) is obviously down to the boom of TikTok.

But what’s interesting is that bigger brands have started to create DIY videos with a very unpolished look as well. This trend is great news for small businesses looking to get into video and social media marketing on a small budget.”

Get onboard with ‘stories’

Stories, namely temporary video or multi-image ‘slide’ content is now a big segment of the social media landscape. For those living under a rock, a story is a time-limited, off-the-cuff social post that can be a video clip, or mish-mash of image and caption slides.

While not always ‘video’ in the strictest sense, by stitching images, video, and text together into a short time-limited post, you can very swiftly grab some attention as to what’s happening in your life and your business’s life.

Story content is authentic, quick, and consumable. Furthermore, these posts don’t have to feature permanently on your social pages which reduces the anxiety for social posting perfectionists, allows you to fire off quick stories as they come to you.

While Snapchat started the trend, you can find similar functions across Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, WhatsApp et cetera.

Key elements to video shareability and ‘virality’

While creating a viral video is a bit of a pipe dream for most – there’s a lot you can do to create shareable videos to increase views and spread… and you never know, virality could happen.

Let’s take a look at some rigorous research undertaken by the University of South Australia, who studied the key elements behind highly shareable videos by asking the question ‘is there a formula for success?’

The two-year study, Viral Marketing: The science of sharing, which resulted in a book found the following key ingredients in highly shareable or viral marketing videos:

  • Emotions and arousal play an important role in video sharing, but wide distribution reigns supreme in viral video.
  • Creative quality is the ‘icing on the cake’ for getting shared.
  • Videos that exhibit high-arousal emotions cut through and are most remembered.
  • Overt branding has no impact on the degree to which a video will get shared.
  • Using poorly branded advertising is like throwing away your marketing budget.
  • Don’t over-invest in creative at the cost of distribution. This will not make a video go viral.

Do some instructional vids

According to Wyzowl’s research,

‘The most commonly created types of video are explainer videos’, and ‘96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service’.

This makes perfect sense. By creating explainers or instructional vids, you tap into the wide array of people searching online for a new skill, technique, or tip.

People love to learn online, quickly, and efficiently. Video is perfect for this, as opposed to long written instructions as it creates a perfect opportunity to spread snippets of knowledge, while boosting your personal or business brand and profile.

Think about your specific business and how you can shoot some quick DIY tutorials that link to your business type and skillset. There’ll definitely be something you can share on your socials…