Yes, that’s correct. One million customers.
Living in Israel, I get to meet with amazing companies that are making an impressive impact across the globe. In order to truly grasp what it’s like to create great videos at scale, I recently sat down with Promo.Com a company that is absolutely crushing it on video marketing.
In today’s highly saturated digital landscape, social media feeds are flooded with content. Yet, despite the content saturation, videos seem to be rising to the top. In fact, it’s the leading format for brands and advertisers. For good reason, consumers seem to absolutely love video content.
A solid video can enable a brand to cut through the noise and gain the attention, engagement, and interest of their customer base.
In a recent study, SocialBakers found that while organic content may be declining, live video, and video content overall, still yields the best organic engagement.
Social Bakers Median Interactions
Despite the overall saturation of content, micro video content is definitely a great way for marketers to engage their audience. The challenges to creating premium video content are finding the right tech to produce solid videos that are shareable, branded and optimized for each social platform.
1. Video marketing is picking up steam in 2019, what are the trends that the company is identifying?
Video marketing is now more accessible than ever for businesses of all sizes. There are many tools that have democratized video creation. As an industry, there’s an increase in demand for video marketing services among small and large businesses in all verticals.
Here are the trends that we’re seeing:
-
Social video has fully arrived.One of the clearest shifts in video marketing is that video now dominates every social media and marketing channel.
-
Stories & Live Video are driving massive engagement.The social platforms’ new video formats are the main driver for the growing demand for video content.
- Short, bite-sized video play an important role in the marketing strategy. We will see more of these videos this year.
- Mobile First — More content is being viewed on tablet and mobile devices than ever before. The popularity of mobile video formats is increasing. We see more stories (vertical videos and square or 4:5 videos for the mobile feed).
- 360-degree video, VR, and other immersive video formats will emerge
2019 seems to be a year full of new possibilities and innovations in the Video Marketing space.
2. How are video marketing platforms responding to the vertical video shift?
Vertical video marketing is on the rise mainly because people are consuming their content, more and more on mobile and on-the-go. We’ve actually seen an increase in the creation of vertical videos, and it currently accounts for more than a third of all videos created on our platform.
With one click users can publish their videos in all relevant ratios and post them directly to their social channels. Not only is quick to do, but the quality of content is also unparalleled and offers professional-grade content.
3. Companies are focusing more on videos but they don’t want to spend the time and resources on the tech, why?
Video production can be very expensive and requires lots of resources and skills.
In order to succeed with videos, businesses need to create lots of videos and try different variations, lengths, and stories in order to find the winning ones that really get results. It’s extremely time consuming and we wanted to make it easier for businesses of all sizes.
Like anything we do, it requires consistency and dedication. Similar to dating, diet or training, we need to create videos every week and do it ongoingly in order to get better and achieve our goals. Creating a lot of videos requires more time, assets and creative ideas, not to mention the budget that is needed when you need to shoot the video and hire staff to create it.
This is where Promo.com becomes so helpful and effective. The platform is an affordable and easy service that, in addition to its intuitive video creation tool, is also providing content ideas, footage, and templates that make the video creation fun and easy. Think Canva for video. It saves time, money, and serves as an amazing resource for creative ideas and social guidance.
4. It used to be that videos were created for one platform and then reshared from there. Today, native videos are receiving better engagement. Can you offer any insights on the topic?
It is a known fact that Facebook is prioritizing native videos and is less likely to expose video links especially if they come from Youtube. Native is clearly the way to go when it comes to most social channels today. Native videos give you analytics and better visibility in the feed. On Twitter, a video Tweet is 6x more likely to be retweeted than a photo Tweet.
5. What would you suggest the best way a brand can start integrating video?
The best way would be to start and try it out. Like many things in life, trying is the best option.
Here are a few tips to start successfully:
- Define your goals — Goals may be to drive traffic to your website, build followers on your Facebook page, raise brand awareness, or convert sales. A truly comprehensive video marketing strategy will likely have several different goals overall. However, when it comes to each video, the focus may shift.
- Define your target audience — When you know exactly who your customer is, it allows you to create content that is suited for reaching them.
- Tell a story — it shouldn’t be a long story. Think of your 30–60 second video as a mini-story. Like all stories, great video content has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
- Perfect your Call To Action (CTA). This is the part at the end of your video where you tell your audience what to do next, and it is important to do it right.
- Test, improve and test again. Video marketing is as much an art as it is a science. The important thing is to test your content with whatever analytics are available to you. If you’re running ads on social media, you’ll have access to a lot of information.
6. One million users is no small feat. What’s the secret? What are the lessons learned?
There are no real secrets here. The important thing is to work hard in order to make your customers happy, focus on their needs, challenges, pains, and be open to feedback. Having a 9.7/10 trust score on Trustpilot is one of our proudest achievements.
In addition, we are one of the bigger customers in our own service. We advertise on all social channels, solely with videos and we know for sure that Promo videos work. That’s what got us to 1 million users in less than 2.5 years. We ‘walk the talk’ while creating lots of video ads every week and being consistent with our marketing efforts and video marketing strategy.
Our model is based on our great people that work hard to deliver an award-winning product and excellent customer service. We keep evolving to meet our users current and future needs and are forward thinking in our approaches.
7. Growing a business with video content, any must-haves for all brands?
Having a video marketing strategy is a must have for all brands that have some kind of an online presence. Planning the types of videos you would like to create in order to achieve your goals and address all types of relevant audiences for your brands is critical in today’s social environment.
8. Every brand claims that they have ‘tons of content’ but then when it comes down to it, the content isn’t necessarily video ready. Now what?
With existing video creation tools, it is very easy to turn existing content pieces into videos. Most brands have eBooks, presentations, blog posts that include ‘how to’ guides, tips, and insights. Today it is even easier to upcycle these content pieces into an engaging video that will help bring more results on social media and will help you rank higher on Google. A video is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than a traditional web page.
9. What other dynamic visual content should brands be incorporating into their strategy?
In addition to video, brands should look to create static banners, infographics, collages, and GIFS. There are many additional tools but to provide value, we want to help brands do all of this effectively. One stop shop. Check for example the Promo Image Resizer — a totally free service that instantly resizes, edits and crops photos & images online and makes them suitable for all web and social media formats with the click of a button.
Summary
Video content appears to be the emerging format of choice right now, across nearly every channel. With Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and now even Linkedin embracing video, companies with a winning strategy will embrace it as a core part of their social media content marketing.