Could Video Give Your Business A Marketing Boost?

Video killed the audio star…
In the same way that radio eventually had to compete against the new medium of television, internet podcasts are increasingly being usurped by video clips. However, before rushing out to purchase a camera tripod and unidirectional microphone, it’s worth taking a few minutes to consider whether corporate videos would actually benefit your company’s online presence…
The rise of online video as a marketing tool can be attributed to a number of factors:

• Firstly, the success of Vine has demonstrated that extremely short videos can still make a point.
• Secondly, rapidly improving download speeds mean there’s no longer a protracted wait while an MPEG clip buffers.
• Thirdly, as smartphone screens expand and improve, watching video is a totally different experience from the stuttering pixelated clips of yore.
• Fourthly, ever-improving cameras and microphones mean even mid-range tablets can now record half-decent footage.

Perhaps most significantly of all, however, is that companies are increasingly realising that something more than static content is required to make their websites stand out from their competitors. To-camera pieces convey a uniquely personal tone, implying sincerity and commitment. Slow-fade montage videos with string-quartet soundtracks may be a bit passé nowadays, but video clips can be genuinely useful if they offer content over and above website text, such as real-world demonstrations of a particular skill or specialism.
And it’s not just about us liking video; the algorithms favour it too.
These reasons underpin Facebook’s aggressive promotion of its own Embedded Video Player. This enables hosted content to be incorporated into a website direct from Facebook by pasting the video’s URL and choosing a preferred pixel width. Facebook is now weighting its Newsfeed algorithm to favour video content over photos or text-only updates, and it’s also appropriated YouTube functionalities like view counts for videos and audience demographics.
This is all a fairly unsubtle attempt to tap into the runaway success of arch-rival Google’s YouTube. Indeed, research published in January suggested that more companies are now uploading videos to Facebook than YouTube. However, Facebook knows all too well that giving a competitor a lengthy head start is unlikely to guarantee success for a new social media platform – it certainly didn’t do Google+ any favours when it belatedly launched as a Facebook rival. YouTube has a billion users, with 300 hours of new video uploaded every minute and four billion videos viewed per day. It remains the default video-sharing platform, and everyone from Australian car vinyl installers to record labels have their own YouTube channels.
Marketing experts are clearly championing Facebook for its superior levels of viewer interactions, but it’s unclear whether slews of LOL-based comments below a company’s latest video clip carry much weight beyond looking impressive in monthly client update meetings. With established third-party video hosting specialists like Brightcove and Wistia already offering a stable platform for hosting high-quality video clips, Facebook’s USP is the degree to which people comment on and share material they like. When video clips in a person’s timeline become as ubiquitous as selfies or checked-in status updates, it’ll be interesting to see whether Facebook’s current meteoric growth as a video platform can be maintained.
Perhaps more importantly, should businesses be generating video content at all?
In truth, this largely depends on the industry in question and type of message that can be created. A hairdresser could use a video to display a montage of their work, whereas an accountancy firm has little to gain other than inferring professionalism and trustworthiness. Entrepreneurs can make themselves stand out by doing Richard Branson-style pieces to camera, but without a significant budget, video clips still tend to look (and sound) amateurish. That’s not the impression any firm wants to give, regardless of its size or target audience.
It seems safe to conclude that corporate video content should only be generated by firms with enough of a marketing budget to pay for high-quality recording equipment, or by those whose output is particularly visually engaging. At least there’s now real choice about where to host video clips, even if the motives of the host companies remain less than wholly philanthropic.
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