Everybody who works in marketing knows that video marketing has boomed in recent years as one of the most prospective and engaging parts of marketing campaigns. Video is a natural storytelling medium and has the ability to capture and keep the viewer’s attention more than any other type of post. This is exactly what makes it so attractive when it comes to marketing and advertising campaigns.
To put things in perspective, here’s a few stats from Animoto Social Video Trends Reports from Consumers and Marketers:
- 58% of consumers visit a brand’s social media pages before visiting their website, an 81% increase over last year.
- Video ads were the #1 way consumers discovered a brand they later purchased from.
- 1 in 4 consumers made a purchase after seeing a Story on Instagram.
- YouTube replaced Facebook as the #1 platform that affects consumer behavior in 2019.
- YouTube is #1 way consumers discover products, #1 platform affecting consumer behavior (replaced FB), #1 purchase-driver on social
- 96% of marketers have placed ad spend on video.
- 91% of marketers are satisfied with the ROI of video marketing on social media.
- 93% of brands got a new customer because of a video on social media.
- Facebook is the #1 platform where marketers plan to invest in the next 12 months, followed by YouTube and Instagram.
It’s clear 2019, video was a big deal, dominating social media. So, what to expect in video marketing in 2020?
Continued growth of live videos
We can clearly see that live streaming has increased in popularity on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch and more, and this trend is not going to stop anytime soon. Live video encourages more audience engagement, and according to various case studies retains the viewers attention for longer than a prerecorded video.
Looking at this from a behavior perspective, a live video offers a greater possibility to engage the viewer on a personal level, answer their questions and provide with immediate action to solve their pain points. Giving access to your viewer to you through live video makes you or your brand be more approachable & relatable. This also is confirmed based on new live stream support updates constantly coming from social platforms like Facebook, making live streams more appealing and easy to manage. For example, a recently announced Watch Party tool update will include scheduling, replays, new insights, and branded content. Scheduling will allow building the anticipation in the way YouTube allows its users to do, ahead of the live stream and be reminded a scheduled live stream is coming up. Minutes viewed and Unique 60s viewers will allow gathering more accurate insights for brands who live stream. Branded content will allow adding your business partners so that they are able to see the insights from the live stream, and even earn revenue from Watch Parties.
Personalized Videos
In line with a more personal approach through live videos, another important ongoing trend in video marketing is personalized videos. These videos are being used to create a strong one-on-one conversation between a brand and their customers. According to this infographic, personalized videos will continue to challenge more traditional client approaches and customer support. With more and more new technology and apps available for creating videos easily and quality, brand marketers are jumping to the opportunity of discovering their audiences, customer support and nurturing their leads through personalized video messaging instead of calls or emails. This trend is improtant as it has many applications within the marketing plan, from discovery, to support, to sale and elevation.
In addition to all this, personalization allows to provide highly targeted solutions to consumers’ needs, saving them time that would be otherwise spent searching for those solutions and making a purchase decision. Personal approach also makes a brand more memorable, which is crucial as 90% of consumers are more likely to shop brands who they recognize and who provide relevant offers and recommendations and 48% of consumers say that they want videos to reflect the products/services they’re interested in when it comes to informing their decision making.
Here’s an example of a personalized video from Barclay’s Bank. This video, made by Idomo, addresses the viewer by name and uses the name in elements of the video as call to action. A personalized car plate or a nameplate by the house helps the person further imagine what they can achieve if they work with this particular bank.
Authentic & Valuable content still on the rise
With a very saturated market, more and more creators and marketers for brands focus their attention on the content being quality and having a valuable message. 90% of the most successful content marketers put their audience’s information needs first over their promotional message, according to Content Marketing Institute’s B2B report.
Authentic and valuable content can be of various sort, but it is always about asking questions that matter, engaging with your community and discover who they are through this. Insights from audience engagement can be further used to create a more personalized, ultra-targeted content that speaks to them on a deeper level. By putting your audience first, you can easier target their search intent and provide a solution to their specific issues. The focus of Google SEO has for a while moved way past just keywords and metadata, it is looking for content that will ensure people who are searching for certain things or services get the best content experience.
This video from Hootsuite was a great example, As fans of the HBO television show Game of Thrones, the brand team wanted to pay tribute to the show while also getting across the value of their own product. Video is in line with the trend of the time, and it is showing the brand as innovative without having a big sales push.
This hiring video is another great example of focusing on delivering value over selling your brand directly. Focusing on what their workers feel like and their hobbies, values and more outside of the work environment allows the target viewer to imagine themselves in the same position and makes them more likely to apply for a position.
Even more video ads
As online video consumption increases, associated ad spend does as well. Zenith forecasts online video ad spend to reach $61 billion by 2021. According to a Forrester report video ad spend by brands is expected to hit $102.8 billion by the year 2023. The explosion of video along with advanced analytics has made video advertising vital to any online marketing plan. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to see this upward trend in paid advertising. With more and more social networks offering the advertising at a cheap rate and making it relatively easy to reach a great amount of potential clients, advertising by brands has become a norm and will become even more standard in 2020.
Kenshoo Q3 Report states that Social advertising spending grew 32% year-over-year with Instagram, Video, and Product Ads continuing to act as the key drivers behind the increase. Instagram Stories ads, in particular, have seen the biggest growth over the past quarters. If you are still not investing in video advertising, you are missing out on a great number of potential clients.
Video ads can cover almost any topic, product or service. For example, this video ad was created for our client ISM to target potential new hires to fill the open positions in their company. The advertisement ran on Facebook and Instagram natively and used as an organic post on LinkedIn.
IGTV & Instagram Stories
In the last few years, Instagram has become one of the biggest players when it comes to social media, and it’s no secret. With half of the people on Instagram following at least one business page, and more than 1 billion monthly active users, its clear Instagram has a great potential as a business marketing tool. And with various outlets within the app, such as feed, stories, shoppable posts, and IGTV it’s no longer news in the marketing world.
However, IGTV can be viewed as the first blueprint of a unique advertising channel, specifically for publishers. Looking at how the Instagram’s own TV channel was created, it shows great potential by using various innovative elements, like vertical video targeting mobile, relatively easy-to-use interface and use of influencer marketing to promote all Instagram features. This all adds to the authenticity that the viewers are creating, making it a very smart move.
Of course, we can see similarities with YouTube, which is still the most used video-sharing platform, however, it has moved towards a more highly produced content.
That said, it is important that Instagram increases their effort when it comes to use of keywords, subscription feed (as with regular feed posts) and search, as at this time the new content can only be manually found through visiting specific profile page – the explore page will suggest IGTV content based on previous interests instead.
When it comes to both of these Instagram tools, we can expect a more crossover which will allow for new marketing possibilities for brands. We can already see snippets of IGTV videos appearing on your main feed and stories showing up in your explore tab. Instagram is definitely experimenting with new content types, how to make sure the viewers stay on the platform as long as possible and how to keep it relatable.
Shoppable videos
Shoppable images and videos are becoming the easiest and fastest way to cut down your customer journey. As we know, the more seamless and convenient it is to shop for a product, the more likely the customer will be buying it. Several social media platforms has shoppable posts, and they will only improve in 2020.
From the start, Instagram has been working on keeping their users on the platform for as long as possible. The only issue they had was the “link-in-bio” which made it attractive to marketers, but it also would send users off-platform. In spring, Instagram introduced Checkout, its own beta-test of shoppable posts, giving a limited amount of the platform’s top creators the ability to tag branded content in their photos, videos or stories. From the initial click on the product to checkout, the customer’s shopping journey fully happens within the platform, instead of redirecting off it. This is a major step towards an integrated shopping experience. Instagram is definitely going to work on improving this experience with new things, such as the collections and saved items (rolled out in November) and more.
Popular app TikTok also has featured shoppable ads for a while, and have announced the new shop in-app video experience late November and are following in Instagram’s footsteps. As the plan is to allow any creator on the platform create their own shop in-app, this is a huge step towards more shoppable video content and makes the platform even more attractive to marketers.
Augmented reality
Augmented reality has grown massively in the last 5 years and, same as VR, it is not going to stop any time soon. With big companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and more getting involved, we can sure say there’s more interesting AR developments to come. AR-supporting mobile device user base reached 1.5 billion in May of this year and the revenue for the industry is predicted to hit $198 billion by 2025. Using AR in social media has been somewhat basic over the past few years, although it’s expected that these will become increasingly sophisticated over the coming years. AR and VR developers have started implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) into many of their apps, for example, Instagram or Snapchat filters.
When it comes to social media, Snapchat is at the forefront of integrating AR videos into their platform with the help of creators. Recently, they announced $750,000 to its main AR influential creators in 2020, which is triple its commitment from 2019. The paid opportunities in this field make Snapchat unique and attractive to creators, unlike Facebook, Instagram and YouTube where the AR ecosystem is not as easily available. With Facebook opening their AR creation tool to all developers and brands in August. This allows the creators to build their filters but there is still no easy way to promote them.
Looking at all the research that is happening right now when it comes to enhancing AR experience, we can confidently say that AR will become bigger and bigger support to e-commerce, and overall video marketing as well.
360 Degrees
In line with the previous trend, the use of 360-degree videos is also on the rise. Smart devices and VR headsets, such as the Oculus Rift, are becoming more common and hence making 360-degree videos a lot more accessible. People now are more likely to view a 360-degree video than the same video in a traditional format, if they have this option. A case study by Magnifyre found that “an average percentage viewed was 28.81% higher with 360-degree video, and double the viewers watched the video to 100%”.
Brands are more likely to embrace the immersive experience they offer in a bid to tell stories and gain engagement. 360-degree videos make your brand stand out of the crowd, and it could help increase your ROI if your video is one that viewers can become fully immersed in.
Platforms prioritizing video content or video-only platforms
In the last year, a great amount video-only or video focused platforms have been rising and emerging. From well established TikTok, which now has more than 500 million users worldwide to it’s new competitor from Facebook, Lasso, video is taking over as a way of communication and will not slow down in 2020.
These platforms are increasing in popularity as it allows anyone become a creator a lot easier than ever before, with nothing but their mobile phone. And, while there are still great appeals within previously mentioned popular social media channels, it is clear that users, especially younger audiences, are looking for more authentic, transparent, relatable, and interactive ways to keep in touch. These video-focused platforms mentioned, give your audience just that. In addition, with all the traditional social media channels having issues with personal data security, algorithm changes and an overwhelming amount of ads, younger users are looking to spend their time elsewhere.
@willsmith What a buzz-kill. ?: @uninterrupted
♬ original sound – realtsfd
To wrap up…
With 2020 just a few days away, we hope these trends help you to prepare your video strategy across all socials. If you are not sure on how to implement any of these, we can help, just CONTACT US and we will figure it out together!
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