Online Marketing Blog

Visual content is certainly trendy – see the meteoric rise in infographics and social engagement with images as proof. Yet the need for content that appeals on a visual level and presents information in a more engaging format than text goes far beyond what is cool or fun to create.

In creating curriculum and learning materials for students (child to adult) and their teachers, I learned just how important visuals are in meeting the needs of different types of learners. This is too often a missing piece in the marketing mindset; we focus on what we want people to do, the action we want them to take. We think of learning styles in terms of learning disabilities, yet the ways in which every person on the planet takes in information should be a major concern for marketers, whose express purpose is to get people to take in information.

Video has exploded as an online marketing tool over the past few years for B2C marketers. As the interent’s second most popular search engine, YouTube has reduced the barriers to entry to almost nil. As a result, marketers quickly jumped on board with vloggers and other personalities to capitalize on video’s ability to capture and hold the interests of an increasingly attention-deficit consumer.

In fact, video is second only to feature articles as the content marketing tactic with the greatest ROI, according to eMarketer. Video allows marketers to connect with web and mobile customers, across websites, social media and apps, in order to offer targeted information in a visual and auditory format appealing to a wide audience.

Repeat after me: This holiday season, I resolve to take into consideration the increasingly mobile and visual preferences of my customers or readers, and to create and repurpose content to meet their needs, on whichever platform they use to connect with my business.

Recently, TopRank’s Alexis Hall and Lee Odden have each shared with us a few figures that underscore the importance of video in a modern day marketing strategy:

• Sixty percent of executives will watch a video before reading a word of text on their screen.
• Forty-two percent of executives have made a purchasing decision based on an online video.
• 500 years worth of YouTube videos are shared each day on Facebook.
• Over 3 billion hours of video is consumed monthly on YouTube.

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth millions. The thing about content marketing is that it’s not just about informing and educating, but creating an experience that your audience can feel. Whether you’re a consumer or business customer, decisions are not made solely on logic, but emotion. As content marketers, we have an opportunity to tie into the experiential state of information influence by leveraging media like video.

eMarketer reports a lot of support for the growth in video investment: Online video is expected to grow 55% this year and is the top format for content marketing. Stats about YouTube are pretty compelling.

Did you know?

• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube

Have you worked yourself to the bone on a video marketing campaign only to see the results fall flat? Do you have a wealth of video content but are unsure how to leverage it effectively to serve your marketing objectives? Can your presence on YouTube be summed as ‘well, we have a channel’?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re not alone. Getting results through your video marketing efforts can be a challenge if you don’t have the right game-plan. However, you’re in luck! At day 2 of SES New York TopRank CEO Lee Odden moderated a panel discussion with leading industry video marketers.Their stellar tips and insights that can be found below.

The first session of the day for me here at SES London is a topic I’ve been interested in for a very long time: video marketing and optimization. It’s a great panel featuring Jonathan Allen from Incisive Media, Paul Carff from Google and Will Critchlow from Distilled. All three speakers offered plenty of interesting tips.

First up is Paul Carff from Google who is a Developer Advocate that helps people learn about and use APIs.

YouTube is the #1 online video site with 2 billion streams per day. 70% of all online video viewing happens on YouTube. Online video is the fastest growing medium in history. 52% of people took action as a result of watching video online. 77% of Americans online watched a video last month. The amount of time people spend watching online video is growing. Their attention and engagement is higher than traditional broadcast.

“Master Story Teller”, that’s how I would describe Greg Jarboe, someone I’ve known in the internet marketing and PR world for several years. Now he’s pioneered yet another essential digital marketing channel: online video. In YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, Greg has assembled a priceless collection of insights, examples and practical tips for companies that want, that need, to understand how to use video marketing to grow their business. You cannot afford to miss this story.”

That’s the endorsement I gave Greg’s new book based on the preview copy a few months ago. He gave me a copy of the final book at SES and I thought it very timely to provide a more in-depth review.