The Solution to Your Marketing Strategy Is Staring You in the Face
Superside is a Business Reporter client.
Video marketing is last on the list for many businesses. Here’s why that needs to change.
When businesses drum up marketing strategies, video is often one of the last items on the list. Sometimes perceived as existing somewhere between newspaper ads and a “sign spinner,” it can get lumped in with a mixed bag of tactics many companies consider irrelevant. This is a monumental mistake.
Not only should video be part of the modern business’s playbook, it should be front and center.
I’ll spare you the usual commentary about the importance of digital strategies in a digital age. I am not your college marketing professor, begrudgingly acknowledging the existence of social media before sitting down to read the paper. I’m a marketer who’s been around the bend a few times and knows how to read numbers.
Why you haven’t made video a top priority
I know why your business probably hasn’t gone all-in on video marketing: Historically, there’s been no ROI. Online video marketing is just new enough that it’s still largely uncharted territory and has not yet been declared tried-and-true by the conventional standard of direct revenue.
Despite this, my company, Superside, began pumping energy into ambitious, high-concept videos last year: video for paid acquisition on social channels; video for our organic search playbook; video for socials; and video to make long-form content such as e-books and guides livelier and more interactive. I could go on, but my keyboard is getting hot.
So, which figures are pushing us to do this if not ones with dollar signs before them?
These figures:
Video makes organic searches skyrocket
Since 2020, one popular search engine has shown video thumbnails in over 25% of search results. That percentage is increasing, signaling a growing opportunity and competitive advantage for brands leveraging video. It’s been just over a year since my company started producing video content at a high level, and some trends have emerged.
We saw an 87% increase in video views, with a 300% increase in clicks on content with video. Sixty-three percent of our 2022 videos appear on the first page of the search engine results, and we’re enjoying more than 31,000 organic video views on the world’s biggest video platform this year.
Performance marketing outperforms the rest
By adding a human face and narration to an already well-performing ad promoting an e-book, we improved click-through rates by 48% and dropped cost per click (CPC) by 62%. Our ads with videos converted 30% more often to demo requests (our typical direct-response call to action) than animation-only or static ads.
Socials gain traction quickly
For our social strategy, we’ve planted our feet in two hotspots. One is creating original video content made for socials that is aligned with and supports gated marketing assets. The other is promotional and repurposed video content from our webinars and summits.
Since investing in video, we’ve seen a 26% increase in engagement across our social channels, with a growing average just shy of 10,000 views a month.
Video drives wins for account-based marketing (ABM)
Our marketing videos help us build awareness across our full buyer committee, sharing video content at all stages of the funnel.
By leveraging the plethora of aforementioned video content in our sales outreach, we’ve enjoyed an eightfold increase in click-through rates and have quadrupled reply rates. Half of our new opportunities are driven by video.
We’ve generated more than 2,500 demo requests with video since late 2020, with millions of dollars in our pipeline. (Yes, I am bragging.) This is reach. These are conversions. When B2B peers ask me why I’ve pinned my flag on something that “doesn’t generate revenue,” I have to wonder where they think revenue comes from.
What businesses need for video marketing
An effective video marketing strategy requires three key ingredients:
1. A thorough understanding of the various platforms, their formats and aspect ratios, with an overall content/media strategy that strictly adheres to these specifications.
2. A culture of thinking about video across most of your content marketing and paid media efforts. Make it an involuntary function, like breathing and scrolling.
3. Most importantly, a dedicated, high-performance video marketing team to develop a winning strategy, imbue novelty and creativity into each asset and make your voice as loud as it is undeniable. For truly captivating content, few can go it alone.
Put video marketing front and center—and do it soon
We will continue to heavily invest time, effort, brain matter and budget into video marketing. We’re standing out from the crowd, simplifying big concepts and, most importantly, winning hearts and minds.
Infusing video in all our marketing initiatives has drastically improved results across the full funnel. Organic search, performance marketing, socials, emails and ABM—video is the tide that lifts all ships, and is where modern B2B marketers should invest.
If these numbers intrigue you—and as a modern business, they should—let’s talk video at Superside.
— Amrita Mathur, VP of Marketing, Superside
This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.
Image: iStock id1397962040
