Five video marketing trends to look out for in 2019
As 2019 begins, Humanoid’s Technical Director, Anthony Thane has hand-picked his top trends to look out for in the year ahead. And WHAT a year it’s set to be!
Pre-2006 (that’s the year Google bought YouTube and everyone finally sat up & took notice), video was seen by a lot of marketers as a luxury; a ‘nice-to-have’ they’d dabble in if they had some marketing budget left at the end of the year. Even when we set up Humanoid three years later, it was still very much an up and coming channel.
Fast forward to 2019 and I probably don’t have to tell you how much it’s changed. With 4.3 million videos watched on YouTube according to The Internet Minute, your marketing plan just isn’t complete without one now. The popularity of video continues to increase year-on-year and shows no sign of slowing down for 2019 either. With this in mind, here’s my top five video marketing trends to look out for in the year ahead. Enjoy!
1. Move over content-led marketing. It’s now about ‘video-led’ content.
With the colossal rise of social media, the marketing industry has inevitably seen a big shift towards ‘content-led’ marketing. In case you haven’t heard the term, it’s all about creating digital content, such as blogs, infographics and videos, that don’t explicitly promote your business but offer audiences something that’s shareable. Either because it’s emotive, topical, thought-provoking, informative, funny or a real mixture!
Take Iceland’s recently banned Christmas advert as a great example. Did you see a frozen sausage roll anywhere in sight? No. Me neither. But what it cleverly did was win over hearts & minds; raising awareness of the deforestation caused by palm oil production and promoting Iceland’s brand values in the process. After sharing it online, it’s since had over 5.7 million views. They also probably sold a lot more frozen sausage rolls in 2018 too.
Just like Iceland, more and more of our clients at Humanoid are realising the power of video above all other channels. Where video was once an after thought, they’re now putting it at the heart of their content-led marketing plans and building other activity around it. According to John Mowat, writer of ‘Video Marketing Strategy’ (2017), marketers need to think more like publishers (typically create ‘pull’ content), not marketers (typically create ‘push’ content). For 2019, be a publisher. Create video-led content your audiences will want to share.
2. Releasing a little video content often is order of the day.
According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, by 2019, global consumer internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic. As well as all this extra video ‘noise’ for your business to compete with, the way we consume video is also changing. Whether it’s watching on the train into work, during lunch breaks or dare I say it, at the dinner table back home, we’re consuming more content on the go than ever before.
So, what does this mean for you as a marketer? To achieve the all-important cut through, you need to create and distribute shorter videos, more frequently. Now this isn’t to say there’s not a place for full length videos anymore. But be prepared to repurpose lengthier video content into more targeted and timely bite-size chunks – either as teasers to the main event or spin-offs to extend your overarching campaign. What’s great about doing this, is it also helps to increase return on investment as it’s a way of using the same content, differently.
3. Video production is getting (even more) technical in 2019.
Because of the traction video now has within the marketing industry, along with ever-increasing viewer expectations, there’s been an explosion of new commercial filming equipment coming onto the market.
Whilst drones will remain a firm favourite, this year’s trendy video production tool is the Gimbal; a camera stabilising tool that produces a super-slick, flowing finish for footage being captured on the move. Likewise, various camera rigs are coming onto the market, such as the Wiral cam and Rhino Arc 2, making it easier to produce unique camera movements usually associated with feature films. 360-degree video is also expected to gain popularity with lots of brands in 2019. Filmed on an omni-directional camera, its seen as the precursor to Virtual Reality becoming mainstream within marketing departments worldwide. A lot of this new equipment is available for hire almost instantly; letting us stay up to date with all the latest tech for our clients without the expense of buying kit that might otherwise get obsolete. But as exciting as all this sounds, don’t feel you’ve got to adopt the latest technology just for the sake of making your video look ‘trendy’. Some of the most successful videos we’ve done to date are straight-forward ‘talking head’ interviews or 2D animations that are simple by nature, but still massively effective.
4. Videos are getting used further down the sales funnel.
According to a 2018 Experian report “it makes sense that if videos perform well at the top of the funnel, they will perform equally well as customers move through the sales process”. I couldn’t agree more. Rather than video just being used for upfront sales, it’s increasingly being used to support customers throughout their entire customer journey with a brand, such as the installation process and all-important after care.
We’ve experienced this trend first hand at Humanoid with a growing number of requests for Instructional and Explainer videos. As many of the products & services that we promote are digital, we’re also getting asked to demo a lot more user interfaces — high quality live recordings or animations of websites or apps, overlaid with VFX onto a device in a video.
5. Video needs to deliver ROI more than ever before.
Gone are the days when a video just sat on the homepage of your website waiting for viewers to stumble across it. Inevitably, because video is becoming such an integral part of the marketing plan now, we’re getting asked more and more by clients – ‘how can we measure return on investment on our video?’. It’s a very fair question and one that our print counterparts have been asked to justify for years – without much success I might add!
In contrast, video is really measurable by nature. However, I’m not just talking about views and click throughs. It’s also about maximising your video’s potential reach; assuming the more people who see it (impressions), the greater the impact. Equally, the tools used to measure a video’s reach are getting more sophisticated by the day. A great system we’ve been using lately is Brandzooka. It’s a third-party video advertising website that can provide us with lots of useful insight – including a heatmap showing where in the world a video has had the most impressions and even at what point viewers stop watching to help us test and learn what content works best.
