(PHOTO CREDIT: Chaay Tee/SHUTTERSTOCK)
During the height of the pandemic, we saw an astronomical rise in video marketing across the board. Brands produced more video than ever before, and consumers’ viewing habits were at an all-time high. However, as things begin to shift toward what was considered normal before the pandemic, some big questions remain about what will happen to the video boom.
How important is video going to be moving forward? Will platforms still prioritize video? Is short-form content going to stick around? In this post, we’ll address some of these questions and more as we take a look at what companies can expect from video for the rest of the year and beyond.
Video is the Main Character
Video is one of the best mediums for conveying messages of all kinds. For companies, it is valuable because it keeps people engaged, helps deliver complex messages, and is an easy way to promote products and services. For consumers, video is helpful, quick, accessible, and simple to engage with. In fact, 72% of customers prefer to learn about a product or service by watching a video according to Hubspot.
During the pandemic, those of us staying home saw just how vital video could be as a means of connection. And as video connects families and friends, it also connects companies to consumers. That connection certainly isn’t going to vanish overnight. Companies that want to stay top of mind will have to create even more high-quality video than ever before, which sounds like a daunting task for many businesses. Luckily, there are so many ways to create video content, making it the best time to embrace this new shift.
Emphasis on Video Everywhere
Back in the day, a lot of video production was for TV commercials or strictly for posting on YouTube. Top-tier companies paid lavish amounts to create these highly produced and very polished professional videos. While this still happens, and for good reason, there is an endless amount of new places to post content, a desire for different levels of quality, and an appetite from the consumer for a wider variety of content.
You can now post videos virtually anywhere on an extremely wide variety of platforms. Whether that’s on social media platforms, or hosting on-demand or live videos on your company website (which we’ll cover below).
More Hybrid Events
Many brands were forced to switch to virtual events last year. While many will be returning to in-person events, the skills those companies learned can still be useful in making future events more accessible. In other words, if you have the ability to add a virtual aspect to your events, you should continue doing so.
This not only will allow you to create more content, but also let folks who can’t physically attend continue to participate in your events. If you need a place to start, explore our guide to paid virtual events here.
Short-Form Content Is Here to Stay
At the beginning of 2020, TikTok made waves in the social media space as a video-only platform featuring content that is 15 – 60 seconds long. The pandemic fueled its growth, hitting milestones far faster than any other social platform. It attracted kids, adults, and businesses to the platform, and highlighted the benefits of short-form content.
Fast forward to today, and many of the mainstream platforms have adopted features similar to TikTok. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts were made to directly compete with TikTok’s rising popularity. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, even went as far as to say Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app and added an emphasis on video content and creators. Clearly, the impact of short-form media is going to be huge moving forward.
Good news for brands: this is just another opportunity to distribute information in a new fashion. If you have a large library of material you already have a comprehensive content bank you can pull from. You can recut videos to fit the parameters of short-form content, or create new short videos from some of your other pre-existing content. To make the most out of your content, explore our guide on producing multiple assets from a single video.
Hosting Your Video Content
With so many videos being created every day, video hosting is a major consideration for many companies as they continue to build out their own video marketing programs. Of course, social videos will live on your social platforms. But for bigger projects—non-public content, videos that need to be privately shared, and placing videos on your website—it is worthwhile to look into a professional solution.
Many folks turn to YouTube for all their video hosting needs, which is great in its own right. But for more control over your videos, you’ll likely need to host elsewhere. Customizable players, video marketing tools, security features, and much more can typically be found with many of the top professional hosting services.
The same process applies to live content. Social platforms are great for going live, but certain topics and events will need to be hosted in a more secure environment. For example, while a live stream Q&A could work great for your audience on Facebook, if you’re having a town hall event, you likely won’t want to host that so publicly. Pandemic or no pandemic, having a grasp on how you host your videos natively will be essential.
There is a good chance these shifts in the video marketing world would have happened sooner rather than later; the pandemic just pushed those timeframes into overdrive. Furthermore, now is the best time to go full force into video creation to help elevate your business. For more tips and tricks for everything video, be sure to sign up for our newsletter with the form below.
