A guest post by Ed Smit.
There was a time not so long ago when a marketing manager's job was much more simple. You find your Unique Selling Point (USP), you contact the best publications which aggregate your target demographic and then you pay for your prized advertising slot or editorial section.
Sure, you had to pick some glossy images and a good headline, but for the most part there was much less to think about. For some, this is still the way, but for most there is an undeniable tide of video and content marketing which is sweeping these old ways away.
Why should you invest in video engagement?
Many marketing managers are panicking as their trusted foundations of how to approach their job are being tested and thrown into question. They ask themselves whether they have enough time or money to invest in video, whether they should be doing it in-house or contracting it out to a trusted video production company. Then they begin to wonder if they even know where to start.
This may sound familiar or it may sound over the top, but it’s a simple fact a huge proportion of marketers still don’t use video for the reasons stated above. Whatever your position, video marketing is the new norm and when compared to text, photography or any other type of content, video engagement is the way to go.
Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you need to start throwing huge amounts of money at a few pieces of polished content. Most companies aren’t looking to hire in expensive video production companies for the majority of their work.
Instead, they’re looking to produce low quality, high volume content which can fill their timeline with short brand news pieces and updates for their audience.
So where do you go from here? Well, first you have to define your goals, what do you want to achieve with video. The gold standard is usually sales and engagement and this is what most people are aiming towards.
If you read this and think, "yep, that’s me", we’ve got some amazing video marketing statistics which will help cement video engagement and marketing as a go to solution for your 2023 campaigns.
Video engagement examples
Capturing attention and traffic
1. Video is now one of the single most effective ways for capturing people’s attention. A recent study found that the amount of people on the internet between the ages of 16-64 who watch video online at least once a week is now at 93%.
Music videos and memes account for the biggest share of viewership (50% of people watching music videos and 37% watching memes), but a whopping 28% of people will watch an educational video every week and 27% of people watch a product video every week. So, if that hasn’t grabbed your attention, I don’t know what will.
2. On top of this in 2022 82% of all internet traffic was from video streaming and downloading.
Capturing leads and engagement
3. These stats are lovely, but for most people they want to know one thing and one thing only. Will this drive clicks, purchases or engagement?
Well, the answer is a resounding yes. A recent study of over 1,000 marketers found that 87% of marketers saw greater traffic to their website when they’ve used video and a further 82% said they’ve noticed a higher dwell time (the amount of time people stay on a site) on their website when using video.
Also 86% of marketers in the study found that video directly increased the number of high quality leads they had and 81% stated that their sales actually increased whilst using video.
4. Building on this, a separate study found that 84% of new purchases from a company began with a customer watching a video about a product or a service and another study found that a huge 93% of brands gained a new customer or sale because of a video they posted on social media.
Focus on customer responses
5. People love to share video, in fact a recent study suggests people are more than twice as likely to share a video than any other type of content including blog posts, pictures and text based posts.
6. There’s that old saying that you should "give the people what they want"; if this is the case, this next stat is a good one. A recent study found that 88% of consumers want their favourite brands to produce more video. If this is so, we better get filming!
These stats should have given you a pretty good feel for the stats of creating video online. But what about specific social media platforms and how video can help you with engagement and clicks?
Go where your customers are
7. YouTube is the world’s most popular social media platform for video consumption with 88% of people saying they prefer to watch video on YouTube over all other platforms.
8. A further global study found that 40% of people have gone on to purchase a product that they found on a video on YouTube.
9. Video on LinkedIn is much better performing than any other type of content. Video is shared on average 3 times more than photography, text or blog posts.
10. Videos below 30 seconds have the highest levels of engagement on LinkedIn.
Ready to go live silently?
11. Live video feels like the way to go on social media and LinkedIn is no different, with marketers seeing 7x more reactions with live videos and up to 24x more comments.
12. Video is becoming one of Facebooks main content types, but did you know 88% of people watch Facebook videos without sound? This means you need to be focusing on text on screen to get the highest levels of engagement possible!!
13. People on average spend five times longer on a Facebook post if it contains video.
14. Calls to action on a Facebook post have a 16.8% higher conversion rate when placed bang in the centre of the end frame.
Time to move over to Instagram
15. Did you know that the average conversion rate of your followers on Facebook to the amount of engagement you get on posts is roughly 0.19%, whilst Instagram is 0.98%?
16. Instagram loves video, but a fact that may surprise you is that carousel images (the posts with lots of images you can swipe through) have higher levels of engagement than video or any other type of post.
17. A recent study found that 66% of Instagram users find short videos the most engaging type of content on their feed.
18. Did you know the time that you will get the highest engagement on your Instagram posts is when you post between 11:00-14:00 on a Tuesday?
Ready to boost your video engagement?
So that was 18 facts that we hope will persuade you to think again about whether to invest in video engagement as a part of your next video marketing campaign.
Remember, video doesn’t have to be expensive and flashy. In fact people like the self filmed home movie feel as it brings them closer to you as a brand. For some projects a trusted video production company may well be the way to go, but for the most, there’s no reason to not pick up your phone and start filming.
About the author
Hey, I'm Ed Smit & I'm the founder of Here Now Films, a UK based video production company creating high end brand films, documentaries and any other type of production. I'm a trained marine biologist with a specialism in Cornwall reef ecology and climate change. As a filmmaker I love to bring together my two passions of the natural world and film so often work with companies with strong environmental credentials and purpose. Over the last ten years we've produced documentaries to audiences of 100's of millions and national campaigns for the likes of AirBnB.
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