Video Is Truly Viral

The debate is over. Video is among the most shared forms of content on the Internet:

• 78% of people watch at least one online video a week (YouTube)
• 55% of people watch online video every day (Cisco)
• 60% of people in the U.S. watch more than 395 online videos a month (Comscore)
• YouTube viewers are consuming a monthly average of 6 billion hours of video (YouTube)

Year after year, these numbers continue to trend up. One of the most touted video marketing stats cites that in 2018, online video is projected to account for 80 percent of all Internet traffic, and perhaps as high as 90 percent of all traffic if you factor in person-to-person (P2P) file sharing (Cisco).

Video Is The Internet’s 800-Pound Gorilla

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth 1.8 million words (Forrester). Statistic after statistic proves that video may be one of the best investments a small business can make:

• Video increases purchase intent by 97 percent (Unruly)
• Video improves brand association by 139 percent (Unruly)
• Video increases conversation rates on website landing pages by 80 percent (Orion 21)
• Video improves click-through rates on email campaigns by 300 percent (Forrester)
• On average, Google ranks websites with video five times higher than websites without them (Forrester).

More than 80 percent of marketers are utilizing video marketing, and of that percentage 70 percent report video yielding higher conversion rates than any other content.  Fifty percent of marketing professionals claim that videos produce the highest ROI (Vidyard/Demand Metric).

According to local Kansas City small business marketing consultant Phil Singleton, “We have created hundreds of small business websites in the KC area, and we also run the online marketing programs for more than a hundred websites. There’s no question that websites with effective video perform better than those without. Video not only improves organic rankings, the conversion rates for existing traffic are through the roof. We now highly recommend that all new websites invest in web video.”

Video Tracking Tools

What differentiates online video are the tools available to measure results and engagement. Thirty-eight percent of marketers now use video analytics to track viewer engagement and overall content effectiveness. Further, 80 percent of marketers believe that using video viewing data to enhance lead scoring and marketing automation is important, yet only 10 percent are actually looking inside the viewer-generated information behind their video content. (Vidyard/Demand Metric)

Perhaps one of the most interesting trends for small business owners is that the cost of producing high-quality video content in recent years has dropped considerably. In a recent study that revealed a few things holding businesses back from utilizing the power of video, 47 percent of respondents said an obstacle to doing successful video marketing was a lack of budget, while 45 percent said they lacked in-house resources, and said they found it hard to create compelling content (Demand Metric).

Video production has not only become more affordable, it has also become more accessible, which is likely one of the primary factors behind the sudden surge in online video content marketing. High-end prosumer video hardware and advances in digital editing technologies, as well as a variety of video distribution platforms have leveled the playing field for small to mid-sized business owners who are trying to keep pace with competition that boasts larger marketing and production budgets. Kansas City video production companies, and small business owners alike, can now produce high-quality small business video content at a fraction of the cost.