Video instinctively feels like a good way of getting a marketing message across – it’s the next best option to having someone beside you, explaining how something works or why it’s a good buy. But is that feeling backed up by the statistics?

As we will now demonstrate, the answer is an emphatic yes!

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Watching videos has become a part of modern life

Watching video is something that people do a lot. Going to the pictures used to be a mass-cultural thing, to be usurped in due course by television. But now, video on the web is what people default to for both information and entertainment.

Take just YouTube: as well as being the leading video platform, it is the second most visited website of any type, beaten only by Google’s search page. According to Similarweb, an Israeli company that monitors global net usage, YouTube had 33.6 billion views in March just gone. 78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day.

Another company, Statista, records the amount of video uploaded to YouTube. It’s currently running at over 500 hours per minute, which equates to 80+ years of new video loaded every single day. And that’s just YouTube; Facebook, LinkedIn, Tik Tok and Instagram are all pretty big operations in their own right, along with the many smaller but more specialised video platforms.

All this shows just how embedded video is in our modern way of life.

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If you don’t use video marketing, you are missing out

American company Wyzeowl run an annual survey that gathers statistics about video marketing. Although their survey is conducted among US marketers, it is reasonable to suppose the results are either relevant to the UK now, or will be soon! Their latest survey found that 89% of consumers said watching a video has convinced them to buy a product or service, and 96% have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.

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With this sort of demand coming from consumers, it’s not surprising that Wyzowl also found that 91% of businesses today use video within their marketing, compared to 61% when they did their first survey in 2016. Even among that minority of marketers who don’t yet use video, 70% intend to start doing so this year. 95% of respondents said video marketing had helped them increase their brand’s awareness.

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Video marketing is a good investment

Other stats reveal that including a video on your home page helps you appear higher up in Google search results (remember, Google owns YouTube!) and can boost your sales conversion rate by up to 80% (WordStream).

As you might guess, people now most often watch video on their smartphones – more than 75% of all videos are played on mobile devices (eMarketer). However, B2B businesses should note that 87% of business-related videos are still viewed on a desktop (VidYard)

People don’t just watch videos either: 92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others, and social videos get 12 times more shares than text and images combined (Small Biz Trends, 2016 – updated 2022). LinkedIn says that video posts on their platform are shared 20 times more than other content formats. Live video is also a growing subset: 45% of consumers want to see more live videos from brands on their social media (Sprout Social)

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Video is easy to get into…

One of the reasons for the explosion in video is that it’s so much easier to get into these days. Within just a couple of decades, we have gone from the production of video being the preserve of specialists with expensive equipment to being within the capability of everyone with a smartphone.

…but it’s not always so easy to do it well

However, only the top 5% of videos retain the majority (77%) of viewers until the last second (HubSpot). So, although a smartphone is capable of good results, by having more technical knowhow and better equipment than the herd – or employing someone who has – it’s easy to raise a video to a level where consumers will notice the extra quality (and it’s never a bad thing to have extra quality associated with your brand!).

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The keys to success

Experience of creating video for our clients has led us to three ‘golden rules’:

• Know the messages you want to put across and identify the single most important objective that the video is intended to achieve.

• Whether it’s an explainer, promotional video, a webinar or whatever, use a script – not necessarily to follow word for word, but so that you know in what sequence you want to make your points, tell your story or build your case. Keep language simple, clear and focused.

• If you can, use two cameras simultaneously – it helps maintain viewer interest and makes post-editing much easier by giving a choice of views – and intersperse talking to camera with snippets of ‘b-roll’ (cutaway footage related to what is being spoken about).

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