Member Article

Businesses need to get video marketing savvy

It’s online marketing focus week on Bdaily. Here, Roy Kimani, CEO of nideo, a video networking tool for businesses, advocates video as a form of marketing.

A video is worth a thousand words, so it is understandable that businesses invest heavily in video content to engage with their customer base, attract new prospects, drive sales or build brand awareness.

To do this effectively, businesses need to ensure the platform they have chosen offers them flawless content delivery and a credible online environment for their videos. However, so many businesses fail to attract their target audience because their strategy is confused and lacks relevance to the people they’re trying to speak to.

Take YouTube for example. A staggering 72 minutes of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, worldwide, meaning that uploading your business or marketing video to the world’s most popular video platform, which so many businesses do, is both time-wasting and ineffective. If your video appears next to videos of how to unlock the next level of Call of Duty, for instance, you’ve completely missed your target and your video now lacks credibility.

Trust is the most important aspect of any business. If you lack credibility, you lack trust and the knock-on effects can be very destructive. In an environment saturated with different social media platforms, it’s important to get the right message across on the right platform, to the right people.

The use of video in a business’ marketing strategy has been increasing at a phenomenal rate, but there is still strong evidence to suggest that the strategy is there but the execution in terms of choosing the right hosting platform is seriously lacking.

A study from Social Media Examiner, released this year, shows that a worrying 69 per cent of marketers are planning on increasing their YouTube marketing, but this is down seven per cent from last year, indicating that marketers are perhaps looking to explore alternative options to promote their brand via video channels.

The other problem with platforms such as YouTube is that the delivery is often flawed. Viewers are easily distracted, so a video that takes ages to buffer will result in the viewer clicking on another link and your business potentially losing a customer.

For a business to coherently get its message across, they need to upload videos that can be viewed in any environment. The modern viewer is no longer sitting behind a desk with their internet running from a phone line; they are on the move and need to be able to stream videos from every device and in areas where the internet connection can vary.

The uptake of 4G in the UK will mean that viewers can watch videos with very limited buffering time and the amount of data they can consume will increase. Businesses should be looking at video marketing options that are not only flawless in their delivery but are also brought to the viewer in the highest possible quality.

It’s a difficult time for businesses that are trying to use different channels to promote their company image, but following the crowd can be a dangerous ploy. The danger for businesses that use YouTube to market their brand is that they are lost in a sea of millions of other businesses attempting the same impossible feat.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by nideo .