Content marketing is an indispensable part of digital marketing. It is intertwined with every other digital marketing method there is. A successful SEO, SEM, email marketing, social media marketing, or any other marketing campaign is highly dependant on quality content.
As a matter of fact, content marketing has been in existence for more than a 100 years and all major companies are using it, from Coca Cola to Ford. Content can take many forms, though usually people tie it to textual one, images, video, and audio are also content and as such are often used in marketing campaigns.The following article covers the importance of video and its growing popularity in the content marketing world.
Services like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Twitch TV, Live TV, and several others are booming. Just browsing through random videos on YouTube will leave you stunned at how many viewers certain videos have. This demonstrates the huge potential video has for the next decade. The focus is slowly shifting from traditional TV to streaming web services (though I doubt it will be any time soon that streamed services will replace good ol’ cable). What used to be TV commercials are now dubbed as ads that we see when we watch online video content, that is, if you aren’t running an adblocker.
Many brands have already recognized the power of a viral video. One of such brands is Allstate insurance which employed actor Dean Winters to act in a series of commercials called Mayhem that proved to be a major success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_5IdWWRL4w
There are others who jumped this wagon some time ago, who are even bigger than Allstate. Volvo and Virgin America are the best examples of viral commercial done the right way.
Maybe the best thing about this sort of marketing is that it is available to companies of all sizes. Nowadays, if you create a video that has potential, thanks to social media it can reach more audience than a TV commercial you’ve paid millions for. A printing services company from Australia created this witty video for their business, outlining some of the most familiar references from today’s pop culture, thus reaching out to a very wide audience.
Handling this kind of marketing campaign is considered to be a double effort. Firstly, with your video you are obviously promoting your business, and secondly, there is a certain amount of promotion that has to be done for the video itself in order for it to gain traction. If you are active on the social media front, make sure to schedule your video for sharing in the moments of peak traffic. If you use tools like Bufferapp, you could create a sharing pattern for your post in order to ensure that many people see it.
However you decide to utilize video for your content marketing effort, ensure that you put as much thought possible into it because sometimes it can just turn into a flop. In the end a good video will not only be a commercial but a good inbound marketing asset, as it will bring you much needed natural links from different sources.
