When was the last time you watched a video on the internet? Pretty recently, right? We thought so - it’s estimated that, by 2021, the average person will spend 100 minutes a day watching online videos. It’s just part of life for most of us.
Well, where audiences go, advertisers follow. Video advertising has been a marketing staple since the invention of the television, but cash-strapped smaller businesses were largely shut out from the exposure of a TV or cinema ad.
That’s changed. Online technologies have massively democratised video creation. At JPIMedia, we’re proud to be making professional online video advertising a viable option for even the smallest of businesses.
Video is a brand-building machine that cements a business’s name, personality and message in people’s minds better than any other format. But its unique power isn’t magic; it’s just a case of aceing core marketing objectives.
Here are 5 reasons video advertising builds your brand better than any other display option.
This is the crux of the matter. Video is now arguably the default way of presenting and consuming information online, favoured across demographics and increasingly prioritised by Google algorithms. Simply put, people like watching videos to entertain themselves and discover things they want to know.
People now watch an average of 16 hours of online video content each week; over 50% more than they did just 2 years ago. They’re not just watching more video, they’re increasingly using it to replace other formats.
This preference is particularly pronounced in a digital marketing context. When learning about a product or service through a webpage, 72% would rather watch a video than read a block of text.
Ultimately, it pays to give the people what they want, which is why video has become the primary messaging channel for brands.
We don’t want to understate the power of great copywriting. Persuasive messaging on static visual ads has powered buying habits for centuries, and still plays a huge role in driving customers to businesses.
But there are limitations to how much a few lines of text and a graphic can achieve. Your ad might make your product sound like the biggest game changer since penicillin, but ultimately, prospective customers will just have to take your word for it.
With video, you can convince your customers by showing them exactly what to expect from what you sell.
Product demo videos have become a major part of how marketing works, and 84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. You should know the ins and outs of what you sell better than anyone, so a convincing demo video should be pretty quick and easy to shoot.
As well as a straightforward run-through of how your product works, you put your products at the heart of tutorial videos for completing common tasks related to your field. Such videos get a lot of traction on YouTube.
Video has an inherent advantage over other formats - it moves.
This may sound like stating the obvious, but when you’re trying to make an impression on busy, everyday consumers, you need every tool (and every dimension) at your disposal to get their attention.
A moving image is more eye-catching than a static one, which is part of the reason why video ads attract 9 times more attention than standard digital display advertising (Lumen & Unruly, 2018).
So, video is inordinately powerful in grabbing people’s attention, but it also gives you the space to cultivate something even more important - an emotional reaction.
Advertising messaging is rarely just a dispassionate list of a product or service’s key features. You want your ad to evoke some kind of feeling in your target audience - excitement, amusement, sympathy, affinity, whatever you think best matches your product. That takes careful crafting, not just in composing the messaging itself but in its sequencing.
While stuffing all your key messaging points into a static ad would result in an ugly, unwieldy mess, even just a short video can give you ample time and space to get things across while still seeming concise and memorable. In this sense, your video should be the centrepiece of your advertising inventory.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t use static ads too - reinforcing your message across all channels is the name of the game. But your video content should be the nucleus of all your display advertising, around which your various banner ads should orbit.
Video lodges your verbal messaging in people’s minds, but it can also work wonders for an equally crucial aspect of your wider brand - your branding conventions.
This is, to a large part, visual. A good visual style will incorporate a selection of distinctive yet harmonious elements; typography, colour scheme, logo and auxiliary imagery. These should cohere seamlessly to create an unmistakable visual signature. Take Apple. You can tell you’re looking at an Apple ad before you’ve even seen that famous logo, just from the sans-serif fonts and shades of white and black.
All these aspects should feature uniformly in every piece of media you create, in any format. But it will take repeated exposures for these to stick in anyone’s mind.
Video just makes this process more efficient by serving up your brand fundamentals simultaneously, for longer stretches of time than the single glance normally given to most other forms of advertising. It also allows you to be a bit more creative with how you present them.
Video gives all the different strands that make up your brand new dimensions. Your imagery can come alive, your logo becomes dynamic and your tone of voice isn’t something your audience has to simulate in their own heads - they can, quite literally, hear it for themselves.
Video advertising is the closest thing any small business has to an advertising superpower, building brands more effectively than any other format out there. If you think you’re ready to take your advertising efforts onto a new plane, get in touch with our video advertising experts today.
