Why You Need a Video Line Item for Next Year

It’s that time of year again – and no, we’re not talking about Pumpkin Spice season. The fourth quarter is around the corner, and that means the budget for next year is starting to take shape on your desk. But if you don’t have a line item for video marketing on that spreadsheet, then you’d better get back to the drawing board right now.

1. Video Helps Companies Sell More

When you think of the most successful brands in the business world today, one thing that they have in common is their use of video – not in just one portion of their practices, but throughout their entire sales funnel.

Videos of all kinds help them connect to their audiences, says Huffington Post, and those videos are becoming the central focus of all their sales and marketing this year. Ascend2 even reported which types of videos are the most effective:

1. Customer testimonials
2. On-demand product demonstration videos
3. Explainer and tutorial videos
4. Thought leader interviews
5. Project reviews and case studies
6. Live and on-demand webinars
7. Video blogs
8. Event videos

It has even been estimated that adding a video to your website can increase the chance of a front page Google result by 53 times! If that isn’t reason enough on its own, we don’t know what is – but we’ll keep going, anyway.

2. Video Isn’t Just for Marketing Now

That’s right. Videos aren’t just for customers and clients; they can be used to boost your business from the inside, too! Check out Heineken’s amazing recruitment tool – one part video, one part personality quiz – as an example.

Videos can be used to bring in and train new staff, empower sales teams, coordinate or inform operations, and more.

And don’t forget the Economy of Scale! That means the larger the number of people with whom you need to communicate, the more efficient your videos will be; and when multiple departments combine resources and budgeting to take advantage of video, it makes the productions much more affordable.

But if you don’t want to take us at our word when it comes to video marketing, then maybe you should look at your competitors and the other businesses around you.

3. Video Adoption Rates Are Climbing

87% of online marketers use video content, and with good reason. According to the Video Marketing Strategy Survey, video marketing effectiveness is increasing for 91% of companies, with more than half of those saying the increase is significant vs. other marketing tactics. This reflects the rapidly growing rate of video marketing adoption. In other words, as marketers learn more about video’s power to generate more traffic, leads, and sales, they continue to see video’s effectiveness climb.

According to Gartner research (released at the end of 2015), 98% of marketers said online and offline marketing were already merging – and 71% also said that video conversion rates outperform other versions of content!

“Marketers no longer make a clear distinction between offline and online marketing disciplines. As customers opt for digitally-led experiences, digital marketing stops being a discrete discipline and instead becomes the context for all marketing. Digital marketing is now marketing in a digital world,” said Yvonne Genovese, group VP, Gartner.

In fact, Forrester Research and the US Digital Marketing Forecast have dug up some impressive findings. In 2016, the average firm was expected to allocate 30% of their marketing budget to online marketing. This rate is expected to increase to 35% in the next two years, and according to Break Media, over one third of total online spending goes to video ads alone.

That means online video will soon account for over 10% of the average company’s budget!

So if you haven’t allocated anything yet, then you’re not just falling behind; you’re flat on your face near the starting line. Budget size aside, it’s time to make sure that you at least have a line item for video marketing.

 

So hunker down with that pumpkin spice latte (it’s okay, we won’t judge) and start planning ahead today.

When you work on your budget, you tend to start by getting all strategic stakeholders into the room. Since you have them there, go ahead and schedule some extra time with them to come up with an overall strategic action plan for your video marketing: a Video Marketing Roadmap. Know what goals you want to reach, and lay down a plan to achieve them. And if you’d like your Video Marketing Road Map to be charted with some professional guidance, give Optimum Productions a call, because that just so happens to be our specialty.