- The Rise of Short-Form Videos
- Live Streaming and Real-Time Engagement
- Personalized Video Content
- Interactive and Shoppable Videos
- Video SEO and Optimization
- Transparency and Trust in Video Marketing
Q: What are the latest trends in video marketing?
A. The latest trends in video marketing include the rise of short-form videos, live streaming, personalized video content, interactive and shoppable videos, and video SEO optimization.
Did you know that video is the best-performing content marketing format with up to 45% performance rating?
Did you also know that 97% of marketers report that video marketing helps their customers have a better understanding of their products, and 87% attribute their sales growth to video content?
Well, these are things you will learn from Forbes’ content marketing statistics for 2024.
From precise five-second ads to witty long-form video ads, video marketing is rapidly changing the way we see and approach advertising. And with every innovation in the industry, we witness the emergence of new video marketing trends.
As a business owner, you must adapt.
Consumers are showing a clear preference for video content for information and entertainment. Considering that you are sharing the market with 33 million other businesses in the U.S., you should be sure that you are constantly at the forefront with relevant and informative content.
In essence, you have to stay updated with the latest video marketing trends and continually adapt your marketing strategies to meet their demands.
Without much ado, let’s take you through a quick exploration of the top 6 trends in video advertising.
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The Rise of Short-Form Videos
Short-form videos, also known as shorts, can be traced back to the days of Vine videos. Vine’s downfall was as unexpected as its rise to popularity. Who knew that people would be so interested in and engrossed by 6-second videos?
If it’s true that people loved Vine so much, why did it fail? Well, the parent company, Twitter, couldn’t figure out how to monetize the platform and retain content creators.
TikTok learned from Twitter’s mistakes and stormed the market equipped with monetization plans and incentives for attracting and retaining content creators. And from 2020 to 2022, TikTok remained the most downloaded app in the U.S.
Clearly, people still love their short videos.
Other mainstream social media platforms took the cue and restructured their platforms to meet the demands, leading to the creation of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and Facebook Reels.
Today, these platforms are all monetized, allowing small businesses and marketers to effectively push their video marketing campaigns through shorts and win the attention war.
Brands spend less on shorter video ads while having more opportunities to reach more viewers:
- TikTok boasts about 1 billion monthly active users worldwide, with about 150 million active users in the U.S.
- Instagram Reels is home to about 2.35 billion monthly active users globally and about 169 million active users in the U.S., according to DemandSage.
- Between 2022 and 2023, the average monthly active users of YouTube shorts rose by 500 million, jumping from 1.5 billion to 2 billion. Monthly active users in the U.S. are expected to reach 164.5 million by the end of 2024.
Besides being a cheaper alternative, these numbers make it worthwhile for small businesses to consider video content marketing.
Why Do Shorts Work?
- Engaging: They are often precise and straight to the point, selling all there is in a few seconds and driving high engagement rates.
- Shareability: Users are more willing to share relevant content in their network, particularly when they know people in their network can view it quickly and discuss it with them. This leads to increased reach and visibility.
- Memorability: With a quick and perfect blend of your brand’s auditory, visual, and textual elements, shorts are quickly registered in the viewer’s memory with less effort.
Shorts also boast the potential for higher ROI. Where visibility and reach are marketing currencies, you’d find that it’s easy to amass more viewers on your shorts than on long-form videos. Consequently, you reach more of your target audience, who are likely to take necessary action.
To ensure the effectiveness of your short-form videos, you should consider using eye-catching visuals and focus on a single message per short.
Live Streaming and Real-Time Engagement
Live streaming is one of the few instances when people don’t mind watching your long-form video content.
That’s mostly because the audience gets to interact with you in real time, and there is less room for edits and takebacks. To the audience, the seeming rawness of live streams creates a sense of authenticity, which is important for fueling brand loyalty and trust.
Businesses use live streams for product demos, reviews, and shopping, enabling their audience to ask questions and get answers about the products in real time. Some platforms also provide interactive on-screen options that viewers can click on to purchase products right away.
Live streaming is rising to be an incredibly conducive, interactive environment that favors both brands and their target audience.
Platforms and Tools
To tap into the digital marketing trends in live streaming, consider using the following popular live streaming platforms:
- Facebook Live: Offers various features to enhance your video marketing strategies, including live ads and live in-stream ads, which allow you to embed non-intrusive ads into your live broadcasts.
- Instagram live: With an Instagram business account, you can obtain Instagram badges which let you earn while live streaming. You can also pin your promotional offers in the live chat.
- Twitch: Forecasted to be one of the biggest digital marketing trends in the coming years. Twitch, which primarily focuses on live streaming, boasts lots of functionalities that brands can leverage to maximize their interactive video sections and boost sales.
Successful live streaming is a product of planning. To get the most out of any of these and similar platforms, you’ll have to adopt some best practices.
Best Practices for Live Streaming
Below are some of the best practices for live streaming as part of your video content marketing:
- Promote your live streams in advance in your network and encourage others to share them in their networks, too. Drum up conversations and anticipation around it.
- Prepare a loose script to help you stay on track with your agenda and goals for the stream. Due to the immediacy of live streams, it’s easy to lose track when the audience starts throwing questions left, right, and center.
- It should go without saying that you should engage with your viewers. Read the live chats and try to respond to as many relevant inquiries as you can.
To get the most out of live stream video marketing trends, consider having streaming as frequently as possible—maybe weekly or monthly.
You don’t necessarily have to sell at every stream. See streaming as an opportunity for brand positioning, boosting your trust factor with your target audience.
Personalized Video Content
Something about “personalized video content” doesn’t sound right.
Does it mean creating a tailored video message specifically for each customer, based on their interests, needs, and preferences? That doesn’t sound practical.
…or does it?
Well, it is actually practical.
Personalized video content typically involves having a video template with placeholders or spaces between certain cuts. Video personalization software like Pirsonal, Shotstack, or MotionLab, then pulls information from your database, such as the customer’s name, location, or other personal details, to fill the spaces and create a personalized video for each of your customers.
At a time when 81% of customers prefer businesses that offer personalized user experience, personalized video content takes you forward in that direction, boosting your likeability among your target audience.
Although global organizations like Nike, Red Cross, Red Bull, and Coca-Cola have sent personalized videos to thousands of customers in the past, the age of personalized marketing videos is only now seeing more widespread adoption. Making it one of the most important trends in video advertising that you should anticipate.
Data-Driven Personalization
As you prepare to embrace personalized video marketing, you should also keep the ground fertile with the necessary data. That is, you should have a database of all the data points needed to meet your brand’s personalization targets.
Personalized video content is not merely about sending happy Thanksgiving, birthday, or Christmas messages to your customers. It is also a powerful tool for marketing and making huge sales, when you have the right data.
Want to deliver personalized product recommendations and offers to your customers?
Your personalization software should be able to extract and analyze real-time information about your customers’ browsing and purchase data from your database. Then, it should quickly insert appropriate product recommendations in the placeholders before sending them off to their emails.
To take your video content marketing to the next level with personalized videos, you should consider:
- Using personalized email videos that perfectly capture the customer’s user data to enhance more opens and conversions.
- Embedding dynamic video ads functionality on your website, creating personalized ads for your customers as they move from one page to another.
In B2B scenarios where you are addressing a few businesses, it helps to put a lot more personal effort into personalized video content creation processes.
Interactive and Shoppable Videos
Interactive videos allow viewers to engage with the content by clicking links, participating in polls, or exploring additional information. Shoppable videos enable viewers to purchase products directly from the video, streamlining the shopping experience.
Shoppable and interactive videos are on the rise as some of the latest video marketing trends help brands maximize their video marketing strategies. They offer features for generating direct conversions from video ads.
These marketing video formats eliminate scenarios in which consumers would ordinarily view a video and move on or take several steps to reach your website and find the product.
Now, they can simply click on-screen pop-ups on the videos to make a purchase immediately—bridging the gap between engagement and conversion.
High-engagement features of interactive and shoppable videos include the following:
- Custom video overlays for interactions, including clickable overlays
- Shoppable group pop-ups or carousels
- Add-to-cart or quick-buy functionality
- Clickable hotspots
- CTAs
- Live product API feed integration
These features improve viewers’ engagement by allowing them to interact with the content either by clicking links or making purchases.
For instance, with carousels, customers have the option of quickly browsing through the brand’s catalog while viewing the given promotional video, enabling the customers to shop directly from the video.
As video platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok continue to improve their capabilities for rendering shoppable videos, we’ll likely see more video marketing trends in livestream shopping, interactive overlays, and shoppable video ads that enhance overall engagement and sales.
Video SEO and Optimization
Video search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your content for search engines, making it more likely to appear on platforms like Google and YouTube’s search results pages.
Video SEO breaks the barrier between your video content and search algorithms, substantially boosting the reach and visibility of your marketing materials. As a result, your video will most likely appear at the top of the search engine result page for search queries that remotely relate to your video content marketing materials.
There are many techniques you can use to optimize your videos for search engines, including:
- Using relevant keywords in titles, descriptions, and tags: Your descriptions, tags, and titles should contain simple phrases and words that an everyday consumer would likely use when searching for products like yours online. Conduct keyword research to know the search terms trending in your niche.
- Creating high-quality thumbnails: When users make a video-related query, search engines present them with various options, including yours. Alongside your video’s title, the thumbnail is very instrumental in making the first sale. Users will often go for videos with the more enticing thumbnail.
Fundamentally, these two techniques can help you halfway through your video search engine optimization.
However, top video platforms like Google and YouTube have various technical features you may need to tweak to fully reap the SEO benefits they have to offer.
Let’s consider YouTube.
Optimizing Video Content Marketing Strategies for YouTube
Here are 4 ways you can optimize your YouTube videos:
- Keyword Research
Run extensive keyword research, focusing on your niche and target audience location to see the most common search queries and learn where your target audience is currently channeling their interest.
You can use keyword research tools like Semrush and Ahref. Alternatively, you can conduct audience surveys, analyze competitors, or use social listening tools to identify trends.
- Create Quality Videos
Here, you should consider production quality as much as content quality. Your video content should be thoroughly researched to present accurate information. And more importantly, production (including visuals and audio) quality should be top-notch to enhance user experience.
In cases where these qualities are lacking, you will experience a high bounce rate, which in turn signals search engine crawlers that your videos are not up to par and shouldn’t be recommended.
- Create Keyword-Optimized Playlists
This is a useful technique for improving link-building for your overall marketing promotions. Here, you have to first create a playlist of relevant videos, then generate a backlink with relevant keywords for the playlist and link back to it from your website, social media accounts, and other platforms.
The keywords and backlinking can help generate organic and referred traffic from other platforms, indicating to YouTube that people find your content valuable and relevant. As a result, the platform’s crawlers may be more inclined to recommend your playlist for queries with the given keywords.
- Add End Screens
End screens are interactive pop-ups that you can embed on your YouTube videos in the last 5-20 seconds.
You can use them to promote other relevant videos in your video marketing campaign or to encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel and see more of your content.
Other techniques to consider include:
- Use timestamps to create roadmaps and optimize viewer engagement
- Take time to provide detailed video descriptions
- Consider adding transcripts to your videos
- Use schema markups to make your videos more indexable (each markup can be a keyword)
When sharing or embedding your video on platforms outside YouTube, ensure that your video is surrounded by contextual information. This can help boost your video’s ranking and organic traffic.
Transparency and Trust in Video Marketing
Consumers’ demand now favors video content, which has spurred various trends in video advertising. However, that doesn’t mean consumers will settle for any type of video content thrown their way.
Consumers demand lots of transparency and trust when it comes to video content marketing.
Realizing that your video title or thumbnail has nothing to do with the content can cause a heightened sense of betrayal. Clickbait can only take you so far; once consumers find that your video content offers no real value, they will distance themselves from your brand.
And really, it’s not just about your video content; it’s also about everything that happens around your brand and how it affects your image.
Brands that prioritize transparency in their social marketing efforts benefit from consumer trust, increased sales, and enhanced brand reputation, according to Business.com.
Otherwise, the consumers lose interest and trust in your brand and products.
According to 2024 Salsify research, 46% of U.S. consumers will pay more for brands they trust. Hence, aiming for brand transparency and trust through your video marketing strategies should be a priority across all aspects of your video marketing planning and implementation process—and your overall business growth strategies.
In so doing, your video content will likely be more authentic, reflecting your brand’s values and mission as a reputable authority in the industry.
Key Takeaways: Boosting Your Brand with Top Video Marketing Trends
Video content has proven to be, by far, the most effective content marketing format.
Understandably, the heightened effectiveness and applicability come with market shifts and changes in consumer behavior, leading to a shift in video marketing trends.
In this article, we looked at six of the latest video content marketing trends, including the rise of short-form videos, live streaming, personalized video content, interactive and shoppable videos, video SEO, and the increased demand for transparency and trust in video marketing.
Further Reading:
- Technologies Powering Virtual Office Spaces
- Empowering Independence: A Guide for the Modern Independent Business Owner
- Maximizing Customer Value: A Guide to Customer Retention Analysis
- Green Marketing Definition: What It Is and How It Works
You should take extra steps to implement the tips provided in the individual sections while keeping your eyes open for changes and new trends in video marketing. Staying updated with new trends in video advertising positions you to take innovative approaches to grab target audiences’ attention long before your competitors know what’s going on.
More importantly, never neglect consumers’ demand for transparency and trust in video content marketing strategies and overall business growth strategies.
These qualities, along with other business growth tools, help businesses build a professional and credible image, bolstering their reputation among consumers and authority among competitors.