6 Reasons Why Video Engagement Marketing Is The Next Big Trend

For any business, entrepreneur, or influencer, video engagement marketing is one of the most important and effective marketing strategies available.

As Wyzowl’s states in their 2021 video marketing analysis, “The number of businesses using video as a marketing tool has increased by 41% since 2016.”

Why the explosion in video engagement marketing? While we’ll get into more specifics, the simple answer is that videos connect with customers and prospects in ways that other types of marketing don’t. Humans are visually oriented, and video marketing can catch people’s attention in unique ways.

In this guide, we’ll break down exactly what video engagement marketing is and why it’s so important for your brand or business.

What is video engagement marketing?

Video engagement marketing is the use of video content within marketing campaigns in order to promote your products or services, educate your audience, and connect with customers and prospects.

Brian Dean of Backlinko says, “Back in the day, video was a tactic that you threw into your content marketing now and again. But to succeed with video marketing today, it’s important to have a solid strategy that you can use.”

In other words, you can’t just have the occasional random video in your marketing campaigns. You need a well-planned, well-executed video engagement marketing strategy.

Here are a few examples of some of the most popular video strategies:

• Live Streaming: Streaming video on a live feed to a virtual audience allows you to engage with them in real-time, answering questions, providing helpful information, etc.
• Webinars: Webinars, like live streaming, allows you to speak to your audience in real-time. The primary difference between webinars and live streams is that webinars almost always have a teaching component to them.
• Tutorials: Many businesses are using videos to teach their customers how to use their products. Some businesses simply post the videos on YouTube, while others host them on their website.
• Online Courses: Online learning has exploded in the last few years, and companies and individuals are monetizing their expertise in the form of online courses.

Those are just a few examples. There are dozens, if not hundreds of ways to use video engagement to your advantage as a business. Whether you’re selling a product, gathering data about your customer base, or growing a following on social media, video content is essential.

Why is video engagement the next big trend in marketing?

In 2018, marketing expert Neil Patel said, “...nearly everyone is going to consume almost entirely video-based content in the coming years rather than text-based.” He was right.

To understand why video engagement is the next big marketing trend, all you need to do is look at your phone or desktop. Whether you’re reading the news, looking at social media, shopping for a new dress, or communicating with your team at work, video is central to the experience.

For the customer, video offers a way to connect and engage with brands. For the business, it offers valuable, actionable insights about the customer base. More holistically, video content is a genuine, meaningful way for organizations to communicate with each other and their customers.

“Videos can attract a different audience, one that might not want to take the time to read a white paper or an article,” according to Brick Marketing.

Here are some specific ways you can use video to strengthen your marketing and drive new business.

1. Virtual events

Virtual events are any live or pre-recorded video broadcast. They include everything from live streams to webinars to virtual summits. For businesses, virtual events are an important part of using video engagement to your advantage.

They allow you to visually show your customers the value of what you do, whether you’re teaching them a new skill, answering their questions, or showing them how your product works.

Here are a few types of virtual events.

Livestream Q&A

Let’s be honest — we all love engaging with our favorite brands. When a brand or organization answers your question, sends you a message, or replies to your tweet, the recognition makes you feel heard.

Virtual events make it even easier to engage with followers. For livestream Q&A events, it’s a good idea to promote the event on social media and email beforehand.

And when you live stream with Livestorm, you get detailed data about your event. You can see how many people attended, gather data from live polls, record replay data, and more. These actionable insights allow you to make better content that is more personalized to your customer base.

Webinars

Webinars are virtual events with one or more hosts, a moderator, and an audience of attendees.

Webinars can be anything from virtual product demos to live lectures or recorded performances.

No matter how you use them, they offer unique, actionable insights into the attendees of your events. With Livestorm, you can even add custom forms to your registration page so you can gather data that is meaningful to your organization specifically.

Livestorm’s innovative webinar platform also allows your attendees to chat, ask questions, and respond to polls. You can even feature multiple guest presenters to get the most out of your virtual event.

Replays

One important facet to hosting virtual events is keeping an eye on your replay data. In Livestorm, you can look at how many times your video has been replayed, and by which attendees. You’ll also keep a copy of your replay so you can share it on social media or use it again in the future.

2. Shoppable videos

Shoppable videos include any video content with products embedded or linked in the video. With the rise of influencer marketing in recent years, shoppable videos have become an effective way for companies to get their products in front of customers.

Some platforms, like Instagram, have shoppable videos built directly into the platform. Another simple solution is to use a video marketing platform like Livestorm and simply share links to products via calls-to-action throughout the video.

3. Video help content

Video help content, like how-to videos, is a great way to both serve and educate your audience. Consumers love the form factor and usefulness of this type of content because it’s easy to watch, but it’s informative as well.

As Jess Rozario-Ospino of Animoto notes, “When learning about a new product or service, consumers prefer video over reading about a product or looking at photos.”

There are a variety of ways you can use how-to content to connect with customers, including introducing new products, providing instructions on how to use specific features, or demonstrating how to solve a specific problem your customers often encounter.

Video help content is ideal for converting into buys because engagement on how-to videos is often higher than other videos. Putting a link to a product or to your webpage in your video description is sure to lead to more conversions.

4. Social media video

Video dominates on social media, particularly if that video is posted natively on the platform rather than linked to. Because video tends to keep people on social media platforms longer than other forms of posts (like text), the platforms tend to push videos to the top of the feed. With that in mind, you should be sharing your video content across your social channels.

It’s important to note that you should tailor your video content to the form of each social media platform your brand is using. In other words, make sure the format of your video is appropriate in relation to how each platform works:

• Short form (Instagram Reels, TikTok, etc.): These videos are around 10–60 seconds long and have a single, concise point.
• Long form (YouTube, IGTV, Facebook Watch, etc.): These videos can be up to an hour or more, but around 5–15 minutes is recommended.
• Disappearing (Instagram Stories, Snapchat, etc.): These videos appear for 24 hours unless saved and are around 10 seconds each.

The great thing about pushing video content on social media is that there are helpful analytics provided by the platforms. You can see how your content is performing, whether it has led to more followers, and whether viewers are engaging with your linked content.

Whenever possible, make sure your social media videos tell a story — even if that story is only a few seconds long.

“Visuals pull people in, but story makes them stay until the screen fades to black. And the key to compelling stories is emotion,” says Kendall Walters of Vidyard. “If you can make your viewers connect emotionally with your video, then you’ve got people who are that much more likely to watch another video and another.”

You only have a few seconds to get your viewer’s attention — they’re scrolling through hundreds of similar videos — so make them count.

5. Vertical video

So much video content today is consumed on smartphones. Waiting at the doctor’s office, scrolling through social media before bed, the list goes on. And while there’s a time and place for video in the traditional landscape orientation, when it comes to marketing, vertical video is just as important.

Vertical video includes any video content that the viewer watches, well, vertically. The viewer doesn’t have to rotate their phone. This can include IGTV videos, Snapchat videos, ads that appear on social media, etc.

Make sure your video content looks great on mobile, since that’s the most likely way that customers will watch it.

6. Personalization

As you gather more and more data about your customers and followers, you can personalize your video content to match who they are.

When you understand who your customers are, you can start really making the most out of video content. For example, you can create different webinars that appeal to different customer segments. Or to go even further, you can create highly personalized videos for a particular client or company that you hope to work with.

In a more general sense, when you start gathering data about how your video content is performing, you can personalize it to meet your viewers’ needs. When a certain type of video content flops, you can begin to understand why and adjust appropriately. Or if a virtual event goes great and leads to many conversions, you’ll know to plan another one.

Discover more video trends

For more on this topic, check out this video by Livestorm's Content Manager, Daniella, as she breaks down her top predictions for video in 2022:

The biggest trend: engagement

Video engagement marketing is only going to become more important in the future. If you need proof, look no further than the stratospheric rise of TikTok, the absolute dominance of Netflix, and the staggering amount of time people spend on YouTube. We've even built our own Video Engagement Score calculator to help measure engagement in virtual events!

People are increasingly turning to video, rather than other forms of media, to learn new things, engage with companies, and make purchasing decisions.

If you haven’t started investing in video engagement marketing, now’s the time.