Online video was once a nice extra.
But now, it has truly become the main event.
As a professional design and animation studio, we’ve always been firm believers in visual language, and specifically moving image, being one of the best ways to communicate and connect with people through the telling of great stories. Loving what we do, we knew the day would come when the online world mixed fully with the power of video to capture the hearts and minds of all sorts of audiences. We’ve been doing it for decades — honing our skills and systems in crafting beautiful (and meaningful) animation and video based projects.
We’ve seen the cultural shift in recent years that has placed video (often referred to as “content”) at the centre of the most effective approach to brand awareness and audience engagement.
The trend continues too, with more and more businesses, marketers and start-ups putting video at the very top of their engagement strategies. In 2017 video accounted for around 69% of all consumer traffic online. That’s a crazy amount of traffic.
The growing popularity in online video/content with brands and businesses really isn’t that surprising when you look at how it works. It’s easy to access, from everywhere. It’s ‘snackable’ and … offers a great way to make relatively dry information more interesting, easy to digest and therefore … engaging and easy to digest.
It’s all well and good to just jump in with the logic of “well let’s just add video to everything then!” to grab people’s attention and increase engagement levels. What’s crucial to remember is
… quality is superior to quantity.
If the content isn’t great, and isn’t considered, consumers will just move on. Making content that’s well-produced, creative, clever and compelling — targeted to the right audience/s — will do a LOT of heavy lifting for your brand, helping it to stand out and stick in people’s minds.
As well as its ease-of-access and mobile-friendliness, another key to video’s success as a marketing tool is how easy it is to share. A video’s potential can be maximised by spreading it across social platforms and utilising the audience’s own networks to get it in front of the right people. It goes without saying that if a viewer is moved, tickled or inspired by the content they’ll want to share it on social media, and the effect is exponential.
Ultimately, users who spend time with a well-told video story will spend time engaging with the brand that made it, which makes us all happy!