The Future of Online Marketing
What a great time to be an online businesses today! Would you like to get a glimpse of the future and see what the crystal ball says about how marketing will evolve in the digital age? Well you won’t need to shake that magical 8-Ball, because it’s not hazy; the future is explainer videos!
It doesn’t take a Nostradamus to see what the world’s internet traffic will be made up of. The overwhelming majority of traffic will be online videos (P2P (peer-to-peer) , VOD (Video on demand), online TV, streaming and regular IP (IPTV, Internet Protocol television). People will consume, share and buy online video. Forget pictures or text – those are the past. Video is the future!
How can we be so sure of this? Well, let’s go back in time for a bit…
What Was The Past Like?
Let’s rewind back to year 1999. Cell phones clunky, chunky, and it was only used for calling or texting. S club 7 and West life were topping the charts, and companies were just starting to realise the potential of websites as a medium in engaging customers and reaching a wider audience.
Let’s leap ahead, to 2005. Cell phones have evolved into all-around entertainment devices, James Blunt and McFly top the charts, and the spotlight on engagement falls on social networking platforms.
Then onto 2009, Pew Research Center found out that the number of online users who download and watch videos have grown to a staggering 69%, while the number of online users who upload and host videos grew 14%. And now, mobile phones are the preferred choice when it comes to watching or streaming online videos.
Fast forward to 2011, and your favourite TV series are now being streamed online. Tech Solutions say that about half of all the world’s online content are videos.
Now do you see how far video has become? Okay then, back to the present time!
Back To The Present
Nowadays, it is pretty much impossible to set up business marketing strategies without thinking about websites and social media platforms. While this fact is undoubtedly true, there is one more important element to factor in – explainer videos in your website’s landing page is always a great move for business.
Take the statistic of how 69% of online users are now watching videos on the internet and increase that to 78% (by 2009), and the 14% of the group who uploads and hosts video? Increase it to 35%!
Look at how businesses are picking up on the video trend – about 81% of all companies are creating video content for their websites; and the most popular ones are, ta-dah! animated videos. The same percentage of companies are churning out 2 or more videos per month.
All this growth in just 5 years! Amazing, isn’t it?
Google’s Online Dominance
Google’s online dominance is uncontested and seems to have taken over the searching world. Keeping a close eye on the online giant we can see it is liking video content too and will give you and your blog lots of Google love if you use it.
YouTube has grown to be the second most popular search engine (all because of video’s emergence), with their videos relying on Google to be found by web users.
It is no secret that explainer videos are excellent for SEO (search engine optimisation) purposes. A landing page composed of a well-made animation video can increase your search rankings 50 times more than a text-based one. Add in a 41% higher click through rate, and what do you get? Success with a capital S!
Users are 64% more engaged and will more likely make a decision after watching animation videos, whether subscribing, clicking, or buying.
Who could forget Dropbox’s rise to conversion fame when they used explainer videos? They made a simple, yet fantastic marketing video on their page, and enjoyed a 10% conversion over the course of two years. 10% might seem small, but when it means a 50 million dollar revenue and 10 million more users, ten percent is a massive gain.
Share Your Way To Success
Sharing is caring, and this maxim couldn’t be more appropriate when it comes to achieving great success for your online business.
Sharing a video to your community circle is infinitely easier than sharing other types of online content.
Users share 700 Twitter videos and 100 Facebook and YouTube hours each minute of every day!
So that Crazy Egg explainer video might not be as popular a week from now, but a well-made and truly engaging animated video can go from 5 views to a million in less than an hour! How does this convert to business numbers? a conversion rate increase of 64% and a $21,000 revenue per month (for the Crazy Egg video).
Go Forth and Engage
Since time immemorial, people have gathered ’round campfires and told stories to pass the time. This tradition still continues and is alive and well in the 21st century.
A good story creates an instant engagement, something that is always a plus in a website’s books.
Animation videos provide a good medium for introducing brand personality because it has a special element that text doesn’t have. It evokes an emotional response better, especially when your video evokes a feeling of who you are in just a matter of seconds.
Groupon placed a half-minute explainer video on their landing page. The result? Visitors came in waves, and the online retailer garnered 24 million dollars. This is the power of good video marketing!
Visual content drives engagement. In fact, just one month after the introduction of Facebook timeline for brands, visual content – photos and videos – saw a 65% increase in engagement.
Simply Measured
Reaching Maximum Conversion
Our instant society takes a 5-second glance at something, then looks away if it doesn’t grab their attention. Content is everywhere, and only the best ones really stand out from the crowd.
The millennium saw the reduction of human attention span from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. If we were to predict this trend, then we think that the attention span in the year 2090 will be just 3 or 4 seconds!
But here’s a surprising fact – web users retain half of the information they watched online, with helpful verbal and visual cues compared to written text. Let’s not forget conversion rates- it increases to more than 20% if a landing page utilises an explainer video instead of introductory text.
After watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online.
ComScore
Forward To The Future!
The past and present comes in full circle, with the future offering a glimpse of how video production will continue to thrive and grow.
The future is bright and laden with numbers! Here are a few of them:
Cisco’s networking forecast predicts 1.4 zettabytes (sounds futuristic, ain’t it?) or 1.4 billion terabytes of world internet traffic by 2017. This is larger than any of the combined online traffic data over the last 15 years! Social networking users will also continue to boom, up to more than 70%.
Mobile video takes the lion’s share and gets 66% of all traffic from mobile data. Smartphones will continue to evolve with new functions and technological features.
Online video platforms will be shown on about 2 billion screens globally.
81% of the world’s population will watch online videos three years from now. If you think that the social media population is massive, think about how online video watchers will overshadow them in just three years!
2018 will see that 90% of global consumer traffic are videos!
So keep in mind all the things you have learned, and how animation video is indeed the promising future of online marketing. Ride the wave of business success by creating explainer videos today!