Videos have emerged as the dominant way people engage with content today. Text-based content has greatly been replaced by videos, and marketing companies have already noticed this.

YouTube, the single largest video viewing platform on the internet, gets around 2 billion monthly log ins.

Data from Google shows that nearly half of all video content viewers under the age of 32 will not subscribe to a pay for TV service by 2025. For decades, television was the primary way through people interacted with video content.

But as future generations increasingly shift towards video content on the internet, it's time for video marketing strategies to evolve as well.

Video Marketing in 2021: Everything You Should Know

Video marketing on platforms like YouTube have grown from home-made content that revolved around skits and reviews. Now, video production is crucial to gaining and sustaining viewers.

If you want to gain subscribers, then your videos need to be visually appealing, informative, and make audiences feel as if you're contributing something to their lives.

Given that thousands of videos are uploaded to YouTube alone every single day, competition is fierce. Video production and video marketing now work hand in hand. 81% of businesses use video marketing, and videos have been shown as a way to increase sales and brand awareness. This means that pre-production is possibly more important than actual video content going ahead.

And what does pre-production entail?

Pre-production encompasses those aspects of your video marketing strategy that help boost your video's growth. Even if you create engaging video content, without the right marketing strategy to support it, your videos could go unnoticed at the end of the day.

Video Marketing: What Do Viewers Want to Watch?

There are certain kinds of videos that generate more views than others. At the helm of this is informative or instructional videos.

If you want your videos to gain traction and go viral, then sharing informative content could be key towards building growth. Here are the kinds of videos that draw the most attention from viewers:

1. Instructional Videos

These videos provide viewers with data, information, how-to's and tutorials within their spheres of expertise.

Product review channels also fall within this niche. If a person wants to find information on a certain topic, they are far more likely to search out video content on the topic instead of a written article.

People and businesses alike now prefer video content over written material. Viewers don't often have the time to go through pages of written material, and a quick explainer video helps them find the information they need.

Video content is also more immersive, and the combination of visual, auditory and written content help audiences to better retain information over the long run.

2. Video Advertising

Video advertising continues to hold a special space in the video marketing world, barring some changes. Video advertising now has to focus on building a connection with viewers.

Video content has the power to boost conversions and increase sales. People who see a certain video online are very likely to follow through with purchasing the product, especially when they like it.

Instagram has already experimented with shoppable video marketing, to great success. Your video advertising strategy should work towards building trust with the consumer.

How do you do this? By finding ways to involve the customer in your business. Social improvement and charity initiatives, when combined with video advertising, can increase consumer engagement, build conversations and boost sales.

3. Viral Videos

A viral video is video content that has fast traction, is shareable among various social media platforms, and gets people talking.

With just these three factors in mind, it's easier to conceptualize and create video content that has the potential to go viral. Alongside the video itself, you also need to have a strong video marketing strategy that's specifically designed to push the video into as many social media platforms as your business marketing strategy allows.

Say your business primarily uses YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and Instragram as part of your marketing strategy. Pushing your video content on these platforms can increase the potential for your brand to gain more views and amplify brand exposure across these platforms.

4. Customer-Centric Storytelling in Video Content

Visual storytelling that focuses on meaningful narratives can drive more viewers to your video content.

Instead of videos that only focus on video production, the narrative within the video can make the content more shareable and sellable. To achieve this, your videos need to provide context that viewers can relate to.

Remember that more than 500 million hours of video content are viewed on YouTube every day. But how many of those videos are remembers at the end of the day?

Memorable content usually has a context that resonates with the audience. There are two key ways to achieve this:

·         The video content should be easily digestible and presented in a way that has an impact on viewers.

·         The length of the video should be shorter than ten minutes ideally. It's been seen that viewers prefer shorter videos over longer ones. Longer videos are more likely to lead to customers clicking away from the video. People tend to have shorter attention spans. It can be as short as six seconds in some people, and can go up to ten minutes in other people. The key here is to create smaller video content that sticks to the three to five minute mark, ten minutes at most.

5. Videos Created for SEO Ranking

Video content on YouTube can help you drive traffic to your website. You can do this by back-linking your YouTube videos to your website using the platform's tagging feature.

This is important for businesses that want to increase their visibility on the Google search engine. This is achieved by using focus keywords on the video title and meta description.

When people like and comment on your videos on YouTube, they boost your website's SEO as well.

There are other ways to increase brand visibility through creating engaging video content. Businesses can create customer testimonial videos, interview videos or even live videos where they directly interact with their consumers.

The key to building brand visibility and achieving sustainable growth in 2021 is to resonate with viewers. The more viewers like your video content and engage with your videos, the more likely they are to become returning viewers.

2021 is still on the way towards the dominance of video content that is likely to prevail when it comes to marketing and advertising in the future. Now is the time to focus on video marketing strategies that utilize the yet evolving video advertising strategies that brands and businesses are developing.

If you want to learn more about video production and marketing, then consider getting in touch with Melty Cone.

Melty Cone is a NYC-based video agency that specializes in video production and video marketing. To learn more about how to create engaging video content in 2021, get in touch with Melty Cone! We would be happy to talk to you!