Video marketing trends for 2020

Video marketing has become an increasingly important tool in digital and content marketing. Video content is easy for users to consume and can be more appealing than text content or images.

Owing to this, video can be used as a way to easily engage your audience as well as gaining new potential leads. As a digital marketer, it is crucial that you understand the trends of this medium going into 2020.

Changes of interest in video content in 2020

Statistics from Google show that by 2025 half of video content viewers under the age of 32 will not subscribe to a paid TV service and instead opt for viewing free online video content instead.

Furthermore, TVs themselves are becoming “smarter”, giving people more opportunities to watch online video content instead of traditional television right from their TV.

More and more people, especially younger generations, are flooding to online video content instead of consuming more traditional video media.

Organic social network video marketing in 2020

Back in the days of Myspace popularity and Facebook, social feeds were dominated by text and images. Today, social media platforms have slowly moved towards providing opportunities to share more video content over the years.

Instagram recently released “IGTV”, in July 2018, in an effort to compete with YouTube and it’s not surprising. Video content on Instagram has a much higher proportion of engagement than both image and carousel content. The average number of comments on video content is 46, over double the amount of comments on image content (only 22).

A statistical roundup by Hootsuite found that engagement rates from Facebook video posts (6.13%) is significantly higher than the average overall engagement rate (3.6%) from other content on the platform.

Videos seem to be dominating Twitter too. The platform has seen a huge 67% increase in video views, year on year, which is remarkable considering twitter was built around specifically text content in the form of tweets. Video tweets also drive 10x more engagement than standard tweets.

It’s clear to see video content on social media is beginning to dominate other forms of content as well as being more effective for driving engagement to social posts on a variety of social platforms, and we believe this trend is going to continue into 2020.

Organic ranking factors for videos in 2020

Ranking factors are the elements of a piece of content that impact where the content is shown within search results. It’s essential to optimise every piece of video content in order to gain the most organic traffic possible. However, each platform has factors that are more important than others, so you need to make sure your video content is specifically optimised for each platform.

In the early days of online video content, the raw video views were the most important ranking factor. It’s becoming more complicated as different platforms opt for different factors to rank the quality of video content.

For example, one of the main ranking factors on YouTube is watch time. The higher the percentage of the video watched, the better it will rank in YouTube search results. Comparing this to Instagram, where engagement is one of the main ranking factors, different strategies need to be implemented.

On YouTube, focus on content that will keep the viewers hooked to watch to the end of the video. This can be achieved by promising more value to the viewers if they watch until the end. Content quality is extremely important to keep people watching; users are more likely to click away from a video that looks terrible.

On Instagram, it’s important to encourage users to engage through comments and likes. Content should be focused on promoting discussion rather than watch time. Ask your audience questions, either in the video description or in the video itself in order to promote discussion.

Make sure you understand what platforms your potential viewers are most likely to use. Going into 2020 we recommend creating and optimising video content specifically for those platforms.

Online video advertising in 2020

Video ads are becoming more and more popular, particularly on social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This is probably because of the increased interest, engagement and return on investment (ROI) from video ads compared to ads that contain only images.

Similarly to organic video marketing strategies, make sure you select the channel that best fits your product, service or goals and optimise your video ad accordingly to the selected platform. Before you embark on a social advertising campaign you must ask yourself a few questions:

• Who are you targeting?
• Where are you targeting geographically?
• What platforms are your competition using/not using?

After these 3 questions have been answered, conduct research into which platforms best suit the audience you’re targeting.

This could be useful if you are targeting brand awareness over conversions. Data from Facebook has shown that 70% of short ads (under 15 seconds) are viewed to completion – Facebook users like shorter ads!

Owing to the vast amount of information Facebook gathers about its users, advertising can target users specifically which helps your video ads to be shown to the right users.

Twitter supports sponsored tweets with videos embedded into them. Studies have found that Twitter video ad campaigns are significantly more emotionally stimulating than campaigns on other platforms. Twitter could be an important channel for your business if you want to promote an emotional message to a younger generation.

Some social sites have a very specific audience. For example, LinkedIn focuses on business and jobs so it might not be a good idea to start a campaign aiming to sell products unrelated to business or the job market.

Conclusion

To summarise, video content is going to be massively important for both businesses and content creators alike in 2020. Year on year more internet users are preferring to watch video content today than ever before and so it is crucial for digital marketers to master this form of digital content.