5 video marketing trends

Video marketing is still relatively new compared to legacy marketing channels, so it’s constantly evolving. Your business’s marketing efforts have to keep pace with the changing social media and digital habits of your customers. But how do you keep up? We asked social media and video marketing experts for their insights on video marketing trends.

1. Using virtual reality increases viewership

Virtual reality (VR) has made the transition from tech curiosity to a practical tool marketers are slowly beginning to use, says Winston Nguyen, CEO of VR Heaven. “You can already watch 3D and 360-degree videos on YouTube, but it’s a highly underutilized video (marketing) format,” he says. “There’s very little competition compared to 2D videos, and businesses can get into it easily since 360-degree cameras are much cheaper than when they first debuted.”

Nguyen noted that most car brands, with lavish marketing budgets, have recently begun offering VR test-drives as part of their campaigns. It’s easy to understand why. Exciting VR videos get millions of views on YouTube. For example, this skydiving video has amassed more than 33 million views.

Nguyen is confident that VR is affordable for much smaller businesses than global car brands. Want to advertise your hotel? Shoot a 360-degree video for YouTube and your website. Viewers are certain to find it more alluring than still images.

The superior verisimilitude of VR is likely to eventually make it standard for tutorial videos about activities like cooking and martial arts.

Nguyen says VR ads get higher engagement now because they’re novel, but that advantage will fade once VR is routine.

2. Integrating video into branding

While some marketers still view video as solely an advertising tool, most have fully embraced it as an integral component of their brand awareness strategy. Osama Khabab, founder of MotionCue, says marketers are leveraging video for brand and product awareness because it communicates their brand message while generating many retargeting options for selling.

Video marketing couples seamlessly with social media. Khabab says his clients want to know more about vertical video because their customers watch their videos mostly on cell phone screens.

“Due to the popularity of social media across mobile devices, vertical video is becoming a necessity for businesses,” he says. “And for efficiency and keeping costs down, they’ll take a single advertisement and use different video formats for placement on different social channels.”

3. Shorter videos

Effective marketing videos don’t need to be cinematic in picture quality or epic in length. Jack Paxton, cofounder of VYPER, says there’s growing demand for video content in emerging economies, but data costs are relatively high. Marketers have strong incentives to shrink the file size of their videos.

“This type of video format is already popular on social channels like Snapchat,” Paxton says. “You can reduce the file size by reducing the length, lowering the visual quality, significantly compressing the file, or a combination of the three.”

4. Cultivate longer-term influencer partnerships

Since many influencers produce video content, video marketing goes hand in hand with influencer marketing. However, simply partnering with an influencer solely based on the size of their social media following is no longer a foolproof strategy.

Fans are becoming less patient when an influencer promotes products and services, so they tend to skip through that content, according to Paxton. “After all, people naturally don’t like to be sold to, even if it’s by someone they like,” he says.

To counteract that effect, Paxton recommends that businesses partner with influencers over the long term. “Instead of these one-and-done or ad-hoc shoutouts, brands will need to require influencers to use their products for several months, or even a year,” he says.

5. Greater personalization

“Tailoring videos to your audience is a great way to stand out and increase engagement,” says Abby Chinery, content marketing manager at Reboot. Producing content that resonates with fans of your brand requires insight and refinement of your buyer persona. Paying close attention to what content is best received and inviting your fans to create content to share with the rest of the audience will bond your fans with your brand.