5 Myths About Video Marketing, Debunked

By now, you’ve probably heard that video marketing is a powerful tool for generating leads and attracting new customers.

Why aren’t you using it yet?

For many small and medium-sized businesses, the reluctance to adopt videos stems from a fear of the unknown. Video marketing feels expensive, cumbersome, and difficult to follow. And these would be good reasons … if any of them were still true in 2020.

Video technology has come a long way in recent years. We’ve moved from “Put it on YouTube and Hope Millennials Find It” to video enablement platforms that allow small businesses to create, share, and analyze videos without the agencies, actors, or cost.

In fact, 88% of video marketers said video gave them a positive ROI – a 5% year-over-year increase and a world apart from the low 33% that thought so in 2015.

If you haven’t seen what video can do for your business, it’s time to stop postponing it.

In this post, let’s review the top myths about video marketing.

5 Video Marketing Myths Debunked

1. Video is too expensive.

Sure, HBOs Westworld You may have beaten The Game of Thrones record for $ 10 million per episode, but you don’t have to play their game. Stay as far away from it as possible.

Video doesn’t have to be expensive. Today’s buyers and consumers value authenticity versus production value.

According to Fast Company, consumers prefer goods and services that are of lesser quality but more “authentic” over goods of higher quality that appear “fake”.

This need for authenticity is why we are seeing such an explosion in micro-influencer marketing and user-generated content. In both marketing strategies, brands rely on their own buyers to create content, usually with little more than an iPhone.

With your own video content, don’t worry about a low production budget when you have something valuable to say. For example, Vidyard produces chalk talks where experts in their company are asked to speak in front of a blackboard on topics such as outbound sales, analytics, and video strategies. The videos have been shared thousands of times, and the cost? A few minutes and a lot of colored chalk.

2. Video is awkward.

What many small business owners usually mean by this is “I don’t know where to start”. When they think of videos, they envision a time-consuming process of scripting and storyboards, sourcing actors and equipment, and hiring someone in jockey pants to flap the door and say “Action!” However, modern video marketing is a world outside of Hollywood and requires much less effort.

When it comes to camera equipment, the age-old aphorism still applies: the best camera is the one that comes with you.

Most iPhone cameras these days compete with all but the top-of-the-line DSLRs and video devices and are great replacements. You can easily record videos of yourself, your office, events, and customers giving on-the-fly testimonials when your sales and account teams visit.

And when it comes to actors, don’t worry that you can’t afford Gal Gadot: you don’t need her. Your employees will do a far better job because they actually know your products, your customers, and the details of your industry. After the initial awkwardness of seeing yourself on camera has faded, you have all the actors you need.

And finally, not everything has to be written in scripts. The writers are great and preparation has its place, but a lot of great content can be created with little or no forethought. Take, for example, the entrepreneur and internet personality Gary Vaynerchuk. He built a media empire from selfie videos recorded on his cell phone. The video below, giving advice to young entrepreneurs, might be what the internet would call “potato quality,” but it still gets the point across.

If you feel like you don’t know where to start, HubSpot’s video marketing course can serve as a guide to your help.

3. Our industry doesn’t really use video.

Hopefully what most brands mean by this is, “Our industry doesn’t use video yet“Video is industry-independent and demand is not driven by companies, but by the people who work in them. Remember that both B2B and B2C are really just B2H (business-to-human) and people love video. Just a need look at the numbers as a reminder:

Real estate

where agencies suddenly take everything from drone flyovers to passages in virtual reality. To see similar oversized wins ask yourself:

“What would the people who make up our customer base, business or otherwise, like to see?”

4. Video is difficult to follow.

Videos can indeed be difficult to follow, but only if you are using a video-only hosting platform like YouTube or your website’s video functionality. These platforms only show you the total number of video views. This is equivalent to measuring the success of your website based on visits only.

What if 95 percent of the viewers of your video dropped out in the first three seconds? You would never know. A true video enablement platform, on the other hand, can give you insights into how people are viewing your videos, who they are, what they liked and didn’t, and what they did afterward.

You see, video has some unique properties that make it very trackable. Because it’s linear and people watch it end to end, video enablement platforms like TwentyThree and Wistia can tell you which parts viewers saw, where they skipped, and where they revisited. From this, you can automatically infer a person’s interest in certain products or value propositions that were displayed in the video.

With the integration of CRM and marketing systems, you don’t have to spend all of your time on these analyzes. You can trigger actions based on how your viewers saw the video. Did you only complete 25 percent of it? Better send them another video. Has another observer repeatedly seen the part in which the product is shown anew? Better to ping your sales team as you may have a skilled head start.

5. Video doesn’t have enough uses.

Of all the excuses, this one makes our editor cough without exception and spit out her coffee in surprise. Video is possibly the most dynamic and useful type of content you have: it increases email open rates, increases landing page click rates, encourages social media sharing, increases time on pages for websites, and leads to more leads than Text alone. And with a great video editing platform, you can optimize a video for all channels.

A good video editing platform gives small and medium-sized businesses the tools they need to easily cut, edit, and optimize a video into many formats for many channels. This is easy to scale as users can easily A / B test videos such as email and render dynamic content to personalize videos for viewers, e.g. B. inserting logos, names or even exchanging different products. With the right tools, video has more uses than you know how to do.

Video is easier than you think.

Once you realize that scriptless, low-production videos are both desirable and trackable, you’ll also find that they’re useful for more than just marketing and sales.

You can use videos in your customer support to demonstrate how to use your product, in your internal communications, to update your remote teams, and to allow employees in your company to communicate on a daily basis.

So if you know that videos aren’t nearly as expensive, difficult, or untraceable as you thought before, are you ready to stop moving them?

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2017 and has been updated for completeness.