By Grant Lingel Click here for original article
The future of marketing is content marketing, and the future of content marketing is video marketing.
Earlier this year YouTube celebrated its ten year anniversary, reminding the world just how much the web has changed in a decade. These days video isn’t just popular; it’s the most dominant form of web traffic. It’s even more popular than live TV, according to a 2014 survey by Adroit Digital.
Video marketing will continue to grow as well: according to Cisco by 2016 online video traffic will account for 55% of total consumer traffic on the internet. By 2017, that number will be 67%.
The growth of online video – as well as the declining costs of producing video content – has meant that marketers have been keen to take advantage. Anyone can upload a video to YouTube and potentially reach the billion users that visit the site every month. While plenty of blogs and article sites allow you to upload written content, few can offer the same numbers that sites like YouTube and Vimeo can.
And marketers are taking advantage as well. A report from Demand Metric shows that 70% of marketers are now using video as part of their marketing strategy, and 82% of them feel that those efforts have been successful.
Most marketers now have powerful enough laptops and smartphones to shoot a video themselves as well. A helpful ‘how to video’ can be shot on a smartphone, while a demo video showcasing your product can be made using screen-recording software (e.g. Camtasia or Camstudio). Both can then be polished up with video editing software such as Magix Movie Pro or Windows Movie Maker.
Better Sound Quality
As content (article) marketing grew in popularity, one of the negative side effects was the increase in low-quality articles and blog posts. These days, there is just so much content being produced that the only way to not only engage readers but get that content to rank in Google as well, is to produce extremely well-researched and high-quality content.
Similarly, as video content marketing grows in popularity, quality will be an essential strategy for companies that want to stand out from the noise. This doesn’t necessarily mean using a professional videographer: the pixel quality of an iPhone is enough to create a video that wins over the judges at Sundance. Instead, where most home-made videos fall down is sound quality.
According to webvideochefs.com people will forgive bad video more than they will forgive bad audio. A professionally recorded voiceover will be free of background noises and static, and will have that crystal clear quality that separates the professional from the amateur videos.
Better Storytelling
A video marketing strategy doesn’t mean creating videos that sound like late night infomercials. Most people don’t want to be advertised or sold to, and will quickly exit a video if they feel that’s what the maker’s intent is.
Storytelling is different, though. There’s something about stories that engage us, that piques our curiosity, and draws us in. It offers companies a chance to sell to potential customers, without ever overtly selling.
We all know that storytelling is essential to content marketing, but often what a good story needs is a good storyteller as well.
The Shawshank Redemption wouldn’t have been the same movie without Morgan Freeman’s narration. Some people are just blessed with a voice that can draw people in, entertain, and humor them.
Big brands know this. It’s why they spend so much money hiring celebrities to do the voiceovers for their adverts. They know that these adverts will not only have better engagement, but they’ll be better for the company’s branding as well.
If you have a story to tell, make sure that you have a narrator with a voice that can tell it. With so much content on the web, we’re all just looking for an excuse to close that video and go over to Buzzfeed, Facebook, or a more exciting video on Youtube. That’s why it’s important to have a narrator that engages viewers from the moment the video starts, until the moment you give them that all-important call to action at the end.
Better Marketing with Video Marketing
The world is a big place and it’s easy for people from one side of the world to assume that your product is not available in their part, based solely on the voice of the narrator.
For example, a video narrated by someone with a British accent may alienate customers in the United States or Canada, who might assume that the product is only available to customers in the United Kingdom. Using different audio tracks with voice actors from around the world means you can take the same video and effectively target it to people around the world.
As well as accents, translating the video transcript and using native speakers can help you to begin marketing your products to other parts of the world.
This is one of the simplest ways to push your product to people in a new country (or to test whether you should invest a bigger budget in doing so). All that’s required is a translation of your voiceover transcript, a new professionally-recorded audio track, and perhaps a small budget to advertise it within that country (for example using Google AdWords for Youtube).
Adding new audio to a video gives you an almost infinite list of possibilities for both better targeting and for split testing. For example, you could use older voice actors to target older demographics, and younger voice actors to target a younger crowd. Or, better still try out both of those voices on each of the two demographics and run a split test to see which works better. The same test can be done with male actors for male audiences and female actors for female audiences (and vice versa).
Or what about getting a child to record your transcript? This can not only be cute but very effective as well, particularly if you’re advertising a product that’s aimed at parents.
Cheaper Advertising
Online marketing is a data geek’s idea of heaven and for those that enjoy the idea of split testing adverts; it gets even better when you start experimenting with the targeting options of AdWords and Facebook.
But aside from data, the real reason to put an advertising budget behind your video content is the cost. AdWords and Bing Ads can both be prohibitively expensive for start-ups and small businesses, yet it’s still possible to get traffic from YouTube and other video networks for a couple of cents per click (or view).
The better the video, the better chance it also has of ranking in Google and taking up some valuable SERP real estate.
So, whether you’re creating a video for an advertising campaign, or trying to tell the story behind your brand, the quickest and most effective way to better viewer engagement is to put that transcript in the hands of a professional voice actor. Video marketing is the future of content marketing. If your goal is to engage viewers with fun, visual content that is easily shareable, it’s time to start thinking video.
To add the finishing touch to your marketing video, check out VoiceBunny’s vast selection of professional voice over artists from around the world.
This article was co-written by ArticleBunny
