According to a report released by Marketing Forecast, 2012 will be the year that online ad spending will surpass traditional print advertising. Online ad spending includes search, social media, and banner ads, which are all important and effective marketing mediums. But don’t forget about the fastest growing medium of them all – video.
Before I get into the benefits, let’s look at some relevant reports on video marketing:
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- According to YouTube’s Press Statistics, over 800 million unique users visit YouTube and watch over 4 billion hours of video each month
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- According to socialtimes.com, in the third quarter of 2011, online video ad growth surpassed online video view growth and online revenues were set to triple by the end of 2011
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- More video was uploaded to YouTube in the past month than the three big TV networks produced in the past 60 years
Oh yeah, and don’t forget YouTube is the web’s second largest search engine. The first? Well Google, obviously. And Google loves video. More and more searches are producing video results on page one, which is where you want your site to be. Now that Google counts video as part of its “relevance” metrics, in addition to driving traffic to a website, video has become an important element of SEO.
What was once seen as an expensive “nice to have” is fast becoming a key element in any marketing campaign. Videos can be about events, like InfoTrust’s Washington Park Ribbon Cutting event, about a new product, such as our video below for taginspector.com, or anything in between.
Last but not least, creating a video shouldn’t require a 10-man production team and Quentin Tarantino in the director’s seat. Most smart phones have HD filming capabilities, and there are a lot of great free tools out there for video editing, such as Windows Movie Maker and iMovie for Mac. If you’d like something similar to the Tag Inspector video above, try Screencast-O-Matic, a free software tool that allows you to record videos of your computer screen, perfect for showing off a website or a new tool.
So to recap, if people love videos, Google loves videos, and they aren’t all that difficult or expensive to create, why wouldn’t video be at the top of your marketing list in 2012?
