What all content marketers should know about the future of online video

By Jennifer Bergen

As a company with our ear to the online-video ground, we can say with conviction that video will have a huge impact on one thing this year: Content Marketing. In a blog post recently published by The Guardian on its Small Business Network, author Chris Trimble speaks to content marketers about why online video is the future of marketing, and why small businesses that don’t integrate it in their marketing strategies are jeopardizing their success.

According to the story, a Cisco study says 69 percent of all consumer Internet traffic will come from video within the next three years, and video-on-demand traffic will nearly triple what it is now. With all of this traffic coming from online video, it’s imperative that companies – both small and large – take advantage of the medium. According to a Nielsen report, 64 percent of marketers believe video content will dominate their strategies going forward. That leaves 36 percent of marketers behind in the dust.

As Trimble points out in The Gaurdian article, Volkswagen’s recent campaign – three videos that received a total of 155 million views – is a great example of online video’s success. However, we can only imagine what those numbers would look like had Volkswagen made its videos interactive. Success in a video ad campaign is not just about how many times a video was viewed, it’s also about how long the consumer viewed it and if they followed through with any calls to action after watching.

According to the recent Forrester Report, “Move Beyond Awareness with Interactive Video,” consumers can spend up to 10 minutes interacting with video content, which is a great return on investment considering the average completion rate for linear video advertising typically falls between 50 percent and 85 percent. We’ve seen completion rates of 90 percent and above with repeated views for the same Rapt Media-powered video.

And you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to bring video into your content marketing strategy. As Trimble points out, “production costs have fallen significantly in recent years and you no longer need to be a technical whiz to work out how to use it .” Interactive Video is no different. Rapt Media’s easy-to-use, drag-and-drop platform is simple enough for anyone to work with. We even made an Interactive Video in just 72 hours to prove that it can be done with a small team and scaled up for larger budgets. Add shoppable videos like the ones created by Kara Ross NY, or branching videos that are able to house large amounts of content in one frame while also highlighting calls-to-action, like the interactive landing page created by Gaiam TV, and the resources available to all content creators are now unprecedented.

Trimble also rightly points out in his post that online video content marketing should not neglect mobile. According to Ooyala, one out of ten videos are played on mobile devices, and mobile is continuing to pick up steam. At the end of June 2013, mobile phones held 41 percent more share of video consumption than it did at the beginning of the year.

We’ve seen how critical mobile is to online video. Thanks to our HTML5, flash-free technology, users can view videos on any device. In our Philips “Designed to Play” campaign, 65 percent of viewers watched the video on an iPhone or Android device with the average mobile interactive viewing time exceeding 4 minutes. This wasn’t just a one-time viewing either; the average viewer interacted with the video three to four times, returning to the video to play out different scenarios.

Not only is Interactive Video beneficial for garnering longer viewing times and more engagement, according to The Guardian article, Axonn Research found that seven out of 10 people view brands more positively after viewing interesting video content from them.

As marketers increase their budgets for online video in the coming year, online video is clearly the future of content marketing. Implementing Rapt Media’s Interactive Video technology instead of creating a static video increases viewing time and user engagement, is easy to do on time and on budget, and enables viewers to watch the content on any mobile device for a user experience that’ll have your customers (old and new) talking, interacting, and ultimately buying.

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