So We’re two weeks into 2017 and the dust has just about settled after the holiday season. Now is the time to plan your marketing strategy for the year… no it isn’t. We should have done this last October. However, most small businesses are always behind with this kind of planning. After all we’re too busy making and selling and helping to keep up to date with all the planning we should do. Not to worry, let’s do our best to catch up. Let’s have a look together at video marketing trends for this year.
Why Follow The Trends?
The world changes and methods for keeping in touch with customers change. The way customers view companies changes. What’s more we need to be able to persuade with our marketing and that’s very tough if we look old fashioned. I don’t mean it’s bad to use content that looks old or vintage. I mean that advertising methods have to be current. Our customers are savvy. Advertising changes constantly to keep up with the consumer. We need to make sure we’re on point with our marketing videos to be successful.
“On Point”. That’s a modern phrase, and not one I’ve ever used before. See, I’m keeping up.
[bctt tweet=”The world changes and methods for keeping in touch with customers change.” username=”yellbusiness”]
The first of my trends for 2017 Is…
Animation
From the adverts we have all seen we know that marketing animations have always been a big thing. In my childhood we had the Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny, and the Texan chocolate bar adverts. For several years we’ve had white board animations and motion graphics, but there’s a new trend. It has become affordable to make enticing animations using motion graphic techniques. The problem with animation is that it is very expensive. Each frame has to be drawn or rendered either by hand or by computer to produce a moving image. Computer generated animations are still created by humans the computers just cut down on the time to create all the individual frames. That need for a lot of human time makes animation expensive. The thing is though that we (the people who make marketing videos) have spent years perfecting techniques for making motion graphics and text in a cost effective way. My competitors are starting to realise that you can use these techniques to do more than just move text. The fact that they’re catching up is bad for me but good for you.
The same digital techniques that your film maker uses to create motion graphic text like this…
Can also be used to make a video come alive like this.
These two adverts look nothing alike, yet the self same techniques are use to make the text move and to make the camera fly through a cartoon town and make a cartoon bird fly by. That’s why characterful animation is my first trend for 2017. The second of my trends is…
Live Streaming
You will have seen live streaming becoming ever more popular on your Facebook newsfeed. It’s also becoming incredibly popular on Youtube. The advantage with Facebook is that so many people have the app on their phones and they get a notification whenever a friend or a page they follow goes live. For your small or medium size business this is a boon. What live streaming represents for us all is an incredibly cheap way of making contact with video.
First you get the live event, which is interactive with people able to like, respond and message during the stream. Then there is the video which stays on your page afterwards. The possibilities are endless. You could have live demonstrations of products, or live “how to” performances. You can do this with your phone and a tripod and mount, or you can set up cameras and mix them through a laptop and produce a live TV show. Imagine that. You can produce a regular TV show and stream out to whoever wants to see it, and it costs nothing for the transmission.
In the coming weeks I’ll be writing a full blog on how you could benefit from live streaming. The big companies are already starting to catch on. It’s been a niche area for a while with gamer channels and live poker games and discussion groups but it is going mainstream this year… sorry about the pun… mainstream… sorry.
Video Banners
I’ve written abut video banners before and I won’t bore you by doing it again. Let me refer you to the previous article here. I will just restate though, that autoplay video banners should NOT use auto-play audio. They need to be silent unless the customer clicks on them. Auto-play videos with sound are really irritating and simple bad manners.
So there are my three marketing video trends for 2017. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and can I take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy new year and the best of luck.
