Why would you invest time and money in ‘expensive’ videos? As if you don’t have anything better to focus on, right?
Listen up, videos aren’t just for big budget companies with large marketing teams. Videos are easily accessible for anyone, both to watch and to create. But that doesn’t answer the question as to why you should consider video as part of your daily or weekly focus. Today, I aim to show you why video is so important.
Why video is the best medium for learning?
Research has already shown that video, by nature, is the best medium for conveying both knowledge and messages. It is more engaging and has more impact than plain text. It activates more parts of our brain, by both visual and auditory incentives, it captures and retains our attention more easily. A monthly ad in your local newspaper, in the long run, is more expensive than investing in a good video campaign, simply because videos by nature are more effective in engaging someone.
Producing video is easy and has become a daily activity. (0) Each minute of the day over 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube alone. You’d need 66 years, without sleep, to watch all the content that is being uploaded in only a day.
Furthermore, every day, we watch 1 billion hours of video on YouTube. So it’s clear video has become a central part of our lives!
The value of video has been discovered by businesses as well. They use it for (1):
- Sales lead generation (39.3%);
- Employee training and education (38.1%);
- Management communications (34.9%);
- Online video slide presentations (31.1%);
- Web marketing (80.8%);
- Social media (69.2%);
Importance Of Video For Organizational Goals
Nowadays, schools are big manufacturers of video production. For example, the University of Essex produces 80.000 hours of video every year. The Arizona State University creates 3000 hours of video every week. Who dares to say that video has no impact? In a Kaltura report, the importance of video over several organizational goals was mapped and it gives the following information:
Customer Satisfaction
You must have noticed that so far, I’ve focussed on education rather than commercial businesses or non-profits. So I did. With good reason, too. The application of video in education has given marketeers great insights into what videos actually does with those that watch it.
Gartner Research conducted a research and highlighted the top 5 uses for video, they think have great added value compared to the lowest risk regarding cost effectiveness for an organisation.
- Vision and Mission onboarding videos;
- How-to videos for internal audiences;
- How-to videos for consumers;
- Customer case study video (how real customers use and value the product);
- How-to videos for software and applications.
Getting started
Now you might think: “Ok, I understand why video is important, but it’s so hard and expensive to create one, I wouldn’t even know where to start…” I hear you, but my advice would be: make it easy for yourself, it doesn’t have to be difficult at all. For example, we know about a pharmacist who explained something on camera and has sent the url to the departments of the hospital. This way, he didn’t have to visit all these departments personally, which saved a lot of time and money! So even creating a simple video can prove to be very useful!
Sources:
0 – https://www.youtube.com/about/press/
1 – Panopto: Seven Things Businesses Can Learn From Universtities about Video, page 5.
2 – Panopto: Engaging & Developing Millennial Employees with Video, page 6.
3 – Kaltura: The State of Video in the Enterprise – 2017, page 10.
4 – Gartner Research, Developing use cases for sharing video content in the enterprise
5 – Leslie Tedgui: Industry Insights, Human Capital Media 2014, page 1.
