My favorite video marketing advice for the New Year is this: “Video Will Account for 79% of Global Internet Traffic by 2020 (So Increase Your Video Marketing Budget NOW).” Cisco is the source of the percentage forecast. Tubular Insights (formerly ReelSEO) is the source of the conclusion inferred from it — and I hope marketing managers can convince their CFOs of its logic. As it happens, when I googled “B2B video marketing trends 2017” and a few similar terms, none of the results came up with predictions specific to video. I got articles about B2B content marketing, B2B digital marketing, B2B online marketing and the like. but no B2B video. Strange, because, an equally logical inference that could be drawn from Cisco’s “79% of traffic” forecast is that content in media other than video will be comparatively irrelevant. Just kidding. But, any way you look at it, video is getting to be a bigger deal online. Here are the B2B video marketing trends I’ll be watching in 2017.
More conversational. Less advertorial.
In mid-2016, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced “We see a world that is video-first, with video at the heart of all our apps and services.” The working out of this vision is quite obvious on Facebook’s apps and services like Facebook Live and Facebook Messenger. As this trend grows, people will increasing value video as a medium of conversation, not just entertainment and advertising. Marketers who want to capitalize on this trend should think how they can make video part of the sales conversation.
More formats
I highly recommend Key Digital Trends for 2017, a thoughtful and great-looking SlideShare from Social@Ogilvy. It has a lot to say (slides 45 to 56) about the “video first world.” (Unusually, it also deals with ethical concerns of marketing in this world.) Among the trends noted by Ogilvy is the proliferation of video formats. Especially relevant to marketers on a budget is the vertical format which will become increasingly relevant as more web videos are viewed inline on mobile devices
More app-like
Did you know you can make just about any marketing content — infographics, even white papers — interactive?
I’ve been encouraging marketers to upgrade the customer experience with video (and other media) with the kind of personalization that’s possible with by including interactive controls — clickable buttons, input fields, dropdowns — in the video itself.Keep an eye on these three trends. And here’s some good news: you can start to capitalize on any of them without the big budget boost recommended at the top of this post.
