This is the time of year when content creators mull over the year’s “trends” and opine about what we should be doing during the coming year. I’m not going to do that, but I will share a few “trends” noted by others that I think could be video trends of interest to technology solution providers.
Get more out of the videos you’ve already made
This my favorite, from a Vidyard blog post titled “Three exciting B2B video trends for 2019.” While the idea of re-purposing content doesn’t sound 100% exciting or trendy, it’s a really good idea with plenty of potential for innovation. Everyone should do it (in which case, it would be a trend).
There are lots of ways to re-use a video: edit it, send a personalized link to it, make it interactive, and so forth. Author Jesse Ariss suggests getting started with a technique that’s amazingly simple: update the thumbnail! An attractive and informative thumbnail makes a video easier for sales teams to share. This is especially apt for YouTube webinars, many of which seem to be billboarded with a random screen grab from the middle of a demo. Thumbnails (or poster frames) are really important. For videos shared via social media, the thumbnail is the only chance you get to stop the viewer from scrolling past your video.
6-Second Video Ads
This is trend #6 out of 10 trends noted by Shutterstock. It’s declared a trend on the strength of research suggesting that 61% of six-second ads lift brand awareness.
While snackable content is a proven tactic in the competition for attention, six-second storytelling may be too heavy a lift for most technology products (as opposed to brands). There are no B2B spots on this list of the best six-second ads from HubSpot. But how about crafting six-second stories around specific competitive advantages? Or product features? (If you can’t make those work, you’ll be interested in Shutterstock’s #7 trend: “Brands Exploring Longform Content” like product walkthroughs and unboxing videos.)
Using Video to Scale Corporate Training
Panopto’s Top 5 Corporate Video Trends coalesce around the value of leveraging internal resources such as the expertise of subject matter experts. Fully capitalizing on these “trends” takes a dedicated video content management platform (like Panopto’s).
Panopto calls their approach an “Enterprise YouTube” for corporate video management. While it may not be a trend that’s gathering momentum with technology solution marketers, the general idea is certainly worth thinking about.
A searchable, customizable library of on-demand video assets that takes full advantage of all the creativity you can muster from internal resources and external partners could provide an invaluable knowledge-sharing resource to your customers and sales team, and a productivity boost for your bottom line. A recent workplace productivity study by Panopto and YouGov actually put a dollar value on the cost of inefficient knowledge sharing: $12M annually for a company with over 5,000 employees.
From marketing, advertising and sales to corporate training, video will continue to grow as an important tool in 2019.
