3 Keys to Succeeding With Video Marketing During the Holidays

It’s no secret that the job of a marketer can get chaotic during the holidays. From discounts to revenue numbers to A/B testing, each marketer has set goals, creativity requirements, attention to detail, and a lot of coffee during the holiday season. 

As we’ve talked about, video is now a part of every marketing funnel; and a medium that’s being brought into the tech stack for proper measurement and management.

Video will play a larger role in marketing during the holidays more than ever in 2017, which gives marketers a unique opportunity to quickly tell their story to potential buyers. Forbes recapped last year's holiday spending worldwide by saying that  “the total expected holiday sales this year are actually expected to exceed $1 trillion.”  And of that $1 trillion, 64% of consumers have purchased a product online.

Video is the perfect medium for telling a story or selling a product in the shortest possible time frame - which is especially vital during the holiday season, when every company is making a push.  Even for B2B marketers, the holiday season can represent a lucrative time when other companies are planning their 2018 budget.

So, how can marketers succeed with video during the holidays? We’ll break down the 3 keys to video during the holidays.

Tell Your Story

While there has been a lot of debate around the ideal length of a marketing videos. But during the holidays it’s most important to simply tell your company's story. It’s a sentimental time and often consumers are a little more willing to listen if the message resonates with them on a different level. For example, the difference between the following two B2C holiday brand videos is 9 hours and 59 minutes:

Lagavulin Whisky

Samsung

While it’s unlikely that someone watched 10 hours of Nick Offerman sitting in a fire, the video generated PR, showed off creativity, and engaged their audience during the most important sales period. On the other hand, Samsung’s powerful ad was short and concise in their messaging during the holiday sales cycle.

Here are some ways that B2B companies connect with their audience during the holidays:

HubSpot - Black Friday vs. Cyber Monday 

While longer videos can create more engagement, it should be noted that 76% of “Americans are using mobile devices for their holiday shopping this year.” Which means that attention spans are decreased and must be captured quicker. That’s why it’s so important for marketers to find their audience, test, and double down on which message resonates the most effectively.

Find Your Holiday Channel

Each business is different when it comes to finding the most effective channel during the holidays. For a fashion brand during the holidays, it might be Instagram. For Amazon, it’s probably Facebook retargeting.

Here’s the benefits of each channel for using video in your next holiday campaign:

Own Website: Ultimately, marketers want their users on their own website. It’s where they can control the user experience and properly measure what video content is being consumed. Each and every email, social post, or outreach should have the goal of getting users back to a website where engagement and conversions are higher.

YouTube: Is a valuable channel for top of the funnel brand awareness, especially during the holidays when customers are searching for gifts, ideas, and inspiration at increased rates. It’s also important to note for brands on YouTube that “the most viewed brand videos are on average 31–60 seconds long (32% of all views).”

Social Media Channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn all present different advantages for marketers - typically dependant on the type of service being offered. Even visual sharing from the consumer side is increased during the holidays when video sharing is increased by 49% more during the holidays.

Email: In our State of Online Video 2017 report, we found that including an animated video or GIF in an email increases click-thru-rates by 63%. And email generated 25.1% of all holiday sales in 2015.

Properly Measure the Holiday Impact

After the madness of the holiday season has settled down, it’s incredibly important for marketing departments to measure the actual impact of each piece of video content. Did the video drive direct revenue? What was the reach? Was the engagement higher than other pieces of content? All these questions can be answered by setting up the proper technology to measure video content.

Revenue - A video marketing platform can integrate with a marketing automation system to setup attribution (and back dated attribution after a purchase) for each video that marketers have on their website. For example, if a marketing department has integrated their video into Marketo, they can set up campaigns to see exactly how effective a video was.

Engagement - Views and impressions are a nice to knows, but marketers should be focusing on how much of a video is resonating with an audience. Facebook counts a video view as 3 seconds or longer, which means that marketers don’t truly know if their content is working during the holidays. Detailed heat maps can be help improve insight into each and every video.

The holidays are a hectic time for many brands trying to drive revenue, and video is a big part of that. Telling a poignant story, finding the right channel, and properly measuring for the following year will amplify the impact even more.

Have questions on how TwenyThree’s video marketing platform can transform your video strategy? Request a trial or demo here.