Before diving in, it’s worthwhile to look back at how our internet society turned into a video juggernaut.

15 years ago, YouTube launched their platform that gave access to video for billions of people around the world. And today, 400 hours of video are uploaded to their platform every single second. This transformed the way we not only produce video ourselves, but consume video on the internet. Video went from production on television to accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a camera. YouTube turned video into a social experience, engaging and commenting with videos that previously limited to a small circle of people.

After YouTube, Netflix, where there are 140 million hours of videos streamed every single day, launched their streaming service. This shifted much of our entertainment to be video, instantly streamed on the internet, shifting behaviors from centuries of text based communication and television experiences. And while broadcast has been around for much of the 20th century, these two platforms can paint the clearest picture for how video has been engraved into our behavior.

Based on these numbers, it’s logical to make this statement about the state of video: it has changed our behavior. With 79% of people saying a brand video has convinced them to purchase a software or download an app, it’s even more apparent that marketers need to not only prepare, but optimize for this shift in behavior.

How can marketers do that, though? That’s what we’ll cover in this blog post, breaking down exactly where marketing is falling behind when it comes to video and where there is an opportunity with video to get results.

The Emerging Field of Video Marketing

The merging of video and marketing has been a slow and arduous process for many brands. While video is, in fact, everywhere, it still lacks to qualities of other marketing disciplines. Unlike SEO, social, websites, and email, video has yet to catch up to best practices. It’s often not run across the funnel and typically relegated to uploading and waiting to see what happens. This discrepancy with video is why the term video marketing is still just video for many brands.

So, how can marketers take the term video marketing and elevate it to the same level as other marketing mediums? It’s about being more video centric and focused on how we can create video organizations within our teams, where video is part of the workflows and every day life of business. It’s about running video across the funnel, where it’s optimized to attract, engage, and convert the audience that is interested in the value you are providing. And it’s about integrating video data into the tools that matter. By doing this, it sets the stage for reinventing your marketing to be more video centric in every aspect.

Reinventing Marketing to be Video Centric

For years on the internet, marketers have been using advertising, content, social media, and other channels to bring people to their websites. But as video emerged on platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the shift quickly moved from text to visual. jeffbullas.com found that videos on social receive 12x the number of shares than text and images combined. Based on this evidence, it’s been a mad dash to start using video at the top of the funnel. But it’s important to note that marketing goes well beyond posting a video on social and hoping it goes viral.

There are also certain steps that marketers can take to be more data-driven with their video, producing real business results that are quantifiable. We found in our State of Video Marketing report that only 21% of companies have their video data integrated into their marketing automation or CRM systems. Without this, marketers are left with vanity metrics to measure and run video. By measuring engagement and conversions from video inside of a HubSpot, Marketo, or Salesforce (and others), it allows companies to lead score and attribute video across the buyer’s journey.

Additionally, this data can help to analyze which topics and speakers are performing at the highest level; whether it’s a product video, webinar, brand awareness or any other marketing campaign that uses video.

By integrating video data, it also pushes organizations to run video across the funnel, where social is used to attract attention and a website is optimized with video to engage and convert. This is where video needs to be brought to best-practices, run the same as any landing page, blog, or website feature. The ultimate goal of every marketer is to find the right audience where expertise and solutions are needed.

Marketers need to reinvent how they run video to find that opportunity and match best-practices.