What is video marketing like in 2024? I’ll tell you what doesn’t work: talking heads and three-minute-long explainers. We’ve reached video fatigue. People’s attention spans have shrunk, and today’s viewers are too savvy for the same old song and dance. In order to command the attention of your audience, you’ll need to make compelling, action-packed, and artful videos that tell a story. A quality video does more than get your message across—it generates more emotional involvement than static articles, tweets, and photos ever could. In short, video is the present and the future of our digital universe.
Businesses that effectively use videos to achieve their marketing goals are poised to succeed. And now, striding into the year 2024, when we are surrounded by the demand for innovative technology and strategies, a business not only has to keep up with the times, but it also has to captivate its audiences with videos to achieve any real “stickiness” that will have long-lasting power in viewers’ memories. Let’s take a deep dive into the latest movements and strategies propelling video marketing in 2024.
Interactive video experiences take center stage in 2024. These experiences are captivating, holding the viewer’s attention in an era of mobile phone distractions and short attention spans. And I shouldn’t remind you that distracted consumers are the kind who likely also don’t follow through with a lot of online purchases.
The best part? You can create interactive videos with clickable hotspots, navigable quizzes, and even 360-degree footage that can be watched with a viewer’s own virtual reality (VR) headset. To me, the term “immersive” is too easily thrown around. But these experiences provide that, in the truest sense. And when viewers interact with your content, they obviously enjoy spending time with it.
Publications Creating Moments of Magic and Meaning
For some, the rise of augmented and virtual reality technologies might smack of mass distraction. But for most of us in this industry, they open up new and exciting possibilities for the kind of storytelling we want to do in advertising and marketing. After all, what could be more engaging and immersive than allowing people to interact with your brand in ways that blur the line between the physical and digital worlds?
The Age of Short-Form Content: Platforms are favoring content that can be consumed in brief quantities, drawing viewers in with tiny narratives that delight and surprise. Storytelling has long been the bedrock of brand-building, and storytelling is effective only if the audience is paying close enough attention for all the pieces to be seen and understood. None of the platforms where brands are reaching consumers during these five years seem inclined to reward undue length, but some have opened the door more widely to small stories, and that has brought some brands more and better visibility.
Livestreaming is a very valuable aspect of a video marketing strategy. It honestly offers a way to have real conversations and real connections with your audience. Our clients have used livestreaming to project launches, interactive events, and informal bursts of “insider” access, all of which are just fun and interesting. And making something fun and interesting is really what marketing is all about. Whether you’re doing a planned or unplanned live video event, it all comes down to these fun and interesting moments — and hopefully, leading your audience to a next step, should they so choose.
In 2024, the AI-aided personalization of video experiences comes to the fore, with brands able to deliver these experiences at volume. Using data and behavior analysis of viewers, algorithms are generating recommendations and variations in the content they’re suggesting. Anything from suggesting what you should watch next to a variation of an advertisement you’re seeing is being informed by a set of personalized signals that are designed to enhance your experience of and with the video content you’re consuming.
With the increase in mobile consumption, brands are now concentrating on the use of vertical videos instead of the standard landscape orientation. These visuals fit nicely and naturally into an engaging mobile space. Because our thumbs aren’t very flexible and our mobile screens are usually in a vertical position, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea of scrolling up and down to see what we want and need. It’s just how we interact with our digital devices. And if we’re spending 90 percent of our digital media time in mobile apps and on websites, well…that’s the way of the world, and brands need to accommodate this basic shift in media behavior.
Integrating user-generated content (UGC) is still one of the most effective ways for brands to build trust and foster authenticity with their audience. UGC is the type of content an average person can create. It is relatable and trustworthy. Even more so, it is the exact opposite of an ad, which can often come off as “phony” to its viewers. When UGC is integrated into video marketing strategies, brands are able to expand their organic reach, while also reinforcing the idea that their audience is part of a community.
The current intersection of e-commerce and video marketing is shoppable video experiences. Companies are taking their videos and turning them into virtual shopping environments. In these new video experiences, companies can embed links, place products in the realm, and even make the player part of the experience. These are just a few of the sophisticated methods that you can do with the new shoppable player. You can even see the cart of a video store and put stuff back or buy more.
In today’s socially conscious society, brands are increasingly focusing on communicating their sustainability and social responsibility efforts. They are doing this mainly through the medium of video, where they have a better chance of connecting with their audiences at an emotional level. Indeed, research has found that consumers tend to form deep, long-lasting connections with brands that they feel take environmental issues seriously and demonstrate a commitment to not just “doing good” but to also “being good.” When you consider the “why” behind these companies, they are they partnered with some very worthwhile causes and initiatives.
The key to a successful video marketing campaign is a plethora of insights derived from data. Using the various tools at their disposal, such as Google Analytics or paid social media listening tools, businesses carefully monitor essential metrics during a campaign: how many people are watching their videos, where those people are coming from, and how long they’re staying. Some businesses even go a step beyond that standard set of metrics to run A/B tests (also known as split tests), which let them see which versions of specific videos are resonating with different subsets of their audiences.
To sum up, the world of video marketing in 2024 is creative, interactive, and personalized. It is an experience that takes you to another place. It is a medium through which you can embrace your audience and make them a part of your messaging. It is a revolution that is still very much in progress but is already transforming not just the marketing industry but also the way we pay attention and interact with the world around us.
