Storytelling in 2024: New Trends in Video Marketing

1. Expanded Audience Reach

Video content is easier to consume and share. In addition, there are many more platforms for displaying video content than text. In addition, video content allows businesses to more easily attract a younger audience (Gen Z) and allows for global reach thanks to video popularity across the globe. For example, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are just a few of the numerous platforms where people watch videos. So, having video content in your marketing is always a great idea to expand your audience. 

2. Increased Engagement

Text content has always been a way to describe your products and services. However, if you create video content like how-to guides, you will be able to grow engagement. The reason for that is that videos represent a rich medium, meaning they offer features like personalization, animation, colors, music, background effects, etc. Keeping the audience's attention and engaging them for longer increases retention and foster connections with customers.

3. Development of Compelling Marketing Strategy

Video marketing doesn't always have to mean ads. However, it can be an excellent way to provide valuable content that brings a more engaged and ready-to-buy audience.

This is particularly useful for educational content since EdTech businesses sometimes have issues with providing unique, personalized, and engaging content that attracts the audience. 

Video marketing helps such companies stand out from competitors by making educational content easy to consume and share - so viewers can grow your customer base at no cost to you.

4. Closer Audience Acquaintance with Products and Services

You can create video content like explainer videos that help your customers get to know your products and services easier. Have you ever heard of a tactic that is extremely popular among Chinese brands? If not, they create videos where they show the problem and then show how their product can solve it. 

Such videos easily go viral and allow brands to easily grow their customer thanks to their shareability. The same happens with explainer videos - showing your products and services attracts more attention than if you just write about them.

Start with Your Business Goals

As might be expected, the first step in developing a compelling digital marketing strategy will be outlining your video's goals. In an ideal scenario, you will be creating different types of videos for every stage of the regular marketing funnel. 

But you should first define which stage is the key target for you depending on your business specific and the goals you set:

• Awareness: The first stage is where the viewer may realize they have a problem. Videos designed for the awareness stage should first attract users and keep them for longer without diving too deep into the product, its benefits, and how it can solve your customer’s problems.
• Consideration: At this stage, the viewer may already consider how they might solve their problem. Here, you can start to showcase how exactly your product or service could assist in solving it. Users at the consideration stage may ask questions, explore the website and product reviews, and compare different solutions.
• Decision: This is the last stage where internet users watching your videos are usually ready for a decision - buying something as the end goal. Here, you should present your product or service testimonials and successful use cases and explain in detail why they should choose your product over competitors.

To sum it up, creating videos for each stage allows you to guide viewers smoothly through their decision-making process. Even if half of the viewers will leave your website after the first or second video, you still foster brand awareness that could influence them in the future when they are not satisfied with another brand.

Identify Your Target Audience

Knowing the stage your funnel will be targeting allows you to better understand your target audience. This is an essential step. One thing to mention here is that your potential customers engaged by video content may differ from the ones who read your articles. In addition, videos require high personalization to be effective, so keeping your specific audience in mind makes it easier for you to gain the results you need.

Once you identify who to target, it will be time to develop a buyer persona. Creating a buyer persona (or a few of them) should be done at the stage when the company creates a product or service. 

Define Your Story

Defining what story you are going to tell your customers with your video content plays a crucial role in how the viewer will perceive your content and your business. The first step in that process will be outlining these four elements that form the framework for the video content story:

• Protagonist with a goal – This character should fit your target demographic;
• Conflict – Highlight target audience pain points;
• Quest – The moment you introduce your services and products to customers;
• Resolution – Show how your product or service could solve the target audience's problem.

Combining these four elements allows your videos to tell a story, so make sure they also align with your business mission and values.

Here, we also recommend answering the following questions:

• What emotions should your video content cause?
• What actions do you want your videos to provoke? 
• Irrespective of the emotion and impact you want to cause with your videos, ensure every element of video content aligns with the brand. These include colors, dialect, language, tone of voice, etc.

Set Aside a Realistic Budget

Not every marketer likes the idea of keeping up with a tight budget. While it is best to have enough for video content production, you can leverage the power of AI as a new marketing tool and a cost-effective solution for tight marketing budgets.

At this stage, you would want to plan out things that your in-house team is capable of and the things you may want to outsource. Create a list of AI tools you may use for your video editing and distribution, some of the most popular ones being Rask AI and Visla.

Benefit from AI Technology

As we mentioned earlier, AI tools are an excellent choice when it comes to reducing unnecessary expenses. 

For example, Rask AI allows you to generate Shorts: take one video, identify the most engaging moments, and automatically create a perfect vertical video for your social media channels.

On the other hand, Visla can take text content and turn it into a video. Choose a tool you may want to use depending on the features you need so you can embrace the power of AI-powered video marketing.

Some AI tools can also use machine learning (ML) algorithms to automatically analyze large volumes of video data, allowing you to gain vital insights and extract key video marketing trends and buying patterns of your customers.

1. TikTok & The Endless Loop

According to Statista's recent report, the United States is the country with the largest TikTok audience, with more than 143 million users engaging with that social media channel. The reason for TikTok being so popular today is its short-form videos. Considering the reduction in modern viewers' attention span, short-form videos seem to be more effective and engaging compared to long-form content.

TikTok also acts as a free source of traffic for businesses since it guides social media users directly to your website. While short-form videos like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are still popular and will gain even more popularity in 2024, we also see a new marketing trend known as the endless loop video. It is a video that repeats constantly until the viewer swipes to the new video within the platform.

Previously, videos on TikTok had a beginning and an end. But endless loops allow viewers to seamlessly transition between the end and the beginning of the video, so they don't understand where the start and finish are. This helps companies to significantly improve and clock up views.

2. Raw Video & Video Bloopers 

We live in a world where authenticity and truth play an essential role in how customers interact with the brand, and raw videos and bloopers are two of the most popular video marketing trends. 

Modern people have a fascination with people doing real things like DIY and handicrafts. The desire to see a more realistic picture and the hidden side of a business is something that will drive engagement in 2024. 

For example, people love watching bloopers from movies they like. The same happens with behind-the-scenes videos people watch to explore how the movie was filmed or to get to know the actors more closely. 

So allowing viewers to peek behind the curtain and access the outtakes, bloopers, and extra footage that wasn't published before means building a stronger connection with them. 

3. User-Generated Video Content

User-generated videos have been here for some time, but it is now one of the leading video marketing trends. The reason for that is that it is effective in attracting users and keeping them engaged for longer. According to the source, user-generated videos are 35% more memorable than content developed by professional creators. In addition, 79% of people participating in the questionnaire reported that user-generated content (UGC) highly influences their purchasing decisions.

Since user-generated video content better converts users into customers, adding it to your video marketing strategy would be an excellent opportunity for your business. This content seems to be particularly beneficial for industries where decisions are highly influenced by user opinions. These domains are travel, beauty, and health.

4. Shoppable Videos

Shoppable videos are also on the list of video marketing trends. They usually feature retail products with the help of embedded links within the video. Therefore, these videos allow users to click on the links while watching videos, so they can be redirected to the items they are interested in without searching for them after watching the video.

This video type allows businesses to improve conversion rates and increase sales, because. potential customers don’t have to leave the video. 

Considering the need for a fast and pleasant user experience, shoppable video content reduces confusion and the number of steps viewers need to take to become customers - which always works in the favor of the business.

5. Virtual Events 

Virtual events are one of the biggest video marketing trends. We all know that in-person events were not possible during the COVID-19 pandemic. And even though the pandemic is over and the situation on the market has stabilized, digital events have gained such massive popularity that they are here to stay.

As per the statistics, in 2023, 50.3% of events were in-person, and 43% were virtual. Since digital events take less effort, time, and resources for production, they are growing in popularity and are projected to stay here for a few more years.

For example, you can start creating webinars where your CEO or other employees will share insights from within the industry, discuss popular trends in the domain, or share expertise through live events and educational videos. Running webinars at least once a month allows you to grow brand awareness and create a community, which most companies seek in today's competitive market.

6. Video Accessibility 

Considering the impact of AI and ML on video production, the video industry now has minimal barriers to entry. The result? Video can be created by anyone and from any location, even without pricey equipment and an in-house team. 

Videos are no longer about high-level productions. Authenticity and accessibility are what modern viewers are looking for in video content they prefer to consume.

To be more specific, accessibility means making videos available and understandable for anyone who has visual, auditory, and cognitive disabilities. The end goal of video accessibility is to grant easy access to videos and allow different viewers to understand the information presented in a video.

Making video accessible involves different steps. For example, adding captions and subtitles allows hearing-impaired viewers to understand what the video is talking about. Adding voiceovers in different languages allows viewers from different countries to get to know your brand. 

You can also consider providing controls for viewers so they can adjust the volume and speed and modify other settings of the videos on your platform.

7. SEO for Videos

Finally, the last video marketing trend that will play a crucial role in the video marketing world in 2024 is search engine optimization (SEO). 

We tend to use SEO for text content, but researchers have found that search-optimized videos (even social media videos) are incredibly beneficial for the ROI. 

Video marketers should be familiar with solid video SEO practices employed in YouTube videos in recent years. Similar optimization can also be done with social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

You can optimize video descriptions, and relevant tags or even insert keywords into captions so that your videos appear in the top search engine results. It seems that reaching the first page of search engines like Google with videos is easier than with text, so chances for your videos to go viral are pretty high.