With predictions that video will account for 80% of all internet traffic by 2019, it is not surprising that marketers are moving away from traditional display ads and investing in a stronger video offering that offers much more engaging and captivating experiences for brands. But how can marketers ensure such investment is directed in a way that enables them to prepare to profit from this growth?

17,000 hours of video marketing content is expected to be published every second by 2021. In such a crowded market, content developers will have to work hard to stand out from the crowd, delivering engaging and creative content as audiences’ expectations become even more sophisticated.  Audience apathy is an ongoing concern, with Havas’ ‘2017 Meaningful Brands’ study showing that 60% of consumers see content created by brands as clutter that has little impact on their lives. This means that the industry needs to adapt to understand the importance of optimizing ad placements and maximizing the relevancy of the message to the viewer. In order to grow audience figures and ensure video ads are having the greatest impact, marketers need to scrutinize the granular data behind each video to understand exactly how to execute ads successfully.

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Meaningful Content to Drive Video Marketing

In order to achieve this, it is vital that marketers are educated on exactly how to strategically grow and scale a successful video marketing department. The first step is to move away from the traditional 30-second video ads repurposed from television campaigns and towards more meaningful and impactful branded content – something which now means that the content is synonymous with the brand while also being something people organically engage with through authenticity and relevance – that responds to what and where audiences want to watch. As more social platforms offer increasing choice and availability of advertising space, gaining an insight into what kind of video content is resonating on which platform will provide the data to enable video marketing teams to be confident in their decisions and free up more time to innovate and deliver more value to their clients. Understanding where and how your target audience is watching content has become as vital as to successful marketing as the quality of the content that is produced.

Once there is a video-rich content model in place which responds to the in-depth knowledge of the audience and platform behavior, the next step is to distinguish where the department’s operating models are currently failing to deliver. Technology is a crucial element in enabling marketers to bring content to the consumer but it is only a part of the solution as it is the optimization of content and spend to produce maximized results that count. In short, marketing departments need to master the business operating model alongside everything else. This means they need to develop the ability to efficiently collect and analyze all the data available to them, foster cross-functional collaboration, and support test-and-learn agility if they want to drive revenue growth via video advertising.

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AI-driven Video Marketing Campaigns

Simply put, marketers need to implement technologies that have the ability to amplify the impact of their knowledge on audience and content behavior. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has already begun to transform the industry and how it performs by being integrated into data analytics. When integrated into video intelligence platforms, AI has the ability to do all the menial data collection work, a task that would take marketers years to complete, and process it all into a comprehensive report that analyses consumer behavior to provide new insights into video optimizations. This allows the marketing team a greater ability to strategize on targeting, forecasting and performance.

With reports that over half of marketers are already utilizing AI and a further 27% expected to have incorporated the technology by 2019, it is clear that there is huge potential for AI to truly revolutionize the marketing industry. With marketers gathering insurmountable consumer data using AI, machine and deep learning will continue to develop and grow to become increasingly important to data-driven decision-making. This, in turn, will put marketers back on the front foot and able to efficiently plan and use video platforms to execute campaigns by providing detailed insights before a video even goes live. In essence, the more people using AI to collect data on video advertising, the better the tools become at providing accurate analysis.

Machine Learning to drive Video Intelligence Platforms

Video intelligence platforms which utilize machine learning will be integral to the future success of video marketing. AI provides an opportunity for human resources within a marketing department to be used more strategically while actually producing accurate and concise metrics and insights which would not have been obtainable otherwise. It is through gaining a detailed understanding of where an audience is watching and why that video marketing has the potential to thrive and continue to be an impactful tactic for business growth.

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