Veed.me sent out a short qualitative survey to many of its past, current and potential clients in order to better understand the modern marketer’s mindset towards video content, video production and other related topics that are near and dear to our hearts.
Our goal is to become more sensitive, smart and savvy to the needs of modern marketers today, in order to improve our product offering and help make getting professional video even easier.
In the interest of transparency, we thought we’d share some of our high level observations and trends that we saw. Even though we saw companies across many industries and with marketing budgets as low as $8,000 annually to over $10,000,000 annually, we nonetheless saw some interesting commonalities across all of them. Here’s what we saw across around 50 responses:
Video represents a small but increasing portion of marketing budgets:
Most of our respondents currently spend quite a small percentage of their marketing budget on video, with most companies in the 5-10% range and just a few in higher ranges (20-30%). However, many said they are looking to increase their spend for video in the next year, echoing broader trends we’ve seen.
The biggest barrier to producing more video content is a lack of ROI:
Even though video is clearly eating the world, with over 75% of online traffic expected to be video by 2017, marketers today worry constantly about being able to prove the ROI behind their videos. There is a feeling that video can be “hit or miss,” and that it’s hard to find the right KPIs to measure against. Even if a company produces a “great video,” it needs to produce some tangible business results.
- “I would spend more if I saw more ROI for money spent. We always have much higher priorities for growth and engagement and a video can be hit and miss and cost too much to make.”
- “I would spend more on video if I could be convinced that it promotes our KPIs.”
Marketers are increasingly looking for ways to test video before committing budgets
Just as other forms of digital advertising are subject to intense testing and measurement, savvy digital marketers and growthhackers want to be able to do small “tests” on video before fully committing to larger budgets, or translating the video to multiple languages. Unfortunately, this is often incompatible today with the longer and more difficult cycle of production and payment in video vs. other advertising formats.
- “I would spend more if I test it and see it’s better than other ads (taking into account the internal & outsourced price of producing it).”
- Video needs to be easier to test before investing more $$$, and easier to scale and localize for multiple languages.”
Video is just one part of the holistic marketing operation
While marketers today see the increasing importance of video, they still view it as just one tool in their arsenal to deploy as necessary. Some business verticals lend themselves naturally to lots of video content, whereas in others it’s less appropriate.
- “It’s really need driven, and time/balancing all our other priorities. Video is just one of the formats we use for our content strategy and just one of the strategies we’re using to build our brand. We primarily use it for case studies/client stories.
- “I think that no video is better than a bad one and a good one can be too expensive. We use video when it’s the right choice for the goal we want to accomplish.”
Though we’re obviously huge believers in video here at Veed.me, and have seen firsthand how it can transform a business, it’s clear we (and the industry) as a whole can do a better job of showing the ROI and efficacy of video content. An increased focus on how video can increase engagement, conversion, and other “hard” KPIs instead of more “softer” goals like “brand awareness” are a definite to-do for us in the future.
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