Jeremy Goldman argues video will become the default content format. His firm's study found marketers see positive ROI from video, but rising adoption means more clutter. He recommends investing in recurring branded video, experimenting with formats like testimonials, and promoting daily to stand out.
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Hi, I'm Jeremy Goldman, founder and CEO of FireBrand Group. I was talking about the future of content marketing and how video plays a huge part in that. So it's actually pretty huge. Video is going to be essentially the default type of content that we're going to be consuming over the next few years. So we actually studied that over the last few months because we're essentially a future proofing firm, and we help companies determine what are the best ways to protect themselves against marketing and communications challenges of the next few years. So video is something that people are generally not ready for. They see themselves as being generally lucky because, oh, we can get a few blog posts out there or we can do some Facebook lives. But for the most part, what we found in our study is that people don't have the resources to create quality content on an ongoing basis. And another challenge that we were talking about today is the fact that you have a boss who shows you some content that one of your competitors put together and says, hey, we need to do something just like this. We need a Snapchat campaign that looks exactly like our competitors. And you know, you can't do that because it's lowest common denominator formats. If you're copying what somebody else is doing, even if you do it 10% better, the audience has seen it already. So it's important to do something unexpected. So generally speaking, what I tell people is that you need to do something to liven it up as much as possible. Hold on. Sorry, one second. So you have to do something and there's actually nothing in here. Right. But the important thing is that this is a talking head video and hopefully you get something out of it. But if you see my new little friend Albert here, I have a prop. I'm trying to find some interesting way make something more engaging than usual. And brands often fall down on that one particular element. So another thing that we talked about and I think is a really important takeaway is that you have to invest in the right amount of time to get video right within your organization and to figure out what's going to work necessarily for you. Okay? You have to find a way to do something that feels just true to your brand, but at the same time breaks through the clutter and the fact that what we found is 84.9% of marketers had seen a positive ROI from their video marketing efforts. So I ask everybody, is that a good thing or a bad thing for you going into next year? And everybody said, it's good, and I said, it's not. Because now that everybody knows that there's ROI to be had there, it's harder and harder to break through the clutter because everybody's going to create content, a lot of it will be crap and you wind up kind of lumped in with everybody else. So the trick is to find unique ways to do things that other people aren't doing and also to play around with formats. Some formats, such as testimonials, are going to work for some brands. Some creating aftercare videos, like customer service videos, is going to be the best way to succeed. So you really have to try a few different formats. And irrespective of whatever formats you try, it's also incredibly important to figure out how you're going to promote those videos. Because we've seen all too often a company figures out that they are going to create something really great that's very on brand, that has a compelling reason for being, and yet they fall down on the concept of promoting that video. We see that right now video marketers are, I believe it's about 6 or 7% of them are promoting their videos every day. And to be successful within a year, we expect that daily number to be about 30%, about four times. Many more video marketers are going to be having to promote their videos every single day. So ultimately, I think that essentially invest in video. Look at the case studies that are out there. There are some great ones. We talked about VAT 19 and E commerce retail. We talked about Refinery 29 as a great case study. And we actually talked about HubSpot. Nobody paid me to put that in my deck, but I think that HubSpot does a lot of great things as inspiration for B2B marketers out there. So Albert and I thank you for being part of our audience today.
