The future of content marketing is video.

2016 is the year of content marketing. Although telling good stories has long been a key factor in a company’s success, it is only in the last 10 months that every marketing manager has really realized that good content and influencers are important. At the moment, however, there is a one-sided focus on written articles. In the future, at least in my estimation, the same content will have different aggregate states and these will predominantly consist of video.

(Reading time: 3 minutes)

Video will win

I think the next big trend in content marketing will be video. This is nothing new for the professionals among you. But it is for the broad mass of marketers. Here are three reasons why:

Video is the most intuitive approach for the vast majority of people

You can observe this even with small children: Almost everyone is magically attracted to moving images. Sometimes we can’t look away when a TV or screen is playing somewhere in the background. In addition, it is usually easier to grasp more complex issues with a video explanation than with text. Of course, there are people who can read text quickly and well. However, my experience shows that this is much easier with videos.

Social media puts SEO into perspective

Text-based content marketing has the great advantage that these articles are usually (or can be) indexed very well by search engines. For a long time, this was extremely important and crucial in order to be found. That’s why I’ve always been a friend of websites that really have a lot of content. And I have had good experiences with this. Even if such an approach is expensive and time-consuming in every respect.

Today, however, the importance of SEO has decreased for many – not all, mind you – companies. More and more companies are trying to build a community in marketing and are finding the right tools, platforms and spaces in social media. On the other hand, the shift in advertising budgets from offline to online means that there is much more budget available than, say, 8 years ago. And this money is being invested in AdWords without much thought. AdWords is a rather economical shortcut to SEO in comparison.

Content is therefore more “socially indexed” and it’s all about who gets the user’s attention faster. Simple question: Is this a teased video or an externally linked article? You can give yourself the answer from your own experience.

Video is easy today

The third reason is even simpler: producing reasonably good video content has become easy and cheap. Plus there are now many good and inexpensive service providers who can make good videos. First of all, I’m talking about the craft. In other words, the recording and post-production of video material. Nobody can take the core, the good story, off your hands.

Not a glossy video – but an authentic everyday production

What I often notice when talking to traditional marketing managers is that they still see video as a kind of commercial. And equate it with lavish budgets, filming locations in Florence and Miami and the big screen. And expect endlessly long production times.

I don’t think the time of elaborately produced corporate videos is over. They are just not suitable for storytelling. They are too expensive, require too much effort and are generally not authentic enough.

A unique opportunity

At the beginning of the year, when I was thinking about how I could do this storytelling in the companies I work for in the future, there was a moment of, shall we say, awakening. It was the moment when I realized that no one in Europe was actually doing storytelling with videos at a high cadence (2-4 times a week). If text content marketing is the big pond where you can only be a relatively small fish, video content marketing is the small pond and anyone who does it seriously is almost automatically a big fish. I think there is a unique opportunity at the moment to exploit this potential.

Content marketing is a marathon; casual, simple production is key

Now, I don’t consciously do content marketing on this blog. It happened to me and I still write every day because I find topics interesting and important and not because I need to achieve any conversions or goals. However, I have of course learned just how powerful this tool is.

That’s why I’ve started to get to grips with videos over the last few months. The first surprise was how cheap decent equipment is. With 2-4k EUR you are very well off.

The real challenge for me is not to spend more time on the videos than on blog posts. The great thing about writing is that it can actually take place anytime and anywhere. It’s not that easy with video. But I think I’ve already found ways to get into a similar region to blog posts in terms of time spent. But I’m still working on it. The hard part is finding a good balance between craftsmanship and effort.

It’s a bit of a shame that many people can’t really tell the difference between well-made videos and very well-made videos. At least that’s my experience. I think a well-made video is always enough.

Video learning curve

That’s why I’ll be doing more and more storytelling with moving images in the future. Primarily for Accounto, of course, where I, our team and above all our customers have a lot to tell. But I think it will be easy to do a lot more video on this blog once I’m there. So give me a little puppy protection with my first future video attempts. I’m learning every day and will be happy to pass this knowledge on. In one video.