Get Ready for the Upcoming Video Marketing Boom

Many of you probably read that headline and scoffed. After all, nearly every marketer would agree that the video marketing boom is hardly “upcoming.”

Rather, it happened a while back and, as the most effective type of media for reaching younger audiencesOpens a new window , video marketing has since solidified its foothold at the top of the ‘must-have’ list of any major campaign.

Here’s the thing, though: Making videos is expensive and not easy if you don’t already know what you’re doing.

What happens if you put all your chips in the “video egg basket,” if you will, but end up creating (a) sub-par piece(s) of content?

Do some quick research online and you’ll see that cost estimates for an outsourced, professionally-produced, two-minute video can run anywhere from $1,500 to $20,000-plusOpens a new window , depending on the quality.

Sure, video marketing is squarely at the forefront of mainstream digital marketing. But it isn’t exactly a cost that most marketing budgets can cover, especially when lacking the relevant expertise or in-house resources to produce them.

In today’s marketing environment, where business decisions are driven by results and ROI, the last thing any marketer without video-producing experience wants to do is to get it wrong — especially for those of us that work for small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises that don’t have enormous amounts to spend on this type of marketing content.

All those caveats aside, let me clarify what I meant by “video marketing boom.”

Video creation made easy

It’s becoming increasingly easier and cheaper to create professionally-produced videos. Given the ever-growing popularity of video, this has long been coming.

Indeed, the sector has been demanding more tools that can help brands create video marketing material on a budget.

Although a myriad of companies offer free video editing softwareOpens a new window , many of these services often operate on a ‘freemium’ model, so ‘free’ in this case is ultimately relative.

Plus, just because these tools exist doesn’t mean they’re easy to use. They can require a substantial learning curve — especially for those of us with little-to-no video marketing experience.

No wonder, then, that there’s so much reluctance — particularly among marketers for SMEs and SMBs — to dip into video.

But that could all change, and soon.

Why marketers should care

SME and SMB marketers generally don’t have the resources, budget or, often, the bandwidth to create effective video marketing.

In its recently released 2020 SMB Video ReportOpens a new window , Vimeo found that just 22% of SMB marketers felt they were leveraging video effectively. The main obstacles? Time, cost and complexity of such projects.

Meanwhile, with the wide-ranging impacts of the Coronavirus epidemic, ad spend across the board at many larger outfits is getting slashed.

So, on the buyer side we can probably expect demand for budget video-making capabilities to keep rising.

On the service provider side…well, no doubt we’ll see more of these types of advanced services come to market as firms look to take a piece of the $135 billion video content creation market.

Vimeo, for instance, has just moved its Vimeo Create marketing platformOpens a new window out of beta.

The service offers marketers a wide range of AI-powered video-making and editing tools and functions that render the entire process more streamlined and straightforward, including the ability to have videos automatically tailored to the different social platforms.

All that for $20 a month.

Andrew Hutchinson writes for SocialMediaTodaOpens a new window  that “the new tool provides simple processes to create more standout video content, including graphic and text overlays, transitions, royalty-free music and more.”

On the investor side, investment in this space will continue. Australia’s Clipchamp, another growing video creation platform, just raised $9 million in funding.

According to Ameya DusaneOpens a new window , the company’s Create video editor helps content creators easily produce high-quality video “without relying on expensive equipment, complicated software or any previous video production experience.”

So, if you’ve wanted to delve into video but just couldn’t afford to or didn’t have the time or couldn’t sacrifice the necessary resources, 2020 might be the year for you.