Inbound Marketing Agency

Video marketing forms part of content marketing, but we think it deserves its own place in the spotlight – and for good reason.

In this time-poor, perma-connected world, people are consuming content in ever-decreasing snippets. Which makes video content and video advertising an ideal format for that 15-minute train commute, 20-minute lunch break or for when you’ve crashed out at home with a glass or two of pinot.

Now, we don’t buy into the oft-quoted stat that 65% of people are visual learners (people learn in all sorts of ways), but we do think people respond well to video content.

A Wyzowl study found that 68% of consumers prefer to learn about new products or services via a short video, whilst 62% of respondents to a HubSpot survey said they consumed video content thoroughly instead of just skimming it. No surprise, then, that by 2021 video will account for 82% of internet traffic.

Video content marketing is also becoming cheaper, easier and quicker to produce. No longer do you need expensive cameras, booms and mics. Your editing software doesn’t need an eye-watering annual license fee. Instead, you just need something to say and someone with the confidence to say it in front of the camera.

Of course, video marketing still takes time and skill. Which means it takes money. But by reallocating existing, poorly optimised and ineffective media spend into quality, shareable content that creates real value, less media spend is needed, as the content is shared among a receptive and engaged target audience, amplifying organic reach whilst building trust and brand loyalty.

Let’s use the power of metaphor for a moment and picture your business as a fishing boat.

In this scenario, your marketing team is the fishing line in the sea. Hopefully, you’ve got a few in there – a website, PPC adverts, a social media campaign – enticing fish to take the bait.

Then, look lively, you’ve got a bite. It’s time for your marketing team to hand over to the fisherman – your sales team – and reel it in.

But imagine if your fisherman had been told by the fishing line how likely they were to make the catch, the best times to reel it in or to feed it some line, and how valuable the fish would be.

And imagine if, thanks to their experience, the fishermen could explain the best kind of bait to use, the lures that attracted most fish, the best spots to weigh anchor.

This is the dream of sales and marketing alignment: each side using their skills and expertise to make the other half – and therefore the whole operation – stronger.

Inbound marketing, with its targeted and personalised approach, filters out poor-quality leads, so your sales team will spend more time closing instead of convincing.

And by feeding back via a CRM system like HubSpot, your sales team can inform your marketers about what worked well, and thus be replicated, and what worked less well, and thus be amended for next time.

All of which means an increasingly efficient, more productive and more profitable operation.

So, happy fishing out there.

A well-optimised, peak-performing website is essential to an inbound marketing strategy. After all, your website is where people go to find out about you, your products and contact details.

Your website is often what all your other marketing activity is driving people to, which means it’s got to look the part, read well and offer an intuitive, friction-free user experience.

And it’s because websites are so important that we take the growth-driven design approach to building them.

Growth-driven design is a smarter way to build websites, one that removes the pain points usually associated with web development, such as large up-front investments, inefficient builds and a final result built on opinions rather than user data.

Growth-driven design requires less time and money up front but rewards continual iteration as you analyse what your users are getting out of your site – and make amends accordingly.