Brands should be wary of the recent “pivot to video” trend and remember the benefits of publishing premium, text-based news and articles, according to UK magazine Marketing Week.
Video is the marketing zeitgeist of 2017, with all the major players in search and social doubling down on new features and tools designed to make it easier for publishers to create clips while driving ad revenue on their respective platforms. However, the “pivot to video” may not be best suited to a brand’s own content marketing goals.
Marketing Week’s Ben Davis said that despite the likes of Facebook and Instagram claiming that video is more emotionally engaging and exciting for viewers, other studies, such as recent data from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, show that the vast majority of people prefer to consume news in text form, including millennials and younger age groups.
Users often associate video with clunky or annoying aspects of their content consumption experience. For example, pre-roll and autoplay ads are not particularly popular with viewers, and mid-roll has fared even worse during testing. Facebook is reportedly going to cancel its experiments with the latter format.
Video obviously still has a place in the content marketing mix, but brands should only pursue it persistently if it fits into their overall strategy and enhances what they want to achieve during a campaign. American magazine Mother Jones’ Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery recently said: “Pivots, more often than not, aren’t led by real audience strategy. It’s chasing an ad [demographic] or dream of a [demographic] like a cat chases a laser.”
Therefore, brands should pursue a strategy that uses mobile-optimised video and written word content to engage with a target audience. More importantly, working with an agency or publisher allows marketers to create high-quality content that end users want to consume. Davis concluded by saying that context is an important consideration when deciding on content formats for a new campaign.
Content Marketing Institute’s latest annual report revealed that 80 per cent of marketers focus on increasing their subscriber bases and audiences, so selecting the right content types is essential for brands.
