When you need the answer to a question, what do you turn to first? The Yellowpages? Not unless you’re living in 1985. Your PC? Maybe, but even that’s increasingly doubtful. Today’s customers are mobile, and their smartphones are almost always the automatic choice to find out everything they want and need.
A recent infographic from Usablenet highlighted the fact that 52 percent of B2B customers use their smartphones to research products and services for their businesses. At the same time, 61 percent of B2B customers look at mobile videos that are relevant to their work. In other words, video marketing is central in any attempt to reach buyers as they move through the purchasing funnel.
Although these stats and figures are inspiring if you’ve got a video marketing strategy in place, now’s not the time to get complacent. Mobile is obviously a huge opportunity, but it’s a demanding channel that requires you to adjust your perspective and tactics to make the most of your on-the-go customers. Here are five ways that mobile can be a landmine if you don’t take the right steps to get your content in front of the right audience.
- A Desktop-first Mentality
Remember when cellphone video was about 2 x 2 inches and so pixelated that you could barely make out what was happening? The only way to have an eye-pleasing experience with digital video that wasn’t on a television screen was your trusty desktop or laptop. Fast-forward to today and the video marketing world is completely transformed. Citing the most recent Adobe Digital Index video report, Business 2 Community explained that more than half of all video views will occur on mobile by the end of next year. Bigger phone screens with higher resolutions make video content on mobile technology engaging, convenient, and relevant. If you still approach video marketing with a desktop computer in mind, you’re immediately starting off on the wrong foot. - Siloed Videos
In addition to being the first screen that many customers – millennials in particular – look to when seeking out both entertainment and information, mobile devices are ideal for giving buyers the chance to share what they’ve seen. According to Think With Google, smartphone video viewers are 1.4 times as likely to watch ads on these devices than on desktops or TV. They’re equally as likely to pay attention to branded videos on YouTube, and they’re far more motivated to share them with their peers, whether that’s through social networks, email, or even talking about the content in person. With this in mind, you need to consider strategies that will give your videos a greater reach with social sharing functionality or implement it in email. Your customers will thank you and reward you for it. - Frozen Marketing Budget
If you’re not forward-thinking with your marketing budget, you’re going to waste a significant amount of your spend on channels that won’t pay off. This is especially true with video because it typically takes more time to create and perfect than other pieces of content. Companies that have grasped the importance of video marketing have made the right adjustments already. Forbes explained that 64 percent of content marketing budgets is moving in the direction of video. Adding fuel to the fire, a recent Interactive Advertising Bureau study found that nearly 7 in 10 marketers and agency executives are planning to increase their digital video ad spend over the next 12 months. If you continue to develop an annual budget following the same old pathways, you’ll be scrambling later on to find the resources to strengthen your mobile video marketing campaigns. - Missing Mobile Analytics
Your online video campaigns deserve close attention with analytics tools. Mobile can be a whole new beast for those not prepared to track mobile video metrics. According to Business 2 Community, it’s critical that you get granular insight into your video’s performance on mobile devices. This includes finding out the exact moments that each viewer stops watching or tracking where they go once they finish watching a video. It’s a smart idea to look at the number of views, following across-device pathways, and playback times. Then, integrate this information into your sales and marketing platforms to capture information about each buyer. Data is how today’s marketers improve their campaigns, and mobile analytics are part of that iterative process. - Click-to-call Malfunction
It’s easy to forget in the rush to publish video content on your mobile-optimized website or content hosting site that smartphones are in fact used to make calls. Marketing Land highlighted the fact that more than 60 percent of mobile users find it very important to have the option to call a business when they’re making a decision about a purchase. Click-to-call buttons are a must for mobile video campaigns if you value inbound phone leads, and we don’t know many companies that don’t like to get calls from prospective customers. Unless a buyer on a desktop is using a Voice-over-Internet-Protocol connection, it’s not likely they’ll take the extra steps to connect, but mobile devices make this intuitive. It’s easy to overlook, so make this a priority.
Mobile will either empower your video marketing campaigns or trip you up horribly. There’s not a lot of middle ground. Don’t get caught up in an outdated mindset that pushes desktop technology first and ignores the reality of the modern customer journey. Mobile is all about convenience, and video optimized for this experience is how companies can give their prospective customers answers in the right place and at the right time.
