Did you know that sites can double their organic search traffic by including a video thumbnail in search rankings? Or that the use of video content rose from 52% in 2011 to 70% in 2012?

There are plenty of stats which show that video really is the way forward for content marketers. A study investigating Universal Search – the way that Google ‘blends’ images, videos, news, maps etc search results into normal search results – revealed that while images were increasingly being displayed, video consistently comes out on top.

And according to eMarketer, spending on video marketing, along with content marketing and social media, will increase by 15.1% in 2013 to a total of $118.4bn. So just why are brands prepared to set aside billions of pounds for video marketing?

Fast-forward your content marketing efforts with video

With video becoming ever-more popular, failure to partake in this movement is akin to putting your content marketing mission on hold. Do your company a favour and press the play button by incorporating video into your content marketing calendar.

Let’s get psychological

As a leading speaker, author and consultant to the likes of Amazon and Disney, Susan Weinschenk, PhD, has hit upon a number of reasons why people are naturally drawn to video. The Fusiform Facial area is a brain function that hardwires us to use the human face as a gathering point for information and believability, something that text just cannot offer.

Dr Weinschenk also highlighted that movement commands attention and that a human voice converts information into meaningful content – making your brand message more relevant and engaging on a very human level.

In layman’s terms

If psychological jargon doesn’t do anything for you, you only have to glance at YouTube to glean the immeasurable popularity of video. Over 2012, the video sharing website – which is the second biggest search engine after Google – reported 72 hours of video being uploaded every single minute.

People will always choose watching over reading. Sheer laziness certainly has a part to play in this: it is far easier to sit back and watch something than read. Say you were given the choice of reading two blog posts. One is 1000 words of plain text, and the other presents the majority of information in a video format. Which one would you choose?

Exactly.

Content marketing is about creating content that your target audience will love, and if that happens to be video, that’s the direction you’ve got to take your strategy.

This isn’t to say you should disregard text altogether – as long as you are mixing up the format of your content, you are placing your brand on the road to victory.