MUMBAI: “Is it viral yet?” More often than not, this is what you will hear from marketers and agencies soon after they make a brand campaign or a video live on social media. The virality of a video is the new scale of measurement for most advertisers now, and rightly so! When a video goes viral, it can increase your search engine ranking, click-through rates, open rates and conversions.

Brands have for the longest time needed a video marketing strategy but what has changed is how important video has become on every platform and channel. It is no longer restricted to doing television commercials or doing product placement on some television show or a movie. It has become the centre to their outreach and social strategy.

While videos are great and should be every marketer’s best friend, there are several questions around it that need to be answered.

How do you know if your videos are working? How can you measure the efficacy of your videos? How do you build brand confidence? What is the role of videos in overall brand strategy? What platforms should you choose to deliver the videos? How do you treat videos in regional languages? And most importantly, what are the top 5 things to keep in mind for branded videos and video marketing?

To find out the answers to these compelling and perplexing industry questions, Indiantelevision.com will host a summit on branded videos and video marketing - BrandVid 2018( brandvid.in) on 30 October 2018 at Sahara Star, Mumbai. The summit will see industry stalwarts discuss these topics and map out a way for the industry where all major stakeholders can make the most of videos.

Video has absolutely dominated social media and according to a recent HubSpot Research report, four of the top six channels on which global consumers watch video are social channels. And a common topic for every A&M conversation - video is the way forward - finally seems to look right.

Video marketing isn’t just limited to slapping a video on television, YouTube and other social media platforms. Today, 70 per cent of millennials prefer watching a brand’s video when shopping online. According to Video Marketing Statistics 2018 report, 84 per cent of consumers are convinced to purchase a company’s product after they’ve watched their video. It is also interesting to note that 81 per cent of businesses with an explainer video on their homepage said that those videos have increased their sales.

As per a report by Syndacast, click-through rates increase by between 200-300 per cent when a marketing email contained a video.

Remember the Dancing Uncles video that went viral? No? Well, have a look at it here:

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Bajaj Allianz signed Sanjeev Srivastava aka the internet’s dancing uncle to promote one of its offering. Lately, he was also seen promoting Amazon India’s Great Indian Festival Sale. The power of internet and video today!

In a general media ecosystem, you would have a brand, an agency and a production house where a brand gives a brief to an agency about the kind of video they want and they in turn hire a production house to shoot the video and later get it edited from a third party. But that’s changing now. Brands are now becoming media companies and they have their own in-house content studio that creates content for them on-the-go. It’s challenging for a traditional agency to sustain and survive in a competing environment like this. But is there a way where brands, agencies and publishers can co-exist and collaborate? Maybe yes but how only time will tell.

Most videos today seem to be mindless and done just because every other brand on the block is doing it. Marketers often forget that they don’t need to follow the herd mentality.

It is incorrect to judge your video campaign solely on it becoming viral and famous. It may not always lead to your products being sold from the shelves. As simple as video marketing seems, it is actually more complex than that. While brands and agencies have exploited video marketing to the core, whether or not it works entirely depends on what do you want your audience to hear, see and feel. And most importantly, what message are you trying to convey and what is the call to action?

All in all, video marketing is not only fun, it’s also one of the best ways to get up close to your audience and give them a real glimpse of what you and your business or your clients are doing The more they know about your positive practices, the more likely they are to stick around.