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Why 20 Percent More Marketers Use Sponsored Video

Sponsored Video Content Marketing

In 2015, just 24 percent of marketers had ever used sponsored video as part of an influencer marketing campaign. Just one year later, that number had increased to 44 percent, a growth of 20 percent, according to the 2017 State of the Creator Economy study (SOCE).
What’s behind the explosive growth of video and its increase in popularity among marketers? A number of factors have contributed to video’s climb.

Video Is Everywhere

It was not that long ago that internet video wasn’t really a thing. A study from Pew Research Center found that just 14 percent of American adults who were online uploaded or posted internet video in 2009.
Four years later, in 2013, that number had increased to 31 percent. By 2013, 78 percent of online adults in the US stated that they watched videos online in some form, up from 69 percent in 2013.
Other studies have pointed to the continued growth of video as an online format. A 2015 white paper published by Cisco found that global IP video traffic made up 70 percent of all consumer online traffic in 2015. By 2020, that amount is expected to increase to 82 percent of all consumer online traffic.

It’s Effective

The ubiquity of video would only count for so much if it weren’t for one other important piece of the puzzle: Online video is also an effective way to reach customers.
The 2017 SOCE found that US consumers ranked sponsored video, in both short and long formats, as among the top 10 most effective content marketing approaches. Brand-sponsored long-form video was rated as slightly more effective, with a ranking of 6.6 out of 10. Brand-sponsored short-form videos had a ranking of 6.5 out of 10.
Additional studies have gauged the effectiveness of video at getting a message across. In 2014, Facebook conducted a test with an advertiser to see which combinations of approaches were the most effective. The test found that Facebook users who saw a video for four days, followed by a static ad for four days, were 1.3 times more likely to visit the advertiser’s website than people who didn’t see any ads.
Interestingly enough, people don’t even need to watch a full video to get some message or information from it. In 2015, Facebook partnered with Nielsen to figure out how video affects a brand’s metrics.
The study examined three areas: ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase consideration. It found that even if people didn’t watch a second of the video, simply seeing it on their newsfeed was enough to increase their brand awareness, purchase consideration, and ad recall. Each factor increased the longer a person watched the actual video.

It’s Affordable

Budget also plays a part in the increased use of sponsored video among marketers. The 2017 SOCE found a pretty significant price perception gap between actual creators and marketers. As it turns out, making video is considerably cheaper than most marketers expect it to be.
In the case of a sponsored video from an influencer, the average creator charges $228. Meanwhile, the average marketer expects to pay more than twice that: $498.
A similar discrepancy happens with content creators and marketers over the cost of a topical overview video. According to the SOCE, a content creator typically charges $631 per video, while a typical marketer expects to pay more than $1,200.
If the price perception gap closes in favor of marketers, many will be able to spend less to get video, meaning that even more marketers are likely to use it to engage with and reach out to new audiences.
Photo by Tom Pumford, courtesy Unsplash

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