We talk a lot about how powerful a tool video can be for generating leads, converting leads, and raising sales. Web video production produces the product we want, but getting the content out there is just as important as the product itself. For your video to generate leads, distribution along different channels is crucial.
We throw around terms like ‘video marketing’ and ‘video advertising’ synonymously, confident that it gets the point across. However, there is a distinct difference between video marketing and video editing. Changing one for the other may very well change your marketing strategy, and understanding the difference between both terms gives you a competitive advantage when trying to get your brand or company name out there.
VIDEO MARKETING is essentially marketing strategy that uses video as its main form of content. The marketers aim is to inform, educate, and engage their target audience by using videos on websites, landing pages, emails, social media accounts, and other forms of public communication.
VIDEO ADVERTISING is a component of marketing that involves running web video commercials across different media to capture audience attention and reach particular markets. Advertising is often paid for. It’s more an element of a strategy instead of an actual plan.
ADVERTISING AS A TOOL, MARKETING AS A TOOLBOX
To illustrate it further, take away the “video” before each concept and focus on the difference between plain old marketing and advertising.
Imagine marketing as a toolbox. Advertising is just one of the tools inside it, alongside other tools like social media management, website building, and promotional events. All of these fit in the marketing toolbox, because they can be used for marketing, but they cannot be used for advertising.
In other words, all forms of advertising can also be considered marketing, but not all forms of marketing are advertising.
INVESTING IN VIDEO ADVERTISING
Video marketing performs well, there’s no doubt about it. Placing videos on landing pages of websites or linking them in your emails is great for video views, keyword relevance, and SEO. But video advertising works a little differently.
For instance, you can upload a sixty-second commercial up on YouTube. You can share it across platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. With enough cross-promotion and backlinking, you could get anywhere between a couple hundred to a couple thousand views, depending on your followers list.
But what about reaching people beyond your established customer base? How do you reach people who have never heard of you before? It’s not like they’re going to search YouTube specifically for your ad, and the odds of them stumbling across it are a million-to-one.
Paying platforms like YouTube or Facebook to run your ads evens your odds. Facebook uses algorithms to determine the best audience for your brand using information people enter on their profile. YouTube functions the same way, using location and watched history to suggest videos.
Investing in video advertising expands your reach. If you consider paying for web video production as an investment, then the same could be said for paying social media platforms for advertising.
