The rise of mobile and the huge opportunity it presents for marketers has been well documented. Smartphone ownership will hit 75% this year according to Guy Phillipson, CEO of IAB UK and mobile is set to overtake fixed internet access by 2014.
The popularity of mobile usage means businesses must adjust their strategies to have an effective presence where their audience is ‘hanging out’. One effective mobile marketing tactic businesses are using is Digital Video. Indeed, within the mobile marketing industry, video is one of the quickest emerging trends. This is hardly surprising given that video now accounts for 51% of global mobile data traffic (source: Cisco, 2013).
Companies are creating a plan of action for how to deliver video to their mobile audience. An effective mobile video campaign can quite literally put a brands’ products or services directly into the hands of their target audience. For example, Starbucks, voted mobile marketers of the year in 2012, integrated video into their award winning mobile campaign with tremendous results.
Video is proving to be an effective mobile marketing strategy because, put simply, consumers love it and demand it. As already mentioned, video accounts for a staggering 51% of global mobile data traffic thanks to improved bandwidth and devices. Mobile devices will also access over 70% of the video on the internet by 2016 (source: Cisco, 2013).
Studies have shown that video increases the conversation rates from exposure to sales, and that the conversion rate is even greater on mobile devices (source: Invodo, 2012). According to Invodo research, mobile shoppers are three times more likely to view video than desktop and laptop shoppers.
One especially effective platform to harness the power of mobile video is social media. Mobile users often access social media via their mobiles and video is a powerful engagement tool on these channels. Indeed, people are more likely to engage with branded content on social media that contains images and video (source: Performics, 2012).
The recent popularity and uptake of Twitter’s new, integrated mobile video app called Vine shows the popularity for video by mobile users. The new video app “lets you capture and share short looping videos” and it’s certainly proved popular with users and brands. Like Tweets, the short videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity. Given that 42% of companies have acquired a customer from Twitter (source: Hubspot, 2013), this is certainly an interesting new element to add to the mix.