The rollercoaster of the past year has forced companies to drastically alter their operations, all with their employees, customers and prospects in mind. With the pandemic pushing change in consumer behavior, marketing and sales teams specifically have seen a huge shift in how they must reach current and potential customers. One of these shifts is an extreme consumer focus on video. For example, video streaming subscriptions hit over 769 million in Q3 2020, up from around 552 million a year earlier, and TikTok surpassed 2 billion downloads in 2020.
So, how will we see video continue to evolve in 2021, and how can marketing and sales teams best use it to their advantage?
Personalized Video Will Replace Event Prospecting
Because in-person events and trade shows came to a screeching halt in 2020, brands no longer have the opportunity to engage with prospects face-to-face. But the evaporation of events doesn’t mean the evaporation of the need for human interaction. That’s where video emails come in.
With personalized video content, sales and marketing teams can grab prospects’ attention and make lead generation more successful. Businesses using a video-based content management solution to do so can quickly scale the personal interaction between prospects to humanize your brand without losing out on outreach scale. When the world returns to normal, events may resume, but video engagement will become a new normal that will continue to hold prominence in the sales cycle.
AI for Video Will Enter a New Dimension
As video becomes more important as a communication medium, AI within the market will enter a new dimension. Over the next year, we’ll see AI predict and recommend B2B video content similar to what we’ve seen for consumers on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Marketers and sales teams will now see which videos prospects and customers are looking at and for how long to level-up video email content and increase engagement.
Brands Will Create TikTok-eque Videos
With attention spans hitting an all-time low of eight seconds over the last decade, B2B marketing and sales teams will need to shift to short, snappy communication. Video will play a new role in this communication, with brands beginning to use TikTok-eque videos to reach prospects, engage with customers and deliver information to employees. Snappy, searchable videos with key information will be a new standard for brand marketing.
No one knows exactly what the year ahead will look like, but we can expect that video engagement will continue to increase. Brands that fail to adopt new video email practices will be left behind by those that unlock prospecting, customer communication and employee engagement with snappy, personalized videos.
Sean Gordon built award-winning sales teams at AT&T, Dell EMC and West Corporation before founding vidREACH, a personalized video email engagement platform.
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