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Facts and Myths About Video Marketing — The Holiday Edition

Video is taking over our social feeds, and it’s no wonder: as content goes, it’s the most dynamic, engaging and perhaps the best for demanding consumer attention at several different intervals. That includes advertising content — 86% of consumers say they’d like to see more videos from brands.

Yet many believe that video content is too expensive to produce, can weigh down web or mobile performance and is too cumbersome to host, manage and distribute. Thus, most brands don’t believe they can afford video, or continue to carve out only a bite-sized portion of their marketing plans for video.

But a great video strategy doesn’t require expensive talent, complicated productions or massive video hosting infrastructure. In fact, as we head into the holiday season, marketers will find that video may be just the thing to up their game this year. Here’s a look at the hard facts and myths that exist about video marketing.

Fact: Video can help re-create those in-person shopping experiences.
This year will mimic last year’s in many ways — it’s the second holiday season amid the pandemic and once again, shoppers plan to do the majority of their shopping online. That said, brands and retailers should think about how to best engage those ecommerce shoppers, and video is key.

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According to Google, online video helps 50% of shoppers decide which specific brands or products to buy. With that in mind, marketers should think about how to use videos to re-create those moments that shoppers have when in-store and sometimes need when shopping online. Video can easily re-create those personal shopping experiences with how-to videos, product experiences, styling tips and personalized gift ideas. With video, consumers can receive helpful advice from people who are like them, celebrating the same holidays as them, are the same age or gender and would possibly be looking for the same kinds of products as them, and are hoping for an easy shopping experience — again, just like them.   

Myth: Video is expensive to produce.
When video comes to mind, marketers think of grand and expensive resource-intensive productions with script versioning and actors. Sometimes that is called for, but not all the time. Oftentimes, consumers just want real people to answer their simple questions, and what better way to answer them than with video?

Brands can use their own team members to discuss common topics or questions. Brands may even be able to use their consumers as ambassadors of sorts to address other customer concerns, lower purchasing barriers or celebrate product features and benefits. Such content isn’t expensive or labor-intensive with technology — it’s easy to produce and much more inviting to the consumers viewing them. Comscore has stated that videos add two minutes to the average time a user spends on a site, so make them count with something relatable instead of overproduced content from influencers.  

Fact: Video can increase your discoverability.
According to Forrester and Aimclear, video results are 50 times more likely to be organically ranked in Google than text-based results and have a 41% higher click-through rate (CTR) than text-based results. We know most consumers will be online this holiday season, so having a superb video SEO strategy is paramount. Coupled with great keyword or key question SEO, video can help consumers find a brand and its products much more easily by increasing the chances of your brand landing on the first page rather than the third or fourth of a search engine.

By investing in their own proprietary videos, brands can also drive traffic by guiding consumers back to brand or product pages (rather than YouTube). Videos on your brand pages help keep customers focused and limit the opportunity for other brands to steal share of mind while they are in the consideration phase of buying.

Myth: Video slows down your website.
Marketers often assume that video can be a ‘heavy’ asset that can bog down mobile or website performance, or an asset that requires complicated video hosting infrastructure and engineering talent as well as additional resources to manage it. Not true. Technology today enables us to create videos that blend seamlessly into websites without interfering with the user experience.

If there ever was a time to reinvigorate your video marketing strategy, it is now. Holidays can be just as stressful as they are joyful. While they can’t help with everything, a brand with a great ongoing video strategy can help lessen the taxing aspects of holiday shopping, by providing consumers with relevant videos to help them learn, consider and add-to-cart, confidently.


Bernadette Butler is Co-founder and CEO of StoryTap. Video storytelling is her superpower. Inspired after two decades in the marketing and advertising industry on behalf of some of the world’s best-known brands, Butler, along with Co-founder Sean Braacx, launched Storytap in 2018, a technology platform that gives any business or organization that same superpower to tell and share compelling stories by enabling brands to create, curate and distribute authentic consumer video at scale. Led by a vision to make video more effective, authentic and accessible to brands, the Vancouver-based platform now powers video storytelling with global brands like UCLA, K-Y, Cepacol, Enfamil, TELUS SHS, TELUS Internet, Canadian Tire and many more. Butler has also served on the board of the Women’s Collaborative Hub, a mentorship and networking program for women in business.

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