Fox Sports made waves in June for laying off its writing staff in favor of video content creation.
Similar moves are happening in the offices of ESPN, Buzzfeed and Vice, where billions of investor dollars are being pushed into video over written copy.
Is this trend in news outlets also the right move for small businesses?
The push for video is due to the emergence of Generation Y’s (Millennials) population surpassing the Baby Boomers. This growth is shifting more traditional relationships with consuming news and marketing information from print to digital.
Adults in the United States watch over an hour of online video daily, a 2,000-percent increase since 2009. Videos lead to more time being spent on your site and a better retention rate of the information, specifically if the content is advertising related.
Video content creation is no longer the wave of the future. It is now part of the mass media foundation.
Now you’re probably asking yourself why this blog post is all text and no video.
Creating videos that market or explain your business should be part of your ongoing messaging.
But not at the expense of good writing.
Text-based blogging is often the easiest form of content creation. It involves little more than a word document, some linking and posting it to a website. Video blogs and video content creation for marketing material is often more time consuming if you are a novice to the media.
Plus, adding a strong title, meta descriptions, tagging and hosting are all factors found in blog copy that still need to be applied to the post-production process of your video.
Google still loves good ol’ fashioned text-based SEO. Pages crawl easier with a few hundred words as opposed to a video title and backend information.
If you only read the first few sentences of this blog you’d think investors pouring billions into video must be the smart choice. The problem with this thinking, however, lies in the fallacy that because of Millennials being the dominant age bracket, there are still 74 million baby boomers who prefer reading print marketing over finding information online.
This isn’t to say all baby boomers don’t hop on their computers, phone and tablets – they invented the technology, after all.
Don’t just listen to investors loving bold moves by companies sacrificing one demographic to appease another, Google doesn’t. Sometimes it’s best to offer the most you can to both worlds. Text and video can, and should, go hand in hand.
Watch our video from a previous blog or schedule an appointment with Valorous Circle to see how we can use video to improve your business.
