Tobin Lehman — September 18, 2018 — September 18, 2018
Free-Photos / Pixabay
Are you thinking about video marketing? You might want to cut to the chase.
There is nothing new in the world. One might think that the move into video marketing is this new phenomena that the millennial generation is pushing. And yes, the means and methods are changing, but the thrust of the cultural and behavioral motives are as old as the medium itself. I’m reminded of this great song by the Talking Heads, “Found a Job“…
“Damn that television what a bad picture”!
“Don’t get upset, it’s not a major disaster”.
“There’s nothing on tonight”, he said, “I don’t know what’s the matter”!
“Nothing’s ever on”, she said, “so I don’t know why you bother.”
We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times.
People fighting over little things and wasting precious time.
They might be better off I think the way it seems to me.
Making up their own shows, which might be better than T.V.
Judy’s in the bedroom, inventing situations.
Bob is on the street today, scouting up locations.
They’ve enlisted all their family.
They’ve enlisted all their friends.
It helped saved their relationship,
And made it work again
As crazy as that that might have seemed in the 80’s when it came out, the reality is that this song doesn’t seem so strange any more. With people becoming YouTube stars using little more than an iPhone, the medium is evolving quickly and will ultimately hit the same conclusion – complete saturation.
Medium Saturation
Saturation, as I’ll use the word here, is the point where the novelty is surpassed by the supply and the medium no longer carries any factor of increased reach. You are no longer amused by a photo on a web page, but if you found a site that incorporated a 3D virtual reality experience into its pages, that might carry some novelty.
Novelty is really a strange consequence of a medium to our senses. We can go deep and start referencing some Marshall McLuhan “medium is the message” factors here, but stopping short of academia, we have to simply put forth that the medium (video, audio, written word, or even jell-o) all carry some importance in relation to the content that they communicate. I can tell you how to tie your shoes, I can write it down, I can show you a video, or I could have robotic jell-o tell you. In all cases, the medium carries in many ways the message itself – and this creates a sense of allure we use in marketing.
For example, if you would have put a video on the web before YouTube was a household name, you would have “broken the internet”, to borrow a phrase – which also points to a popularity that seems to exceed the capacity of the internet itself. Yet now, in many industries, video is no longer a novelty – it’s just table stakes. If you’re not in video, you’re dead. There’s no novel allure to video as a medium anymore; that stage has passed.
So what does all this mean for most B2B businesses?
All this should go to give you a heads up that saturation is quickly approaching for video as a medium. I would suspect that within the next 12-24 months, you’ll have competitors using – or your own business will have used – video in marketing that will dominate your market.
If you are a consultant and you’re not doing video marketing, you’re falling behind the push. We’ve helped a few coaches and professionals this year start grooming a video strategy that will put them in front of their market and competition. Alas, this strategy will be ubiquitous by the end of 2019.
Start Your Video Strategy Now
So, if you’re finally feeling the confidence to start your video strategy – good. This is the time to strike on it, and move into the space to use video in its various forms to communicate your message before the highest levels of saturation are reached. This can be through simple videos displayed on social media or through more complex web-based videos. Either way, you are setting a course to success with video marketing – and that course is best set now, before time runs out.
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community
(74)
