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Building a stronger customer relationship through video

Everyone you come across these days seems to spend most of their time glued to their screens. This could be phones, tablets or even smart televisions.

Here’s a quick view of the latest online consumption habits:

of people say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service 96%
of people say a brand’s video has convinced them to buy a piece of software or app 79%
outright preferring to learn about a new product or service via video 68%
  • 96% of people say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service
  • 79% of people say a brand’s video has convinced them to buy a piece of software or app
  • 68% outright preferring to learn about a new product or service via video

How beneficial is video to building a stronger connection with your customers?

The dynamic nature of video means that you can utilise it in various ways to reach out to customers and get your message across. Here are some of the benefits of video that will go a long way in increasing your customers’ affinity with your brand.

Video breathes life into your brand through storytelling

When marketing through different channels, you need to maintain a common thread in the brand story you are telling, Video is a great way to make this story compelling. Craft an engaging story and support it with video. This is because 69 per cent of people prefer watching a video to reading a product description.

The emotional cues that video contains can move your audience to identify with your brand, leading to conversion.

All this works if your storytelling is good. Good storytelling gives structure that leads audiences to commit to watching the whole video, taking in your entire message. Here’s a great example from Microsoft. Their SuperBowl commercial gained an additional 30 million views for the brand on YouTube.

Videos can explain complex products, or subjects most effectively

If you’re looking for a way to stand out in a crowded industry, video is a marvelous mechanism you can utilise to get started. Video does this perfectly. Why? Because the human brain processes videos and visual cues 60,000 times faster than it does plain text.

So, while your excellent copywriting skills are commendable and useful in certain contexts, video will trump them when it comes to explaining complex products and services. The brain is wired to avoid complex cognitive function if it can.

This search for the path of least resistance also translates on the internet because your audience browses for things within their reach and are easy to understand. They will, therefore, watch videos to easily understand concepts instead of reading your text.

Video creates easily sharable content

Video is very adept at engaging your audience’s emotions so that they can virally share the content. Your content should, therefore, tap into the target market’s emotions so that they can share the video with others. The video should elicit feelings of joy, laughter, surprise, anger, admiration or even happiness.

Your strategy should try to find ways to connect with your audience on an emotional level through the video. When, for example, the video is hilarious, it causes joy and laughter – prompting those who have watched it to share with others so that they too can laugh.

Video offers information-rich and memorable stories

Videos provide more information in a shorter time…

Videos provide more information in a shorter time, enabling the audience to understand it better. A 60 second video contains a similar amount of information that can be presented in 1.8 million words. It would take a really dedicated internet user to read through all that just to know what you’re selling.

As well as providing information in a short time, video is also a way to tell memorable stories about your brand, product or service. 9 in 10 people who watch videos are able to remember the content therein compared to only 1 in 10 who remembers the content they read.

So, if you present information about your product or service in video format, the odds of people remembering your brand are high.

How does video tie into an integrated marketing mix?

In spite of all the advantages of video, you can’t use it as the sole medium through which you are marketing your brand, product or service. Your insights and strategy should come together to provide a media agnostic solution to your marketing. This results in a multitouch point media combination – of which video is a part – to deliver the desired results.

For example, you can run an ad for your product in your local daily. At the bottom of the ad, you can include a QR code. When people come across your ad in the newspaper, they can scan the code with their smartphones, redirecting them to either your website or YouTube page.

The video that they find on your site or YouTube channel will provide all the advantages of video. They understand your product and brand more and will have higher chances of buying from you.

In this hypothetical example, you have an integrated mix of traditional and modern digital media all working together to ensure that you reach out to more people and carrying a common thread of the brand story.

As The Walk, we have actually carried out multi-touch and cross-platform marketing campaigns for TIME Magazine, Faith Insurance and Harbour ISP’s Supernet and Race You campaigns. The integrated mix contained radio and TV spots as well as print ads in the newspapers and brochures. The digital end of the mix comprised responsive landing pages, social media campaigns, long-tail SEO content, HTML 5 banner ads and video reviews on the sites.

Some examples of integrated campaigns we’ve done

Click the thumbnails below to check out these other campaigns.

In conclusion

The numbers don’t lie; video is becoming more powerful and influential. Many marketers have taken notice and are using it in their campaigns, with 87 per cent using video as a marketing tool in 2019. This is hardly a surprise given that people are consuming more and more video.

However, as a marketer, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Your marketing strategy needs to be media agnostic, embracing video and other media. You need to leverage an integrated mix of media to push your brand, product or service.

In that variety of marketing media, video will still play an important role. Marketing videos will help drive sales, grow your brand equity as well as increase your customers’ affinity with your brand.


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