The internet is a great avenue to promote our businesses worldwide allowing us to advertise in many different forms. Where once we see printed flyers, banners, fact sheets, and all sorts of content marketing we now see a proliferation of digital advertisements to leverage on the businesses’ web presence. Quite recently, online video, which is said to be the future of content marketing, is rapidly gaining popularity.
By 2016, annual global IP traffic is forecast to be 1.3 zettabytes, according to Cisco VNI Forecast. The significant level of traffic growth and service penetration is driven by several factors such as an increasing number of devices, more internet users, faster broadband speeds, Wi-fi growth, and more videos. Cisco further predicted that, by 2016, over 1.2 million video minutes – the equivalent of 833 days (over 2 years) – would travel the Internet every second.
With online video’s peerless rise, it is quickly becoming a standard means for people to satisfy their information, purchasing, and entertainment needs. Most companies, who are seeing the immense potential of using online video to generate more sales, are already making use of the medium as an integral part of their internet marketing strategies. In a study conducted by Nielsen, 64% of respondents indicated that video content will dominate their marketing strategies moving forward.
When it comes to potential reach, online video is unsurpassable. YouTube receives more than one billion unique visitors every month from all over the world. With an engaging video, viewers spend longer time on your website and more time interacting with your brand. For any marketing campaign, video is without doubt one of the best tools in a marketing kit today.
The increased demand in online videos has encouraged businesses, advertisers, media buying agencies, and publishers to take an increased interest in this platform. Since online videos help marketers to brand and compete alongside targeting online audiences, they are being rapidly adopted by businesses thereby inciting the growth of the online video platform.
The online video platform has been exhibiting massive growth fuelled by the astounding growth of the online video audiences, increased use of social media campaigns within corporate communications, and rapid adoption of the platform as a key enabler for organizations that want to reap the benefits of an effective international content marketing.
Understanding local interests and audiences is essential for international content marketing. It is important to always consider the audience and to ensure that the video is relevant to them. Creating content that responds to the needs of readers requires a lot of effort. Oftentimes, these efforts are poured into the main/home country site, but little to none of this brilliant content is pushed to international websites created for other countries.
Localizing an entire website, including online video with voice overs, in all languages of the audiences being targeted is ideal but not always realistic – with limits on budgets or other resources. Therefore, it would be wise to understand the differences in interests among the target countries so that companies can better prioritize the content creation and the content localization. The key to successful content marketing is in understanding the reader’s interests, and providing quality content to satisfy the reader’s needs but the key to successful online business is how well data is utilized to organize, prioritize, and create the content for each of the target country that generates incremental revenue.
