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If you’ve spent time keeping up with the latest digital, social media and mobile marketing trends over the past year, then you’re well aware that including video in your content marketing and digital channel strategy is no longer an option — it’s a must.

Declining attention spans, weighted algorithms and “banner blindness” has created a vacuum that is driving the need for personalized and easy-to-consume content — pushing video to the forefront of the digital media conversation. An increase in mobile users, the number of mobile devices and mobile apps such as Snapchat have also driven digital marketing strategies that incorporate video. A report by YouAppi found that “85 percent of digital marketers plan to increase their video investment for mobile marketing efforts in 2018, up 10 percent over last year.”

Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) have been at the forefront when it comes to integrating video into their self-service advertising solutions. Programmatic advertising has also risen to the challenge offering a multitude of video formats to advertisers including mobile, native and over-the-top (OTT) providers such as Roku and Hulu. Even email marketing has seen an increase in video being featured (although usually requiring some workaround) in nurture campaigns, product releases and newsletters to prospects and clients alike.

Merritt Group has seen from our own advertising case studies that video used in online marketing can drive down CPM’s, increase top-of-the-funnel awareness and build engaged retargeting segments that can be utilized further down the funnel to positively impact conversions. It’s over the last year that I’ve seen this trend take-off and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. We’ve also used video for mobile marketing campaigns where desktop isn’t an option to reach our target audience.

Turning our attention back to social media marketing sphere, LinkedIn has lagged behind other social networks, having just introduced native video for individual users back in August of 2017. Now, with its March 29th announcement, LinkedIn is expanding its video offering to incorporate video ads for LinkedIn Sponsored Content and the ability to include native video on Company Pages.

So, is LinkedIn too late to the game when it comes to video advertising and native video? From my perspective, not in any way. With their B2B focused audience and above average metrics for engagement via Sponsored Content, I don’t think they’ll have any problems getting marketers to bring this new format into the fold.

What I do think will be interesting to see is what the cost structure will look like; an average cost-per-three-second-view for Facebook can be as low as three cents and YouTube can average around ten cents for a thirty-second view. As most marketers know, LinkedIn’s much more expensive from a CPM and CPM basis — so I’ll be curious to see where they shake out on the cost spectrum. What this new release does is give marketers another tool in their digital and mobile marketing strategy arsenal, and add to digital marketplace competition.

Read more to learn about how Merritt Group can help you with your digital marketing strategies.

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