Top Video Marketing Trends to Know for 2024

As video continues to be a dominant force in the digital world, representing 82% of global internet traffic and reaching 92% of users worldwide, it’s important to continually revisit our video marketing strategies to ensure they are still relevant. Because even though videos get more and more popular each year, the video landscape itself sees significant transformation on a regular basis. 

In order to stay relevant and continue to find new audiences, here are the most important video marketing trends you should know about in 2023, and how you can apply them to promote your small business.

2023’s Top Video Marketing Trends and How to Use Them

1. Short-form vertical videos

Short-form vertical videos a la TikTok (and subsequently Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts) dominated 2022, and they’re going to do the same in 2023. TikTok is continuing to grow year after year, attracting more mainstream brands and celebrities, which indicates that it’s even more of a marketing must-have than ever. 

How to use it:

For success with vertical short-form videos, aim to be as casual and authentic as possible. Otherwise, you’ll stand out on the platform – in a bad way. TikToks are candid, silly, and loose, so feel free to let your brand’s personality shine. And don’t forget to interact, as the platform is built off of trends, responses, and “stitches.”

2. Live video

Live video options are now available on nearly every social media platform, with 63% of people ages 18 to 34 watching live-streaming content on a regular basis. Live videos leverage the same casual authenticity that makes TikTok so popular, but swaps out the short duration with a much longer one – audiences are willing to sit and watch live streams for hours, often as a form of background entertainment.

How to use it:

There are a variety of ways to play around with live videos, including:

• Live-streaming events
• Behind the scenes of how you produce a product
• Interviews with staff or people from your industry
• Product demonstrations
• Product unboxing videos
• Live demonstration of a service
• Q&A session with viewers

We also recommend including an interactive element in each live video you create. This helps you engage and connect to your audience, boosting brand loyalty. You can even leverage the exclusivity of live video (whoever catches the video while it’s live wins; whoever doesn’t misses out) to offer exclusive promotions, giveaways, and discounts, which will build your live audience for the future.

3. Small-time productions

There was once a time when all advertisements had to feel as professional as possible, leading businesses to spend thousands on outsourcing video production and editing to the professionals. But with the rising popularity of formats like TikTok and live-streaming, audiences have a much higher tolerance for lower production value in the content of the brands they follow. Today, you don’t need much more than a smartphone and a computer to create all of your marketing videos.

How to do it:

Use your smartphone (in vertical format) to film videos for TikTok, Reels, Shorts, live streams, and Instagram stories. Just beware: while audiences are willing to tolerate lower-quality video, they tend to have a much lower tolerance for poor sound. So do your best to film in a quiet space (A/C off!) with a decent-quality microphone.

For more polished videos that are still affordable and easy to make, try out Promo’s online video maker. In a short time, you can whip up a totally presentable social media video – even with no special video editing skills. Low on ideas? Try one of our thousands of customizable video templates. Just add your branding, and it’s ready to go.

4. Social media stories

Another casual form of video content that is highly popular on social media today is the story. This format originated with Snapchat, which displays videos for only 24 hours before they disappear. Since Instagram created its own version of this content type called the story, it has become a popular feature on many social media platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, and WhatsApp. 

Like TikTok, stories’ strength is their ease of creation and casualness. You can post a dozen a day without tiring out your audience, giving you more of an opportunity to connect with your followers. 

How to do it:

Make the most out of the story format by posting interactive content aimed at engaging with your audience and increasing brand loyalty. Polls, questions, and quizzes are all great ways to encourage your audience to interact with you, helping you build relationships and a sense of community.

For more tips on how to have success with stories, check out our article How to Get People To Watch Your Instagram Stories In 2023.

5. User-generated content

Want an even lower-effort way to create video content? User-generated content (UGC) might be the solution you are looking for. This strategy involves posting content created by your audience to your social media feeds. Not only does it give you a totally free source of content, but it also serves as a form of audience interaction and engagement that helps build a sense of community with your followers. Another major added bonus? Consumers are 2.4 times more likely to say user-generated content is authentic compared to brand-created content.

How to do it:

There are several ways to source content from your followers, including:

• Creating a contest in which people submit videos and the winner receives a prize of your choosing
• Hosting a giveaway in which users must submit a video to enter
• Paying influencers to create videos for or about your brand
• Simply just asking people to post videos of them using their products, reviewing your services, explaining why they love you, etc.
• Reaching out to customers who have created videos about your brand, product, or service on their own accord and requesting permission to repost onto your feed

6. AR/VR videos

While artificial reality and virtual reality have been around for a while, slowly making their way into our daily lives through things like Snapchat filters, 2023 will be a truly breakthrough year for these technologies. Not only will they be more accessible to creators, but consumers will show increasing interest in this type of interactive content. 

How to do it:

Virtual experiences you can create with AR and VR technology vary significantly, but often focus on convenience, accessibility, and allowing people to try things out before they buy them. Think of virtual property tours in the real estate field.

We recommend keeping an eye out on new technologies to see what you might be interested in trying in.

7. Shoppable videos

As more and more social media platforms, including TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram, make it possible for users to shop directly from a link within the app, content and ecommerce are increasingly merging. Not only is this highly convenient for users, who can simply click the video they’re watching in order to buy that cute blouse the influencer in it is wearing, but it’s also an incredibly effective marketing tool, lowering the effort potential customers have to make in order to complete a purchase.

How to do it:

Try to make as much of your content shoppable whenever possible. In addition to adding shopping links to explicit ads, promo videos, product demos, and the like, we recommend adding them to other, more casual videos, as well. 

A video doesn’t have to look like an advertisement to be shoppable. All it takes is a quick scroll through the comments of a TikTok video to see that viewers are often curious about where they can buy items the creator is wearing or has in the background of their video.

So use this to your advantage. For example, if you upload a video of a staff member giving a holiday greeting, why not have them wear one of your products while they do it and ad a link to that product in your store? Then that video becomes just as shoppable as any advertisement is.

8. Educational videos

Since schools went remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, viewers became even savvier at using videos as a tool to teach themselves something they want to learn. Today, 58% of people report using digital video to learn new skills. 

Since a big part of marketing is educating your audience as to why they need your product or service, as well as how your product or service works, educational video has a lot of potential as a marketing and sales tool.

How to do it:

The trick with educational videos is balancing clarity and thoroughness with video length. You don’t want to ramble so much that your audiences get turned off, but you want to make sure you include all of the necessary information. Here are some tips that should help.

• Consider creating multiple videos in a single learning series. This way, you keep each video at a digestible length that won’t overwhelm your audience.
• Plan your videos in advance so that you can be certain you cover all of the important content and don’t spend too much time on things that are irrelevant. Creating a script can be very helpful with this.
• Don’t just post raw educational videos with no editing. Use an online video maker like Promo to cut the fluff out of your video so it remains focused and clear.

Using Video Marketing Trends for Your Small Business

If you’re a small business short on resources, 2023 will be your year to shine. Almost across the whole board, the video marketing trends that are forecasted to take center stage this year are highly accessible and have a very low barrier to entry. So if you’re not yet investing some time in a proper video marketing strategy, this is the year to start.