Text and image-based content are still incredibly important but while the classics never die, video content’s kind of kicking analytics and taking names. Video content has been steadily climbing in popularity over the past few years.

Multiple studies prove that while all digital media is seeing increased usage by US adult users, digital video content has been sky rocketing. Each day, the average adult spends nearly two hours watching videos online. Seems absurd once it’s on paper, right?

But all those YouTube videos and linked Facebook recipe vids and Vines start to add up. We’re not judging, you watch those SNL recap clips for as many hours as you want. But video content dominates Internet traffic.

According to the recent stats, 91% of consumers are interested in seeing more video content from companies. So why the takeover? What makes video so effective for capturing your audience’s attention?

Here are some of the benefits that video content brings to your marketing campaign and brand.

Video Shareability: Syndication and SEO

One of the best features of video content it’s incredibly easy to share. Social media sites and YouTube lend themselves to easy sharing, and they’re also laid out to increase binge-watching (we’ve all gotten caught by Auto-Play and the Suggested Videos bar).

Today, embedding videos (and tweets and other social-media objects) is a standard feature on most sites, which allows both content creators and viewers to make video media easy to access and spread. This creates an organic syndication, letting videos spread out across different social media platforms, blogs, one-page documents, and even discussion pages.

Videos have the potential to go viral, and they pick up speed much faster than other forms of original content. And if your content goes viral, so does your company (and sometimes, even your product). When sharing is made so easy, even casual customers can more quickly transform into brand advocates.

So, how do you achieve good syndication and sharing for your video content? One: tag your work. Use relevant key words, titles, and tags to improve your videos search engine optimization. Two: engage your audience.

Engagement through Videos

Original content can exist in many forms — photo, text, video, etc. — and have many different purposes — to persuade, to sell, to inform, to entertain. But no matter what, content has to engage your audience. If your readers can’t mentally or emotionally participate with your content in any way, it’s not even worth making.

Your purpose won’t come across to an audience who isn’t actively interested in what you’re creating. And if your audience isn’t interested, there’s no way in buffering hell they’re going to share your content with their friends and become a brand advocate.

Leaders in B2C companies have indicated this year that their top priority in content creation is producing more engaging content to educate their clients and help them make the most of their products. Surely, no other type of content can match the efficiency of videos for training and development.

Video offers an immediacy that other content forms can’t quite match. Powerful video campaigns can have messages that last less than a minute but can pack a full emotional wallop. Videos engage multiple parts of your viewer — visual and audio — with the least amount of effort on the viewer’s part. Internet users are more likely to engage with a video than they are to finish a complete text post (again, we’re not bashing text posts).

Potential Video Repurposing

Reduce, reuse, and… repurpose? Video offers opportunities for multiple levels of content beyond the video itself. A single video can be split or repurposed into different content formats, and the video itself can be linked and embedded on multiple social media sites to help with your company’s social media marketing campaigns. When you repurpose video, you give your company these benefits:

• Improved SEO
• Targeting multiple audiences
• Wider viewer distribution
• Increasing the number of views on your original video
• Making outdated content relevant again.

Many companies release behind-the-scenes clips from their video campaigns, especially on YouTube accounts. Behind-the-scenes footage can make campaigns — and your company — feel more personal and relatable to your viewers, allowing them to feel like they’re part of your creation process.

Stills from videos can be turned into shareable pictures and advertisements with the right captioning. The audio from your video instantly becomes a podcast. The script of your video becomes a blog post.

All of these options offer new content with minimal effort and resources. They can act as advertisements promoting the video, or as related-but-separate posts. You can divert the majority of your attention to your next big content campaign while still creating easy, breezy content to keep up your online presence in the meantime.

Videos are the gifts that keep on giving, the content that keeps on creating for you.

Adaptable Video Format

We’ve already had some posts focusing on why mobile compatibility is becoming a must, and that’s certainly reflected in the overwhelming rise in mobile video. While desktop is still generating an impressive amount of video plays, the spike in mobile video plays indicates further growth.

That’s only supported by the fact that Millennials — the largest generation with growing spending power — engage more with social media networks that’re based on visual content like video, and Millennials are more likely to engage with those networks from a mobile device than a desktop.

The implication’s really clear: you need to bulk up your content with some visual media, and it needs to be supported on mobile devices. And guess what? Video’s one of the most easily adaptable content formats for mobile devices.

Video content also has a great solution to the host or post question — should you host the content on your website, or post it on a social media platform? With video, both can be effective, and embedding allows you to easily do both. And because of the popularity of visual content on social media, you’re more likely to get a widespread audience that can pass along your content.

People are flocking to video — the numbers are on a steady increase, and market support for video content creation is high. There are many tools that let users create engaging videos even with minimum skills and efforts.

To Sum It Up

If you’ve never created video content before, that’s perfectly fine! You’re hopping onto the bandwagon at the right time. You can still get ahead of the video curve by starting to make compelling, high-quality video content that drives user engagement.

It may take quite the financial and time investment, but a well-produced and planned video can help shape your brand, create brand-advocates, increase your audience, and help your social media platforms. At the end of the day, there’s a huge payoff, and it’s clear that video is the newest and fastest-growing online star.