Video: The Marketing Trend You Can’t Ignore

Social media has completely changed in the past decade. 

In 2008, 21% of adults accessed a social media account once a week.

In 2018, 69% of adults accessed at least one social media platform every single day.

Folks, that is a 229% increase in active users. To put this in perspective nationally, that amounts to roughly 66,996,000 adults ready to engage with your content.

Naturally, the next question is: How do you reach these people? Better yet, how do you reach the right person, with the right content, at the right time?

Lately, Leap Group’s answer almost always involves video.

We thought it would be interesting to take all our clients, and all their active social media channels, to test what type of content generated the highest engagement rate by age and gender. Take a look at what we found in the past 6 months:

The data speaks for itself. Across the board, with a combined average of 14.37%, engagement rates for video, content significantly outperformed video carousel content by 84.94% and photo content by 53.45%.

Armed with these statistics, incessant monitoring of social algorithm updates and a lot of coffee, we completely revamped our clients’ upcoming content calendars to prioritize video.

We’ll let you in on our top tips and strategies that ensure your video marketing dollars are mattering more.

Know Your Specs

You give your videos the best chance of success by ensuring size, dimensions and aspect ratios are optimized by network and device. We love Sprout Social’s Video Specs Cheat Sheet. It’s always up-to-date and all in one place. Use it.

Give Your Audience Visual Cues

Eighty percent of video across all social networks is consumed without sound. This puts the onus on marketers to make sure their brand’s voice and message is being heard loud and clear, even when the volume is turned all the way down.

Keep It Short

Viewer retention rates are on the decline – with 72% of online users tapping out after 60 seconds. If there’s something you really want your audience to see, use your first 10 seconds wisely. Put the important stuff in the beginning.

Define Your Target

Know your people. If your audience isn’t on Snapchat, then chances are you shouldn’t be either. Did you know that last year, men spent 40% longer watching videos online than women? How does this stack up against your video analytics? We help our clients clearly visualize their target audience by building out detailed personas to make sure the right video reached the right demographic.

Audit Your Competitors

Work smarter, not harder. Learn from your competitors’ channels to help boost your own video efforts. We leverage tools like Rival IQ to help benchmark performance and gain invaluable insight into competitor video strategy.



Long story short – prioritize video in your digital media strategy, or you run the risk of getting left behind.

videos about videos

Like many agencies, our clients are spread across different cities and different states. It’s not plausible for executives to fly to our weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly reporting meetings. But we refuse to let our hard work fall on deaf ears.

At Leap Group, we pride ourselves in giving clients more than just the numbers. Anyone can pull data. We take analytics reporting to the next level by taking that data and telling a story – essentially building a narrative around overall digital performance.

This allows our clients to review report decks on their own time with a video walking them through it. This also allows for easy distribution among colleagues and teams. Our clients tell us that “Hey! Watch this 5-minute video!” is a lot better received than “Hey! Look through this 30-slide PowerPoint presentation.”

Try it out!