If you run an online business, chances are a lot of your marketing has to do with content. You produce the best possible content, you optimize it for the search engines, and that is the meat and potatoes of how you get people to come to your site and engage with your business. This is the very foundation on which most online businesses are based. However, a new study into how people conducted their marketing online in 2013 has shown that the type of content online entrepreneurs are using is changing. While in the past, written content such as blog posts and sales letters was the most common thing to use, in 2013 the YouTube video has risen dramatically in terms of frequency of use for marketing purposes.

How Many People Are Using Video in their Marketing Efforts?

A survey by Reel SEO that was recently published talked to 600 professional marketers and online business owners, and found that a whopping 93% of them had used some form of video marketing in their strategies this year. This means that if you aren’t doing any kind of viral video marketing for your online business, you are in a 7% minority, and it is possible that you are losing out to people who are doing it. Of the respondents in the survey, 82% said that video marketing had had a positive effect on their business, and offered a good return on investment. While that isn’t as high a percentage as those who have used it, it is still a very high number that serves as a ringing endorsement for the effectiveness of video as a marketing medium.

Video And SEO in 2013

While video marketing has been around for years, in the past people were perhaps reluctant to use it over text because of a lack of understanding about how Google and other search engines treat content they can’t scan in the same way they analyze text. In 2013, things became much clearer – Google loves video content and even presents it as an enhanced search result that the user can click on to run the video right from their search results page. While learning how to perform SEO on a video is a skill online business owners have had to pick up, because the methods of tagging and writing descriptors for your YouTube content are different to those for optimizing written articles, it is no longer a dark art that people don’t understand. This has made it much easier for people to include video in their content mix and still be assured it as doing as much, if not more, for their Google ranking as their text content.

2013 was certainly the year when video marketing went from being a ‘nice to have’ that only people who felt they were at the cutting edge of marketing bothered with, to being basically an essential for doing effective online marketing. While some businesses operating online, for example writing businesses, may not see many advantages to it, those doing affiliate marketing and other online activities can strongly benefit from including it in their approach for 2014!