Video Marketing is a medium that has become central to most platforms. According to Sprout Social, Half of social media users prefer video over other types of content while 85% of social media users want more videos from brands.
Even platforms like Instagram that were originally designed for photo sharing have switched their algorithm to prioritize video content over photos, with Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri stating that: “Video is a driving an immense amount of growth for all the platforms right now, and I think it something we need to lean into more”. This came as the platform launched new video-based features like IGTV & Reels to accommodate the demand.
Before social media however, we were used to seeing brands engage with customers through video using TV ads, played between our favorite shows.
Now, combining the art of advertisement with social media, we have a new wave of brands and business flocking to these platforms to create video marketing content with the intention of creating more exposure for themselves. Long gone are the days of shelling out tens of thousands of pounds to produce an effective advertisement, as now you can shoot in high-quality, 4K video with your smartphone.
Videos may help in the branding of you, your company, and your product. Videos, particularly for service-based businesses, can help the company to establish a connection with their customers.
Video Marketing in the Energy Sector
Video Marketing in the Energy Sector has been around for decades. I’m sure there are countless Energy Suppliers TV ads you can recall seeing throughout the years. How could you forget the EDF advert with the dancing orange blob? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXa2F3kYeBI), or the British Gas advert that includes Wilbur the penguin, a long-time brand mascot for British Gas, skating through a thawed frozen house due to the homeowner’s boiler breaking down?
Emotional video storytelling for a while has been the go too for these companies, and was the most compelling way to make a lasting connection with viewers. More recently though, we’ve seen companies take a slightly more realistic and attainable approach with their video marketing.
British Gas for example for the past couple of years have focused on their ‘Solved on Screen’ series. This has been a multi-media campaign using mainly nontraditional ad types such as social media (YouTube, Livestreams, IG/Facebook/Twitter etc) to reach their required audience. The campaign idea is all based on 48% of British homeowners and renters using online tutorials to help finish their jobs.
British Gas have been sharing video tutorials and tips, filmed on smart phones and uploaded directly to online platforms, with a very DIY feel, fitting in well with the current way we digest content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. After all, most social media platforms were created with the idea of being able to connect with people you know, so brands leaning more into that familiar and friendly way of producing content is not surprising. Seemingly, the goal of this campaign is not only to ensure customers have sound advice to follow when completing household maintenance to do with gas and energy, but to also make customers feel more connected to the brand, as they are engaging with their audience in a way that feels familiar.
This is of course a far cry from the full produced video adverts we were used to seeing from these big brands years ago.
An example of emotional Video Marketing more recently in the Energy Sector comes from E-on’s Change Maker series, posted consistently on their YouTube channel. This is in which Eon tells a number of powerful stories of how ‘very different places tackled their energy challenges driven by ambitious change makers who were enabled by E. ON’s expertise and technologies.’ This allows for these Change Makers to tell their story, while E.on plug their technologies.
There are various other ways companies in the Energy Sector can use means of Video to quickly and efficiently market what they do to audiences.
Types of Content
Some Video Marketing concepts or ideas that could work for companies in the Energy Sector include:
- Energy Explained Videos: Make it easier to understand a complex subject. This can be done through a variety of methods. You could take hot topics from the Energy Industry like ‘Renewable Energy’ or more recently ‘Ofgem’s Price Cap’ which has hit the headlines recently, things that a lot of people may have heard of, but may not fully understand. Use Video to explain these things in a way that will resonate with a new audience. Ways to do this could be through the use of Video Animation, talking to the camera or simply a combination of video and text (make sure its engaging enough though!)
- Tutorials/Guides: As mentioned above, these videos can be as simple as you like. Whether you’d prefer to film on your smartphone, or create a detailed step by step with various angles on the best camera around, this is another way to allow your customers to feel connected to your brand by retaining new information. When clients need to solve a problem or obtain information, they frequently turn to the Internet. Videos are now searchable by search engines, which means they appear alongside text-based websites in search engine results. Many customers feel that viewing a brief movie rather than reading pages of text is a better method to get the information they need.
How We (Energy Solutions) Use Video Marketing
At Energy Solutions, our main use of Video Marketing has been done through social media. Our YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/EnergySolutions-01316101688/videos) is the main hub so far for all of our video content. Instead of creating content that is a direct advertisement about us and what we do, we have used a few different templates and methods to create content that stays within our area of expertise but that’s also designed to reach a new audience.
As an Energy Procurement company that works mainly with Businesses on procuring their energy, our content is a little more shifted towards strictly helping out our business customers as well as attracting new ones.
Starting off with our Supplier Reviews. These are usually shorter 4-6 minute videos in which we detail information about popular Energy Suppliers, including their backstory, what sort of Gas & Energy packages they offer, and what customers have to say about the brand. In terms of looping these videos back to who we are and what we do, this is done more subliminally. In every video, we include our links in the description, and also a page on our website that has information about the Supplier the video is about. We also encourage our audience to enquire with us if they have any more questions about the Supplier, or about what Energy Solutions does.
While so far these have been our main type of video content, we have dabbled in a few others such as helpful guides like ‘Ways to Contact Your Energy Supplier’ for our business customers. This is a detailed and engaging compilation of all the necessary information businesses need to contact their suppliers (things like phone numbers and email options), all in one place with all of the correct links. The main goal of this being saving our customers time, and also helping out potential new customers contact their current supplier efficiently and easily. Again, with this we include links to our website that has a page about every supplier mentioned in the video.
Our first video ‘Bitcoin & It’s Energy Consumption’ was a way of combining our field of Energy with a very current and trending topic such as cryptocurrency. This for a while was our most viewed video, most likely due to the popularity of the subject matter.