9 Dynamic Video Marketing Trends: From Video SEO to TikTok

Video is one of the most valuable tools in the world of modern marketing. With 56% of consumers watching videos on social media every month, and 70% of eCommerce brands increasing their video marketing budgets over the last year, video engagement is at an all-time high. 

While TikTok and Instagram have dominated the social video scene over the last few years, data shows that video consumers aren’t just watching videos of viral memes or influencers. In fact, four in 10 internet users watch videos from brands they like or would consider buying from, and 84% have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video – so, if you haven’t already jumped on the video marketing bandwagon, you better get a movie on!

With the prominence of social video continuing to grow by the day, having a video marketing strategy for your business has never been more important. So, if you’re ready to leverage this increasingly popular format and grow your brand and ROI, here are some of the top video marketing trends to try in 2022 and beyond.

Recent political campaigns and elections have seen the role of social media and search platforms come under scrutiny due to their ability to sway voters’ decisions. As a result, there have been calls for advertisers and influencers – as well as the platforms they publish on – to adhere to new standards. This means clearly labelling ads and disclosing when a person has received money, products or services in return for posting their endorsement.

Take a look at the ‘paid partnership’ flag that appears above TV and radio personality Ash Pollard’s Instagram posts, or optical brand OPSM’s video ads which are clearly marked ‘sponsored’. Several publishing platforms are joining the push for open advertising. Facebook Ad’s Library has even compiled a comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads currently running across its apps and services, including Instagram.

To make your social media ads shine, use the customizable features in these Instagram Stories Templates by Atamotion. And, in the spirit of ad transparency, be sure to caption your posts with the hashtag ‘ad’ where appropriate. 

More people than ever are consuming video content without sound. In fact, research has shown that when silent autoplay is the default, 85% of Facebook videos are watched with the sound off. This means that your audience is more likely to watch your video for longer if it’s made to be viewed without sound, or if it includes captions that don’t detract from, but actually enhance the viewing experience. 

So, what’s the easiest way to create watchable silent videos for social media? By adding closed captions or subtitles, of course! For example, this interview with Billie Eilish for Vanity Fair is accompanied by perfectly synced subtitles. 

The addition of closed captions and subtitles is super important when it comes to accessibility. Some of your audience might be hard of hearing or deaf, which means that without on-screen elements, their experience – and therefore your brand – might be negatively impacted.

Add seamless subtitles to your visual content with this Easy Subtitle captioning kit from Envato Elements. It allows you to easily adjust the stop and start times of each word and sentence and instantly customize your font, color and text animations to ensure clear communication. 

TikTok is the latest social platform revolutionizing the way video creators and marketers think about short-form content. TikTok’s developers have also created the concept of the endless loop – where a video repeats constantly until the viewer swipes to the next piece of content.

Seamlessly transitioning between the end and the beginning of the video, making it unclear when the visuals start and finish, can help you quickly clock up views.

“TikTok has really changed how video creators think about short-form content,” explains Jen McKinnon, Video Marketing Manager at Envato. “The way that videos repeat until you swipe has inspired the concept of the endless loop, a cheeky little video technique that works to clock more views by not making it clear when the video has ended. This is done by seamlessly transitioning between the end and the beginning of the video.”

TikTok creator Nick Major tapped into this trend by making his own endless loop revolving around the relatable, never-ending chore of washing dishes. We see him scrub, dry and put away his cutlery, pots and pans, only to close the cupboard door and see the sink is full again. 

We’ve created our own endless loop example in line with the Good Soup trend and have accompanied it with a how-to video to help you master the technique.

For your next loop video, add a sense of constant movement and depth with these Quike – Loop Kinetic Posters by MotionWizardStudio. Simply customize the text, the font and the colors, and away you go!

We all have a collective fascination with real people doing real things. Inspired by a desire for authenticity – and playing into the resurgence of DIY and arts and crafts activities – this trend offers a window into everyday routines, hobbies and pursuits. 

It also extends to behind-the-scenes content, which gives viewers a chance to peek behind the curtain and access-all-areas – for example, formats such as outtakes, bloopers and extra footage that didn’t make the official final cut. Basically, anything that reveals the people and processes behind the brand or content.

One very intricate example of this trend showcases YouTuber and creative engineer Mark Rober’s homemade squirrel obstacle course, where cute and quirky animals scale rope ladders and run through plastic tunnels to hijack their coveted acorns. It’s interspersed with a Mission Impossible soundtrack and footage from popular heist films to add a sense of adventure and a speckle of comedy to the back garden setting. 

If you’re planning some behind-the-scenes content of your own, introduce the people behind the curtain with these ready-to-use Minimal Lower Thirds by cooreets. And add names and job titles to your content with customized colors, and 30 and 60 frames per second options.

Optimizing your video to be indexed and ranked on search engines isn’t a new concept, but it’s only now becoming a mainstream practice. As businesses start to pay more and more attention to organically building video audiences, it’s essential to ensure that your content can be easily found.

“SEO for video is not a new concept, but it’s really only just now catching on in the mainstream now as businesses start to pay more attention to building video audiences organically,” says Jen. 

From carrying out keyword research to optimizing titles, descriptions and hashtags, there are several strategies that video marketers should adopt to ensure their content stands out from the competition.

Here are some tips to ensure your video is optimized for SEO: 

Netflix, Roku, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney Plus are some so-called “over-the-top” services that bypass TV providers, allowing viewers to watch whatever they want, whenever they want.

By constantly capturing data and gathering audience insights, these streaming platforms are a marketer’s dream. This is thanks to their ability to reach small, highly-targeted audiences with specifically personalized content, giving them the opportunity to serve up sequential ads that push viewers further down the marketing funnel. 

For example, this ad from Netflix promoting “Play Something” – a feature that automatically finds viewers the perfect show to watch based on what they love – revolves around an exaggerated portrayal of a very normal, relatable situation – not being able to choose what to watch –  featuring hilariously OTT animation. 

When creating an OTT advert, ensure that the viewing experience remains the same, regardless of whether it’s being consumed on a connected TV, laptop or smart device. You should also keep your video relevant to your audience and make your message short and succinct, aiming to grab the viewer’s attention before they have the option to click the ‘skip ad’ button.

Marketers are always hoping to get more bang for their buck, and content atomization is an excellent way to achieve this. Extending content value means adapting video content across a variety of platforms to extend content reach.

To take advantage of this trend, you need to know where different content types work best. For example, you might have a long-form interview that lives on YouTube. You can then repurpose that content for Instagram in the form of a teaser video before breaking it down further into clips to publish on TikTok or Instagram Reels. You can even atomize it further and transform the audio from the video into a podcast. Or if you send newsletters using email newsletter software, you can embed these videos to ensure they reach a wider audience.

The Futur – an online education platform for creative entrepreneurs – does a great job of content atomization with their audience-building workshop. This content comprises an 8-minute YouTube video that’s then edited down to make a visually arresting three-minute Instagram video, including bold on-screen takeaways and captioned soundbites. To extend its value even further, the team also released a fast-paced TikTok video that comes in at just under the platform’s time limit of one minute. 

“​​There are so many places to publish content now and, theoretically, any video you make can be adapted across all these different platforms,” Jen explains. “This doesn’t just mean changing the dimensions of the video to optimize viewing; it also means adapting the format. For example, you might have a piece of long-form interview content that lives on YouTube. You can then repurpose that content for Instagram in the form of a teaser video, you can break it down into clips – or golden nuggets – to publish on TikTok, and you can even take the audio and transform it into a podcast. This is called content atomization, and planning your content in that way has the potential to extend its value tenfold.”

To create content for all your platforms, you’ll need to pay attention to different dimensions and formats required. That’s where this pack of Social Media Posters by Colorama comes in thanks to its range of aspect ratio formats.

From growing your audience and generating more views, to providing brand or product endorsement and increasing brand awareness, working with influencers can do incredible things for your business. So it’s no surprise that we’re seeing guest stars and subject-matter experts popping up all over the video marketing world. 

Collaboration is key with this trend, and can be beneficial for both creators and influencers alike to gain exposure to new audiences, platforms and storytelling opportunities. We see this in action as Rob from VidIQ invites Nate from Channel Makers to host a special episode of his explainer series, which is all about audience participation. Both are creators and both are YouTube educators, but far from being competitors, the partnership gives them the opportunity to boost each other’s brand.

Social media has completely changed the way people interact with content online. Authenticity is more important than ever, but audience attention spans are shorter than ever – so only brands that inject personality into their posts will stand out from the crowd. Complex and nuanced communication styles, like sarcasm and satire, have been made popular by social media’s evolution into the realm of video, and these traits, inspired by the social media form, have begun to filter through into regular, day-to-day content.

“Video allows brands to convey much more personality than other mediums and also provides a vehicle for more complex and nuanced communication styles, like sarcasm and satire, that traditionally haven’t translated as well purely via text,” Jen says. “With the support of video content, brands are finding new and creative ways to adopt these quirks into their broader marketing content as a way to embrace the evolution in communication we’re seeing across social media, and to achieve consistency from platform to platform.”

Brands are now finding new and creative ways to achieve consistency of voice from platform to platform. Just look at Wendy’s Twitter feed, which consistently calls out customers who favor their competitors and publicly shares its ‘beef’ with McDonald’s. This savage approach on social media can also be found making its way into their TV commercials – take these scenes set in the McBoardroom that poke fun at the company’s secret sauce and sesame seed-sprinkled buns.  

That does it for the video marketing trends you’ll be seeing this year! For more great tips and trends content, check out our Video Trends, Social Video Trends, Video Editing With the Experts, or our guide to Envato Elements: The Unlimited Creative Subscription for Video Creators.