Marketers are slow to adopt cloud-based solutions for video marketing

While Twitter and others are betting big on the future value of video, the marketers of today have been slow to adopt video-marketing tools from the big marketing cloud platforms.

This according to a recent report by VB Insight, which finds that video marketing tools are among the least utilized features of  marketing cloud solutions, currently being used by only about 20 percent of the nearly 1,500 marketers who were surveyed.

That’s a significantly lower uptake than marketers report for more traditional activities, such as email marketing, or lead generation.

“It seems that, while marketers have eagerly adopted clouds for things they were already doing, they’ve been slower to embrace the power of marketing clouds for more niche activities in social and mobile, where video looms huge,” said John Koetsier, VB Insight leader and author of the report.

The reticence is a bit difficult to understand because video has proven out as a highly engaging, SEO-rich content format that converts well across different use cases, screens, and social networks.

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Consider: Meerkat, the live-streaming app that was the darling of SXSW and has millions of downloads, has already become a weak second place in the market to Periscope, largely based on the power of Twitter’s marketing muscle.

There are also now more than 4 billion video views on Facebook every day — an astonishing 400 percent growth rate in less than a year. Underscoring the depth of its commitment to video, Facebook also recently introduced new video metrics and algorithms, prompting predictions that Facebook may soon overtake YouTube as the video platform of choice for brands.

This doesn’t even contemplate the large number of second-screen apps that are fundamentally disrupting traditional broadcast TV delivery and monetization models, and have created whole new streams of advertising revenue.

But despite all of this, marketers have yet to buy in to the power of video tools.

“When you see that the 100 million users on upstart platforms like Snapchat are watching over two billion videos a day, you know that video has reached and surpassed its tipping point,” said Koetsier. “Part of the challenge is that video has jumped so quickly — mobile video ads, for example, jumped 5X in 2014 alone — that the big marketing tech vendors have had little time to build solutions around it.”

The report, Marketing Clouds: How the best companies are winning via marketing technology, also makes it clear that, while marketers’ uptake of video tools has been slow, they aren’t the only cloud-based solutions that marketers are avoiding.

Adoption rates of tools for other significant growth areas, including influencer marketing (22 percent), m-commerce (15 percent), and ecommerce (12 percent), also lag well behind marketing cloud tools for analytics, targeting, and email marketing, all of which had been adopted by more than two-thirds of those surveyed for the report.