If you do only one thing this year to increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing, integrating video into your customer acquisition strategy is a must. More potential customers are consuming video than ever before, across multiple platforms and in multiple formats. From long-form video on Instagram’s recently launched IGTV to short-form videos in mini-snippets and GIFs, the power of video is taking over social media.

For brand marketers wanting to incorporate video into their social networking efforts, understanding the potential of video outreach is essential. Knowing how a video + social media marketing double-whammy can improve your brand building efforts is key for increased customer acquisition and audience engagement. If you want further convincing of the power of video-enabled social media outreach, bear the following tips in mind.

Instagram Video

According to data from Statista Research, Instagram’s user base is expected to increase to over 111 million users by 2019 (statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-instagram-users). That’s a heck of a lot of eyeballs your brand could potentially be connecting with if you doubled down on video marketing on Instagram. Brand marketers who realize the potential of Instagram as a cornerstone of their video marketing strategy are poised to reap the rewards of this cross-generational powerhouse social media network.

YouTube Marketing

As of May 2018, over 83% of smartphone-enabled users were utilizing YouTube on their mobile devices. That’s more than Amazon Video, Hulu, and Netflix (statista.com/statistics/294586/smartphone-video-app-reach-us). If you want to connect with mobile users on social media, YouTube marketing needs to be an integral part of your strategy. Sharing your YouTube videos on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest lets you combine the power of YouTube video with multiple social networking platforms.

Embed-Ready Content

Video created on platforms like Instagram and YouTube shouldn’t just be left on those platforms. When you embed videos into blog posts on your own website or on platforms like LinkedIn and Medium, you increase your time-on-site rate while improving your engagement rates at the same time. Brand marketers using embedded video can not only increase their thought leadership status, but can increase their social share rate too. Understanding how the enticement of embedded video benefits your brand is essential if you want to start using video outreach across multiple platforms.

When you realize how the combination of video outreach and social media marketing can drive consumer attention to your brand, there’s a good chance you’ll feel like kicking yourself for not having doubled down sooner. Video-enabled social media marketing just might be the one-two-punch your business has been looking for.