Online video is quickly becoming the primary way for people to consume content. With that in mind, small businesses should include video in their Internet marketing strategies or risk falling behind.

These few points will convince you:

Statistics

I recently attended a YouTube event, where they discussed several interesting statistics. The most interesting one? Half of TV watched globally by people under age 30 is not on TV.

Cisco also predicts that by 2017, video will account for 69 percent of all consumer Internet traffic. By then, video-on-demand traffic alone will have almost tripled.

These statistics show how videos have taken online content marketing by storm. This infographic also shows the effectiveness of video marketing.

Online videos, including YouTube, Facebook and others, have exponential reach. YouTube receives more than 1 billion unique visitors every month — that's more than any other channel, apart from Facebook.

Even Facebook pages have reported high reach when they post videos (natively) on their pages, as compared to all other kinds of posts (text, photo, links, etc.).

Success stories

The success stories of video marketing have provided excellent results. A recent campaign from Volkswagen, saw three of its videos viewed a combined 155 million times. The funny videos of the characters of Clash of Clans, the mobile game by Supercell, have 50 million-plus views — each.

Even if these case studies have big budgets, they at least show how effective video marketing can be in spreading your message to more people.

Production costs have fallen significantly in recent years, and you no longer need to be a technical whiz to work out how to use video. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Vine are effective, even if the videos are not shot entirely professionally. Even Twitter now enables you to capture, edit and share videos right from your Twitter app, as announced recently.

Targeted video advertising

YouTube allows for video ads to be highly targeted. Businesses can target audiences based on demographics, content topics and remarketing lists. The ads also have frequency capping, transparency and flexibility. Also, the in-stream YouTube video ads enable you to pay for only full views of the ad, not for people who skip them.

The same targeting facility applies for Facebook advertising, which is almost the same for video as it is for traditional ads, which you might have been doing already.

Mobile devices

Digital advertising is growing by 19 percent (globally) due to the growth of usage of smartphones and tablets. Videos are now being watched everywhere, due to mobile data and devices getting faster and cheaper in the past few years. It is only sensible for businesses/brands to consider mobile in their video-marketing strategy.

The value of video marketing and advertising is measured by the attention it receives, which is its currency. Today, online video has more eyeballs and attention of the audience, compared to TV. It is getting harder for brands to reach their target audience on TV.

For video marketing to be effective, make sure the content is relevant, targeted correctly and that mobile devices are not ignored.