The success of YouTube since 2004 has been astounding by any measure. For example, YouTube is the second largest search engine (behind Google), more than one billion users visit YouTube each month, 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute and, six billion hours of video are watched monthly. These and many additional statistics for video hosting sites are simply staggering.

YouTube grew with User Generated Content (UGC) - growth of smartphones, ever increasing bandwidth, ease of uploading content and instant distribution made it easy for anyone to become a broadcaster with YouTube. Over time enterprises doing B2B business also saw the opportunity to use YouTube to push their own content starting with "produced" marketing videos and then complementing them with UGC such as how-to videos. Today, video marketing has become an important and growing component of B2B content marketing. In that context, here are my thoughts on various B2B video trends in the next couple of years:

UGC versus produced videos: Videos are playing an important role in content marketing. Content marketing is a beast that needs continuous or, at least, regular feeding. Given the cost and time to produce television quality video content, it will be important for marketers to put out UGC videos. Similarly, complex concepts require more than just a camera ’ perhaps screen recording or a white board ’ for clarity. There will be a need to curate the videos to maintain some quality standards and branding but we will see more videos produced by engineers, sales people, support people and others using standard desktops and tablets. Examples of these videos will include product updates, "how-to" videos, customized sales presentations, and customer service videos.

Interactive versus passive viewing:

While video creation and distribution has become easier by leaps and bounds with video capture and hosting platforms, video viewing has stagnated. Most videos are watched passively by viewers and are commented on through scrolling comments below. There is very little interactivity with the author of the video, other viewers and the brand. We are seeing some improvements with annotations that, for example, YouTube allows, but more advances will happen.

Searchable versus opaque videos: Videos naturally lend themselves to sequential viewing ’ one starts at the beginning and keeps watching till the video is over, or when one loses interest. People also browse forward or backward if they can preview a frame by hovering over the video timeline. For entertainment videos, this works just fine. For B2B videos, which value substance more than style, this is a problem. For busy enterprise users, it is important to find important content by searching inside the video, making it as easy as Ctrl-F inside a Word document. We will see more tools to build searchable videos, which make navigation easy.

Discoverable versus hidden videos:

Today videos are found based on the metadata associated with them. Additionally, when found, videos start from the beginning instead of the point where the match occurred. While this works fine with text documents (which allow application specific searching within), for videos it becomes tedious to find the relevant content inside them. We will see video technology supporting more precision in search and, thereby bringing videos out of hiding.

Views Versus Interaction Analytics:

Video analytics today are limited to views and heat maps. Unlike a website which has multiple objects and a users' interaction with the website can be measured by their interaction with specific objects, videos are treated like blobs and it is not clear from the views what impression the video made on the users. We will see more interaction being captured in analytics as video technology evolves.

So, why are videos important for B2B product companies? Here are some reasons: Video results have appeared in almost 70 percent of the top 100 search listing on Google in 2012 (Marketing Week, 2012); the chances of getting a page one listing on Google increase 53 times with video (source: Forrester Research, 2012); 70 percent of B2B content marketers now use videos (source Top Rank); according to Rhythm and Insights, combining video with full page ads boost engagement by 22 percent; animated explainer videos increase conversion rates by 20 percent according to Unbounce. There are many more statistics like this that make video content an important part of an overall content strategy. The trends mentioned above simply will make video content marketing even more effective. So, find a way to make videos easily and contribute to your company's brand!