Why Video-First Strategy Matters for Your Bottom Line
The bottom-line case for video-first strategy in 2018, once IGTV and cheaper vertical video production had shifted where attention and ad dollars were going.
Where the money was moving
By the second half of 2018, the return on video-first strategy was showing up in a concrete place: the cost of reaching people. Static image ads on Facebook and Instagram had gotten steadily more expensive as more advertisers piled into the same inventory, while video, especially Stories ads, was still comparatively cheap because supply hadn’t caught up with demand yet. That gap alone made video-first worth a hard look purely on cost per result, before considering anything about branding or engagement.
What IGTV added to the equation
Instagram’s launch of IGTV in June 2018 gave brands a dedicated long-form vertical video home for the first time, sitting alongside Stories and feed video rather than replacing either. It didn’t reach a huge audience immediately, but it signaled where Instagram intended to keep investing, and businesses that started building a library of longer vertical content early had a head start once discovery improved.
The efficiency argument
A single day of shooting could now produce a week or more of usable content: a longer piece for IGTV or YouTube, cut down into feed-length video and cut down again into several days of Stories clips. That kind of repurposing turned one production cost into several weeks of distribution, which materially lowered the cost per piece of content compared to writing an equivalent volume of blog posts or designing an equivalent volume of graphics.
The retention argument
Video-first brands weren’t just acquiring attention more cheaply, they were keeping customers longer. A demo video or a founder explaining a product on camera built a level of trust that a product description page rarely matched, and businesses running video-first strategies through 2018 reported noticeably lower return and refund rates on products that had a clear video walkthrough attached to the listing.
Where the return was slower
None of this meant every dollar into video paid back immediately. Building an audience on IGTV specifically took patience, since discovery tools were still immature at launch, and a business chasing quick returns was better served leaning on Stories and feed video first, then treating longer-form video as a longer-term investment.
The bottom-line takeaway
Video-first strategy in late 2018 wasn’t primarily a branding play anymore, it was a cost play. Cheaper ad inventory, higher content efficiency through repurposing and better conversion on product pages added up to a strategy that paid for itself faster than most businesses expected, provided the team treated it as a real operational shift rather than an occasional experiment.
More from the archive: browse the Content Marketing category or see everything published in 2018.
