video-marketing

The online content world is changing and video is now surpassing text as the best medium to engage with your target audience online. YouTube is the internet’s second biggest search engine with over three billion searches a month, over one billion unique monthly visitors, and bigger than Yahoo, Bing, AOL and Ask.com combined. Even though video is such a powerful medium when you ask the average business they are not leveraging this format yet. Time constraints, difficulty level and unfamiliarity with video are key reasons why businesses are not jumping on this internet trend. Here we explain why it’s absolutely paramount that businesses use video marketing and why it’s not as difficult as most people think.

Engagement

Think of your own experience when engaging with content online. Are you more likely to read through a 1000-word Blog post or watch a two-minute video? Internet data proves that video engagement is higher than written engagement. According to the Content Marketing Institute users are 10 times more likely to engage, share, and comment on a video than they are a regular Blog post. Videos command more attention and therefor viewers are more inclined to interact with the video in some way. Videos also evoke emotion more quickly than the written word due to the varied signals (voice, expression, music, body language) compared to written posts. If you are looking to increase interaction for your business or brand, video is the way to do it.

Reporting

Reporting metrics for written Blogs posts are limited. You may be able to tell how many people clicked on a particular post, and the bounce rate (percentage of users that abandoned the site after viewing only one page) but that’s the extent of it. It is hard to know with Blog posts how many people read the first sentence only, who read half the article and who devoured every single last word. With video you can tell the duration of the video watched through a feedback loop that measures click-thru-rate, number of times watched and drop off points. These stats can be examined at a granular level so you can monitor behaviour on an individual basis. Recent stats show that 64% of viewers watch on average ¾ of a video (Brainshark); it is safe to say written content does not get digested as fully as video.

Search Engine Optimization

Adding video to your website can increased the likelihood of ranking on the first page of Google according to Comscore. Video not only enriches the content on your site which is positive for SEO it also provides additional opportunities to insert keyword labels, expand your site-map and back-links from YouTube will certainly help with your website’s SEO performance. With the increased usage of videos online the user experience on your site will increase. A video rich website will positively affect your site’s bounce rate, engagement and average page duration which will in turn help your website rank better in search engines.

Conversions

The most important reason to use video on your website is that it converts users better than any other medium. According to Search Engine Land, videos on retail sites kept visitors an average of two minutes longer and converted 30% more people. A recent study shows that 71% of marketing professionals believe that video converts better than any other medium. In a world where the average web-user is drowning in written content, video is the way to get ahead.

The good news is thousands of dollars of equipment and production software is not needed to create a powerful marketing video for your website. There is inexpensive online software that is easy, intuitive and effective if businesses want to have a stab at creating their own online videos. Here at Cloud9 marketing we create impactful and conversion-driven videos for our clients. If you see the importance of adding video as a component to your online marketing strategy but would rather leave it to the pros, contact Cloud9 today.