When it comes to your company’s online presence, content really is king.
But there’s a caveat—not all content is created equal. You can bombard your fans, followers, and customers with useless content that they will, at best, ignore—or you can share meaningful, insightful, and entertaining content that will keep them coming back for more.
To ensure that you fall into the latter category, you need focus on providing quality content. You can do that in two ways: by creating content and by curating content.
Creating Content
Creating content means building original content from the ground up. This is your company’s chance to share its knowledge, use its own voice, and develop useful and captivating content that will wow your customer base.
When you create original content, you own it because you made it. As the primary source of the content, you become the expert. People viewing your content are sticking to your website (or blog, or Facebook page, or… you get the drift)—they aren’t clicking away to read more. In fact, other people might share your insightful content, bringing even more viewers straight to the source: you!
The beauty of creating content is that you control what is being said. That means that you can share what you think is important and you can talk about pretty much anything you want. Just remember: all content, including created content, should focus on quality first. Put thought into what it is you’re producing—and check your spelling and grammar!
Of course, creating content requires a little effort on your part. After all, researching, writing, and revising won’t happen by itself.
As the primary source, readers are counting on you to be the expert. If you’re caught writing inaccurate, misleading, or just plain wrong information, then you’ll need to bear the brunt of the blame.
PROS: Customize content. Draw people to you. Be the expert.
CONS: Time consuming. Tough work. Big responsibility.
Curating Content
Curating content means sharing content that was created by other people and companies, like reviews, news articles, or pretty much anything that you find interesting and relevant.
Curating content is not about plagiarizing: it’s about connecting people with content from other sources and giving those sources credit for their hard work.
Sharing, re-tweeting, and otherwise passing along external sources of content is a great way to show your fan base that you’re in tune with what’s going on in your industry. It’s a good way of diversifying the content you provide and of steering clear of self-promoting post after self-promoting post.
When you share content, it’s like high fiving the person who created it, whether it’s a publication, a partner, a passionate customer, or anyone else in your industry. Building a relationship with industry influencers is always a good thing.
Curating content is also a time saver—it’s usually much faster (and cheaper) to find something share-worthy than it is to create it from scratch.
On the downside, when someone clicks on an external link, they’re floating away from your site. Make sure that you give them incentive to come back!
PROS: Quick and easy. Mix it up. Making friends.
CONS: Can’t edit. Leads people away. Lacks originality.
The Bottom Line: The best content strategies include a mix of both created and curated content. That perfect balancing point depends on your product, your company, and your industry—talk to us and we’ll help you determine the optimal ratio. Ultimately, no matter the type, always make sure that you’re providing quality content.
Is Mobilegeddon Upon Us?
If you haven’t made a priority of making your website mobile friendly, you might want to start thinking about changing that.
It could cost you your ranking on Google. (Cue the horror film screams.)
What Happened
In mid-April, Google announced that they were developing a new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm. The idea was that mobile-friendly sites would, in theory, appear higher in search engine results when users were conducting their searches on a mobile phone.
To a lot of people, this wasn’t just some small change: this was “Mobilegeddon”. Businesses began to panic about the mobile-friendliness of their websites (what took you so long?), with many opting to expedite the process before the algorithm change took effect.
On April 21st, the world of SEO held its collective breath as it waited to see Mobilegeddon unfold. It wasn’t unlike the moment the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. And just as our wild fears of the Y2K bug were all for nothing, it turns out that the fuss behind Mobilegeddon may have been a little bit excessive.
For now, at least.
What Could Happen
It turned out that the change in the algorithm didn’t have as severe an impact as many had expected. It took a week to fully roll out, but even after that week, the changes weren’t as drastic as anticipated.
This is thought to be generally attributable to a few factors.
First, and perhaps most importantly, the update was implemented, but not all websites have been reindexed. As these websites’ scores become updated, it could potentially affect the rankings in mobile search. (Read more here.)
Second, the fact that many companies decided to take action on making their website mobile friendly prior to the launch of the update could have lessened the impact of the update. In theory, the update is supposed to make mobile friendly sites appear higher than non-mobile friendly sites in mobile searches; if the site is, indeed, mobile friendly, then it should remain roughly where it is in desktop searches, assuming competing sites have taken similar action.
Third, many note that the update was said to be one factor that affects search engine results. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the only factor, or the “be all or end all” factor. Other factors could take priority in the ranking, making the effects not as noticeable as people expected.
Time will tell how much impact this change has really caused, but for now, it’s safe to say that the so called “Mobilegeddon” was an overreaction.
What Should I Do?
Algorithm update or not, you really should have a mobile friendly website. If your site looks bad on mobile devices, you’re going to lose out on the audience that is visiting you from those sources—and you probably know that more and more people are using mobile devices to do their internet searches.
To find out whether Google considers your website to be mobile-friendly or not, just enter the web address into this site.
You want it to say “Awesome! This page is mobile friendly” after you complete your analysis. If it doesn’t say that, you have some work to do.
Cloud9 Marketing can help you bring your website up to mobile-friendly standards, preventing you from losing out on potential business and on your mobile search engine results ranking. Contact us, and we’ll set up a plan for
Is Your Website Feeling Under the Weather?
You’ve got an awesome product or service. Your website looks pretty. You’re ready for business.
So why isn’t anyone calling?
The short answer is that there’s a lot more to a good website than you might think. Though it might look nice and be intuitive for you, there’s a good chance that there are some gaping holes lurking around your site.
In other words, your website is feeling a little under the weather – but just like when you’re feeling not-so-hot, it’s fixable.
Go to the Doctor
When something’s wrong with you but you’re not sure what it is, you probably head to the doctor (or, at least, you consult Dr. Google). Your doc probably won’t be able to help with your website, but we can: a website audit is the e-version of the doctor’s appointment.
A website audit is all about finding what elements are performing as they should, and what pieces are not. In our basic package, we search for broken links, HTML code errors, duplicate content, keyword ranking and visibility, etc.
Just like your appointment, audits are pretty quick an easy: we’ll meet with you for an hour to listen to your “symptoms” (a.k.a. your online marketing objective and goals), then we’ll take a few days to run our tests and assemble information. Once we’ve done our work, we’ll meet with you for another hour to discuss our findings, recommendations, and next steps.
Your doctor might recommend surgery, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it right away. On a similar note, our consultations are no-obligation: you can choose to act on our recommendations, or you can think about it for a little while.
Follow Up With the Specialist
You know what’s wrong and you’re ready to take action. Time to book an appointment with the specialist who is going to fix you right up.
Depending on what is wrong in the first place, a simple Band-Aid might be all you need to get back into shape. But let’s say your audit returned highlighting some major weaknesses in the search engine optimization department, and you want that fixed, stat. The next step would be getting an SEO specialist involved (Cloud9 does that!).
If it’s your SEO that needs fixing, we’ll work with you to determine your objectives and strategies, and we’ll come up with some keywords together that will convert searches into sales. We’ll roll up our sleeves, snap on our surgeon’s gloves, and take a look at your website’s structure, putting things back together in a way that makes your website shine.
SEO not the problem? Whatever we find in the audit, we’ll fix at this step, whether it’s a tiny job, a major overhaul, or somewhere in between.
Stay In Shape
Congratulations – you’re feeling better! Now don’t let all that hard work go to waste. Just as new illnesses and injuries come and go, the web is constantly changing. Links go stale, SEO algorithms change, and so on. Adequate follow up is key to staying in good shape.
Touch base with us every few months, and we’ll make sure that everything is running smoothly. If it’s not, we’ll help you fix it. You can even sign up for monthly website assessments so that we can proactively fix minor issues before they become big problems.
Once your website has got a clean bill of health, you can focus on providing your customers with the best product or service! That’s all there is to it.
8 Tips for Creating a Killer Newsletter
If you’re like most people, you probably receive email newsletters from time to time.
Some, you love: as soon as a good one lands in your inbox, you open it up and start clicking away at what’s inside.
Others, you could take or leave: you might keep one of these in your inbox, saving it to read for a later time, like when you’re waiting for the bus to arrive.
And then there are the ones that you delete immediately upon receipt, not even bothering to see what’s inside.
We’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that you want your newsletters to appear in the first category. Here are 8 tips that will make your newsletters shine.
Target, Target, Target
The first step to a killer newsletter is making sure that the people receiving it actually want to read it.
Your readers should see value in what you send out. If they do, they’ll engage with the content and will be thrilled to keep receiving updates. If they don’t, they’ll unsubscribe, missing out on future newsletters and emails that they might have found interesting and useful.
Curating your list of recipients can be a mind-numbing task, but categorizing your contacts means that you can control who receives what. Targeted content will keep your contacts happy.
Content is King
No matter how you organize your information or how nicely you design your newsletters, nothing will help you if your content is a snore.
Why are you sending out this newsletter? Do you have important news to share? Are you offering your readers a reward or a deal? Are you launching a new product? Don’t send newsletters for the sake of sending newsletters: instead, send them to share valuable content.
An Eye-Catching Title
Coming up with the perfect subject line can be tricky. You want your subject to entice people to open up the email, and you want it to describe what kind of content is inside. The shorter, the better: many mobile screens only display the first 30 characters in a subject line (including spaces).
Short is Sweet
Resist the urge to send a novel-length newsletter. No matter how compelling your content, most recipients will get bored partway and will skip out before reaching the end. Keep your content short and punchy, and provide a link for readers to click if they want to find out more about a particular topic.
Stick to Your Brand
Every aspect of your newsletter – from tone to design – should reflect your brand.
Newsletters are an extension of your brand, so be consistent and use this opportunity to showcase your stuff. Make sure that your logo, contact details, website, and social media links are included.
Mind Your Grammar
Double and triple check the content of your newsletter for spelling and/or grammatical errors. If English was never your forte, find someone who can edit your content. Careless mistakes reflect poorly on you and your business.
Pictures: A Fine Balance
On the one hand, visual content is good: photos can convey a ton of information, and they make a newsletter look good. On the other hand, too many photos will clog up your newsletter. Emails that load slowly and that hog inbox space are major no-nos. Use some pictures, but be aware of their sizes.
Be Mobile Friendly
Your newsletter might look spiffy on your computer screen, but make sure it looks good from a mobile screen, too. After all, that’s where many of your readers will be opening it up. If they have to scroll horizontally or if formatting becomes a jumbles mess, your email will be sent straight to the trash folder.
Need help crafting the perfect newsletter? Get in touch – we’ll help you create a killer newsletter.
How to Use Video to Take Your Business to the Next Level
Some food for thought: according to Brainshark, video will account for 74% of all internet traffic by 2017.
That’s a lot of video.
There’s something about the format that entices people to click, watch, and share (provided, of course, that the content and production quality is top-notch). Videos can do a lot for businesses: boost SEO, increase traffic, generate sales, connect to the target market… the list goes on.
In short, videos are good news for business – but how can you incorporate them into your business?
We’re glad you asked.
Show What You Do
Sure, you could tell people about what it is your business does – or you could show them. Video lets prospective customers see your product (whether it’s a good or service) in action. You can highlight features, demonstrate how it works, and show why people need what you’re selling.
Introduce Yourself
Wouldn’t it be great to personally introduce yourself to every existing and potential customer within your target market? Video is the next best thing: it puts a name to the face and shows viewers who is behind the business, helping build trust and rapport. Chances are pretty good that it’s the people that really make your business. Make sure customers know who those people are.
Explain Your Expertise
Prove to viewers that you know your stuff. Make videos to address industry news, to explain how complex components of your business work, or to give forecasts of where you think the industry is headed. This type of video can help build your reputation as a knowledgeable professional in the field.
Go Behind the Scenes
Most of your clients have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, so show them! Film what goes into developing your product – the inputs, the people, the processes, etc. Use video to show how your business creates value for your customers in a fun, dynamic way.
Provide Support
Raise your hand if you’ve ever YouTubed for help on how to do something, like how to change your headlight bulbs or how to open a bottle of wine with a shoe. A lot of us do this – so create videos to help people with your product. Use videos to help users troubleshoot common issues, to address frequently asked questions, or to show unique ways of using your product. Give them the solutions they crave.
Tout Your Testimonials
Got happy customers? Share it! Incorporate videos of your clients using your product. Prospective customers are keen on checking reviews – just check TripAdvisor, Yelp, or any other review site. Harness your satisfied clients to get even more customers.
Videos that Go Beyond You
Not all videos have to be about you and your business – it can be equally powerful to share videos that are related to your business. For instance, a ski shop might share a video clip from a ski film, ski-related viral videos, or shock-factor avalanche clips. Keep it targeted and interesting to your customer base.
Deliver News
Think beyond the press release and create a video to share exciting news about your business. Won an award? Hired someone awesome? Created something new? Show, don’t tell!
We want to help you create videos to help you take your business to the next levels. Get in touch with us – we’ve got some big ideas for you!
Calling All Realtors: You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy
Dear Realtors ®,
Have you thought about your digital marketing strategy lately?
We know, you’re busy – you’re busy farming, prospecting, marketing your listings, preparing listing presentations, staying in touch with clients, building your network, and doing plenty of other activities.
This might be a good time to mention that a sound digital marketing strategy can help with all of those things.
There’s no denying that the internet is playing an increasingly large role in the world of real estate marketing — you’ve probably heard the stats about how many prospective buyers begin their housing search online. Listing your properties on MLS, WLS, or whatever local listing service your market uses is one place to start – but it’s only just the beginning.
Consider the following:
This all sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But back to the original point: you’re busy! You’ve got enough on your plate, and digital marketing takes time.
That’s where we come in. Cloud9 works one-on-one with real estate agents to plan, execute, and measure a strategy. You get to call the shots, providing input on content, direction, and themes, while we implement the day-to-day activity. From blogging to branding, from SEO to social media, we do it all.
We’ll work with you to ensure that you (and your clients) are getting the most out of digital marketing, while freeing up your time to focus on other activities, whether than be taking your buyers on a property tour or negotiating a sale on behalf of your seller. You don’t have to be a marketing expert to implement digital marketing – you just need Cloud9!
So give us a call – we promise not to take up too much of your time – and find out how we can help you get ahead of the game. We looking forward to talking with you, and we can’t wait to help.
Yours,
Cloud9
Can Blogging Help Your Business? (Spoiler Alert: Yes, It Can!)
Blogs are often misunderstood. They require a fair bit of work, and business owners can’t help but wonder if they really make an impact.
The short answer: yes, they do.
The long answer goes something like this: blogs can help your business in more ways than you might think. We’ve rounded up some facts to help convince you that a well-written blog can do wonders for your business.
And if you still need convincing, consider the fact that you’re reading a blog post right now!
It Helps Drive Traffic to Your Website (Hubspot)
There’s lots of buzz about SEO, or search engine optimization, and guess what: blogging and SEO go hand in hand. New, original blog posts can drive more traffic to your website, and not just because visitors want to imbibe in your knowledge and wit (although that happens, too).
On the more technical side of things, a frequently updated blog signals to a search engine that your website is active, which can be an SEO booster. Your blog also adds a significant amount of content to your website, increasing the opportunities to pop up in search engines.
It Helps Establish You as an Expert (About.com)
Your blog is just one more way that you can reach out directly to your existing clients and prospects. You can choose to be silent (by posting nothing at all), or you can harness the opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your field.
By posting accurate, informative, and original content, you’re proving that you know your stuff and that you’re good at it. Your website’s visitors are often seeking additional information related to whatever it is you do, and providing them with helpful blog posts is a major plus – one that can translate to conversions.
It Gives Your Brand Personality (Bloom Tools)
Blogging and social media are excellent ways to build that coveted brand loyalty. Use your blog to let your brand’s personality shine, showing the world that you’re more than a logo on a computer screen. Develop a voice and stay true to it. The result: customers will have no trouble differentiating you from those other guys.
It Keeps You on Top of Your Game (Social Media Examiner)
Whether you post once a week or once a month, coming up with relevant, informative blog content can challenge you to become even better at what you do.
Knowing that you have a blog post to produce will encourage you to stay on top of the latest industry news, technology, and developments – everything and anything is potential material for your blog!
Even more importantly, you’ll learn how to communicate your business concepts to your clients. Writing succinct posts in a compelling matter is great practice for organizing your thoughts and sharing your knowledge in a way that’s easy for others to understand. This will help improve your broader communication skills.
Blogging isn’t always easy, and we’ve heard the common rebuttals all too often. “I’m so busy and don’t have time to blog!” “I’m useless with computers!” “I always forget to post!” Cloud9 offers customized blogging packages: we’ll work with you to develop an optimal blogging strategy, and we’ll create posts using your brand’s language to keep customers coming back for more. Contact us, and we’ll help you get set up!
7 Ways Social Media Can Help with Branding
As the year starts to wind down, it’s easy to become a little bit nostalgic. A lot has changed in the past few years – surely in your personal life, but in your business, too.
For instance, just think of all of the brand development opportunities that have arisen over the past decade with the advent of social media. Branding for today’s businesses is radically different than it was even just a few years ago.
Taking advantage of these opportunities is a given for today’s leading brands – and for a good reason. Here are just a few ways that social media can help take your branding to the next level.
Become Recognizable
Building a brand is about creating something that your customers and clients can identify easily. Social media can you help you expand your brand’s presence. You can be in front of your customers whenever they’re scrolling through their Twitter feed or checking out Facebook updates (which is virtually all the time) – now that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Create a Consistent Voice
Your brand should be consistent throughout all channels, including social media. As potential and existing clients and customers become accustomed to your social media presence, they’ll come to recognize your voice, building familiarity with your brand.
Connect with Influencers
Use social media to embrace your brand’s biggest fans. Loyal customers are worth their weight in gold: not only can you count on their continued business, you can also expect them to introduce your brand to their own personal networks. With social media, you can build a direct relationship with those influencers, like offering your cheerleaders early access to a sale, a bonus perk with their order or booking, or sneak peeks into upcoming events and releases.
Establish Trust
Social media isn’t just for connecting with your biggest cheerleaders: it’s also for connecting with your future cheerleaders. Through social media, you can really let your brand’s personality shine, building relationships with new fans and earning that coveted brand loyalty.
Be More Than a Brand
Your brand is more than just a name and a logo and social media allows you to showcase that. Through social media, you can build a community that shows what your company is really all about. Customers and clients will gain a better understanding of who you are and what you do.
Share the Brand Love
Customers and clients are engaging brands like never before through social media channels. They’ll post a picture on Instagram showcasing a recent purchase, or will Tweet their praises after a positive customer service experience. Social media – both your own use and your customers’ use – can help others share a brand experience.
On the flipside, customers will take to social media to announce when they’re dissatisfied. Savvy companies will take this opportunity to fix the problem directly with the unsatisfied customer, turning a negative experience into a positive opportunity. People are going to complain whether the company in question is on social media or not – wouldn’t you like to have the chance to hear about the problem so that you can fix it?
Listen, then Strategize
Social media is a two way street – don’t forget to listen! Your customers and clients are constantly providing feedback on your brand through social media. Scan your Facebook page, see what blog posts are getting the most hits, and scour relevant hashtags – and learn something from them. Use your findings to update your brand strategy and to stay connected to your target market.
If you’re thinking about building your brand through social media (or improving your existing social media presence), don’t hesitate to get in touch with Cloud9 Marketing. We’re here to help – this is what we do!
SEO Isn’t Dead: It’s Evolved
“Here’s the mental model you need to understand why Google does what it does in the search results: we want to return really good search results to users so that they’re happy, so that they’ll keep coming back. That’s basically it: happy users are loyal users.”
These words of wisdom come from the mouth of Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. They tell the ‘secret’ behind Google’s attitude towards search engine optimization, or SEO.
SEO: Dead or Alive?
SEO has been a hot topic over the past few years—and more recently, the conversation has turned towards the death of SEO. There are plenty of headlines predicting the death of SEO, but these posts don’t provide very convincing evidence that SEO is, in fact, on its way out.
Our opinion? SEO isn’t dead; it’s simply evolving.
Back to Basics
SEO is a multifaceted and often multi-channel support method intended to improve a website’s online presence. For example, SEO will help your website rank higher in Google searches that use keywords relevant to your website.
Coming back to our opening quote, Google wants to please its customers: when a customer types a few words into the search engine, Google wants to provide them with the best matches possible so that the customers find what they’re looking for.
SEO works with Google to make sure that it can deliver to its customers. SEO means building strong websites that offer a great user experience. So, if a customer Googles keywords that match up with your site’s content, they’ll be happy if Google coughs up your name first.
Google is our Friend
Note that we said working WITH Google. SEO isn’t about tricking Google—after all, if someone is searching a topic that has nothing to do with your website and you “trick” them into coming to your website, they’ll probably just leave. They’ll be annoyed at you, and they’ll be annoyed at Google for not giving them what they want.
SEO is about helping companies like Google do their job—while helping the website owners improve their web pages and the user experience. Happy users like to stick around.
The Evolution of SEO
Why do people think that SEO is a dying field? Probably because SEO algorithms and techniques are constantly changing. SEO strategies that worked a year ago might be stale now, meaning Google has changed the way it decides how a site will be ranked.
Since SEO involves lots of moving pieces — including traditional methods like improved meta data, keyword and key phrase research, and proper tag usage—there’s a lot going on at once. It might be accurate to say that some parts of SEO are dying, but in their place, newer, more effective SEO methods are popping up. SEO isn’t dying; it’s regenerating.
Smart SEO
There are thousands of factors that play into SEO, with dozens of changes happening every month. That’s a lot to keep up with, which is why it’s important to ensure that your SEO guru is up to snuff. SEO is serious business—ignoring it altogether can harm you. If your website unintentionally is poorly formatted for SEO, it can actually be penalized in search engine results. Yikes.
The key to good SEO is a good SEO person who adapts to changes as SEO evolves. Psst… we can help with that!
Creating Content vs. Curating Content
When it comes to your company’s online presence, content really is king.
But there’s a caveat—not all content is created equal. You can bombard your fans, followers, and customers with useless content that they will, at best, ignore—or you can share meaningful, insightful, and entertaining content that will keep them coming back for more.
To ensure that you fall into the latter category, you need focus on providing quality content. You can do that in two ways: by creating content and by curating content.
Creating Content
Creating content means building original content from the ground up. This is your company’s chance to share its knowledge, use its own voice, and develop useful and captivating content that will wow your customer base.
When you create original content, you own it because you made it. As the primary source of the content, you become the expert. People viewing your content are sticking to your website (or blog, or Facebook page, or… you get the drift)—they aren’t clicking away to read more. In fact, other people might share your insightful content, bringing even more viewers straight to the source: you!
The beauty of creating content is that you control what is being said. That means that you can share what you think is important and you can talk about pretty much anything you want. Just remember: all content, including created content, should focus on quality first. Put thought into what it is you’re producing—and check your spelling and grammar!
Of course, creating content requires a little effort on your part. After all, researching, writing, and revising won’t happen by itself.
As the primary source, readers are counting on you to be the expert. If you’re caught writing inaccurate, misleading, or just plain wrong information, then you’ll need to bear the brunt of the blame.
PROS: Customize content. Draw people to you. Be the expert.
CONS: Time consuming. Tough work. Big responsibility.
Curating Content
Curating content means sharing content that was created by other people and companies, like reviews, news articles, or pretty much anything that you find interesting and relevant.
Curating content is not about plagiarizing: it’s about connecting people with content from other sources and giving those sources credit for their hard work.
Sharing, re-tweeting, and otherwise passing along external sources of content is a great way to show your fan base that you’re in tune with what’s going on in your industry. It’s a good way of diversifying the content you provide and of steering clear of self-promoting post after self-promoting post.
When you share content, it’s like high fiving the person who created it, whether it’s a publication, a partner, a passionate customer, or anyone else in your industry. Building a relationship with industry influencers is always a good thing.
Curating content is also a time saver—it’s usually much faster (and cheaper) to find something share-worthy than it is to create it from scratch.
On the downside, when someone clicks on an external link, they’re floating away from your site. Make sure that you give them incentive to come back!
PROS: Quick and easy. Mix it up. Making friends.
CONS: Can’t edit. Leads people away. Lacks originality.
The Bottom Line: The best content strategies include a mix of both created and curated content. That perfect balancing point depends on your product, your company, and your industry—talk to us and we’ll help you determine the optimal ratio. Ultimately, no matter the type, always make sure that you’re providing quality content.
These 8 Facts About Using Video on Your Website Will Blow Your Mind!
You’ve probably heard that incorporating video into your website will do wonders for your business. More people will visit! They’ll buy your stuff! They’ll become devoted lifelong fans who will wax poetically about your fabulous company!
But we know how it is: taking the time to write, produce, and edit a video isn’t always easy. It requires time, money, and help from other people to incorporate video into your website.
It’s kind of like eating vegetables: you know that adding video content to your website is good for you, but it’s not always the easiest thing to do. We’re here to give you some motivation to eat those proverbial vegetables. Here are 8 facts about incorporating video into your website that you simply cannot afford to ignore.
Fact #1: YouTube is the #2 Search Engine in the World
Yes, you read that properly. It goes without saying that people aren’t searching YouTube for text-based posts. Posting video content will allow you to reach out to one billion people who search through YouTube every month.
Fact #2: The Value of One Minute of Video is the Equivalent to 1.8 Million Words
Okay, a stick-person stop-motion video might not convey that much information (though in the age of the viral video, you never know). But a properly produced video filled with valuable information can have a major impact on those who view it—and the viewers will actually remember it. Plus, creating a video takes much less time than typing out 1.8 million words!
Fact #3: Over Half the 25-54 Year Old Demographic Share Video Online
Business 101: word of mouth is your friend. Sharing content on social media is the new word of mouth. If you can convince your fans to share your content with their friends, then you’re getting a personal introduction through a trusted source to some very valuable potential clients. Not having video means that you’re missing out on these shares.
Fact #4: Shorter Videos Are Shared More Often Than Longer Videos
Bonus fact: 20% of people viewing a video will click away from the video after 10 seconds of watching. Don’t be thinking that you need to produce a multi-hour blockbuster to engage your target market. On the contrary: focus on well-executed short videos that pack a punch.
Fact #5: Online Video Accounts for 50% Of All Mobile Traffic
See those people scanning through their phones at the bus stop? Half of them are watching a video online. It’s simply impossible to ignore the fact that people are consuming their media in a whole new way, and that new way is through video. Ignore the importance of video, and you might be facing a future similar to the VHS player.
Fact #6: The Average Internet User Watches 32 Videos Per Month
Think about who uses the internet: that would be just about everyone. Now consider the fact that each person watches at least one video per day, on average. If you’re convinced that your target market isn’t into videos, think again.
Fact #7: On Retail Sites With Video Components, Site Visitors Stay 2 Minutes Longer—and Are 64% More Likely to Make a Purchase
The facts are starting to add up. We know that the time that people spend on our sites is incredibly valuable. We also spend a lot of time trying to convert site visitors into clients. Here it is in black and white: video does that.
Fact #8: Video Content Is 53 times More Likely to Show up on the First Page of a Search Engine Results than the Same Content in Text Form
Our final fact is a bit of a mouthful, but wow—talk about impactful. In the world of SEO, any leg up you can get on your competition is huge. That’s not 53%– it’s 53 times.
Convinced that video is the way to go for your website? We just so happen to offer video production services– click here for more details on how to get all the benefits offered by incorporating video onto your website.
Don’t believe us? Check out these websites for sources and more details: