The whole point of having a business website is to attract customers. You want people to know what you do, what you offer, and how you can help them. One of the best ways to do that is through video marketing. A short video demonstrating a new product, talking about a service, or alerting customers to a special sale or event will resonate much more with your visitors than using only copy to convey your message. Here are a few reasons why using online video as part of your content marketing strategy is a great idea.
7 Reasons to Start Using Video Marketing Now
1. Rank Better in Search Engines
One of the factors that affect how Google and other search engines rank your site is how much time visitors spend on your website. If your visitors are sticking around for a long time, it is a signal to search engines that your site contains high-quality content that searchers are looking for.
That part about high-quality is key. Videos are not a magic pill with automatic SEO value. They need to be engaging, tell a story, offer valuable information, answer questions, etc. That is what makes a successful video that glues people to their screens. Put some thought behind your video strategy, what you are going to say, and how you want to present things visually—write a script (mainly talking points, you don’t want to sound rehearsed) and consider using video production equipment if you have easy access to it.
Great video content attracts people, increasing their time on site—especially if videos are a staple of your content. Visitors can move easily and organically from one piece of content to the next (better click-through rates), and, in turn, they could also become loyal followers who return to your site again and again and recommend it to others.
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2. Connect with Your Tribe
It’s great if what your selling has tons of cool features and can revolutionize the way your customers do something, but if your target audience cannot form a connection with you pretty quickly, they might not hang around long enough to realize all you have to offer.
Videos give you a platform to show who you really are and what sets you apart. By talking to your audience through a video you are helping to build trust with them. A video that features your company founder or team, discussing the motivation for creating your product/service and how it helps people could be just the thing to establish that personal connection while explaining the benefits of what you have to offer.
3. Use Video Testimonials
What better way to show your potential customers how great your products and services are than by sharing testimonials from satisfied clients? Ask a few of them to film a quick video proclaiming how awesome your product or service is.
Give an Incentive
Make sure to make it easy for them and worth their while. Most people don’t naturally gravitate to the camera, so you need to give them a reason to want to put themselves out there. Some ideas include:
Offer a one-time discount on products/services.
Add them to a VIP membership/list where they’ll receive exclusive offers.
Hold a contest. The best video will get a reward and/or be featured in a prominent place on your website.
Write them a personal email thanking them for their support/business and asking if they can help you out.
Choosing who to ask is also important. Sending a generic email blast to all your past customers is not the most effective method for getting quality video testimonials. Instead, choose customers whom you have a great relationship with, who are well-known in their industry, and who have metrics that show their success (which you may be able to help provide).
Make it Easy with Clear Guidelines
Make it easy for them by telling them what you’re looking for – they’ll actually be much more likely to agree. You can provide guidelines and information such as:
minimum/maximum length of video, if any
tools/methods for recording (can be as simple as using their phone)
a list of considerations or questions to think about
key metrics that demonstrate how your products/services helped them reach their goals
facts, features, or other benefits you may want them to briefly highlight (and how they used them)
Wait and see how many people will come to you because they saw that someone else was happy with you.
4. Video is Ideal for Mobile Viewing
Every day we’re bombarded by distractions from every angle. It’s hard to grab people’s attention, especially when they’re on the go. On mobile, our attention span is even shorter. Couple that with the fact that it’s much easier to watch a quick mobile video than to read an article on a smaller screen, and you’ve got more than enough reason to include strategically placed videos on the key parts of your site.
In addition, users who are always on their devices tend to be very interconnected with social media, so having videos on your site also increases the likelihood that that content will be shared and seen by more people.
5. Show, Don’t Tell
As a writer, my teachers and professors always emphasized the power of showing over telling. I guess that college education wasn’t a total waste, because they were right, show>tell applies to digital marketing too! It’s always more powerful to show how your product works and how it can change people’s lives. Showing paints a picture, provides proof, gives confidence. Showing makes it real for the viewer; it allows them to imagine themselves behind the wheel racing toward a better future, leaving their problems in the dust—or in an exploding inferno, depending on how fed up they are. 😉
A solid place to start is with product videos and/or explainer videos. These are great resources for your users to get to know your product and how it works. You can include a product video right on your homepage to showcase your its most important features.
Explainer videos/how-to videos are perfect for support documentation, especially if you sell something digital, such as a software program, desktop application, plugin, etc. You can create several videos and group them together in a support section on your site. Show your customers exactly how your product works by recording a screen share of you using it to carry out typical tasks that a new user would need to understand. We have some examples on MaiTheme.com in our How To’s and direct people to these frequently for quick answers to common questions.
6. Use Social Videos
People search for content in a variety of ways, so it pays to make “social videos” part of your video marketing strategy. Here are some of the social media platforms you should consider sharing on.
Facebook allows you to create live videos, which give you a great opportunity to show yourself in a human light. That kind of authenticity is invaluable and will help you form a deeper connection with your tribe. Live Facebook videos are well-suited to Q&A’s, quick how-to’s, or even your musings on a topic (still showing your know-how of course).
With Twitter, you can share native videos or create live videos using Periscope (their in-app extension). Videos automatically play as the viewer scrolls over them, grabbing the viewers’ attention immediately. Twitter also encourages short videos (140 seconds), so if you are planning on creating a video marketing campaign on Twitter, you’ll likely want to design your videos specifically for Twitter to pack a lot of punch into those precious seconds.
People come to Instagram specifically for visual entertainment/consumption.
Over 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram every day. (Instagram, 2016)
-HubSpot’s Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2018
Instagram also allows you to create stories—highlights of whatever is new or exciting at the moment.
Snapchat
Snapchat is another option that is all about video and photo sharing. What makes snaps unique is they are fleeting. Stories remain visible for 24 hrs and snaps disappear after viewing. It’s like you are giving the viewer a glimpse into something special, just for a moment, and then it’s gone forever. FOMO all the way!
YouTube
YouTube is a video platform and a top choice for video marketers, so if you are going to create lots of video content it’s probably a good idea to create a YouTube channel where you can aggregate all of your videos and drive viewers back to your website. YouTube also allows you to track video views, which can be helpful in determining how effective a particular marketing campaign is. YouTube videos can also be easily embedded on your website.
On any of these platforms, the goal of your content strategy should always be to get viewers back to your site, because that is where your most important conversions will happen. Link to a related blog post or page where they can learn more, sign up, or buy. Read our post, Use Social Media to Drive Traffic to Your Website, to learn more.
7. Sell Courses/Programs
A landing page with an awesome video could be a game-changer when it comes to course sign up conversion rates. We have seen success with several of our clients who run recurring courses/programs using this method. Provide visitors a one-stop spot where they can get all the information they need about your next program or course with a compelling video as the main attraction. Tell them what they can expect, what problems will be addressed, address common objections, and the show the potential outcome. They’ll feel much more comfortable investing their time and money if you lay it all out there, and they can hear it coming straight from you.
You can also create marketing videos to use in on-site retargeting campaigns when your pre-sale or sign-up period rolls around. This method is effective because it alerts new visitors (who may know nothing about you) to your current promotion, and these campaigns can be tied back to your drip marketing as well.
Closing Thoughts
Video does not need to be intimidating. If you are not already using video marketing, we hope this post has given you some solid reasons to start incorporating more video into your overall strategy. The more you practice and create, the more you will find how much of an impact video can have on the growth and monetization of your website.