Be kind, please rewind might be a phrase of the past, but online video content is fast becoming the most important medium for companies to master. The importance of video for business doesn’t lie just with the marketing department either, you can use video content across your entire company. YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web and even your boss prefers watching work related videos over text. Yep, 50% of executives watch work related videos on YouTube.
Reasons Why Video is Important For Your Business
Video Improves Search Engine Optimization
Turns out, your best opportunity to rank in a search engine could be with an optimized video. Forrester Research reports that it is 53 times easier to rank a video in Google’s search results than it is to rank a webpage. While Google is the world’s largest online search engine, YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the second largest search engine on the web. According to Comscore, adding a video to your website can increase the chance of a front page Google result by 53 times. Videos on a business website not only improve your SEO, they can also reduce the bounce rate. Too many videos can slow your website’s load time, so don’t put too many. But a handful of videos can greatly benefit your business.
Video Engages Followers
Videos demand more consumer attention than any other medium, but it is also incredibly easy to consume. With so much content available, capturing attention has become the key, and visual content is the key to great engagement. Video marketing can capture a wide audience, and it works on many levels.
How much of your latest blog post did readers consume? Did they come back to re-read parts of it they missed or did they share it with friends? Audiences are about 10 times more likely to engage, embed, share, and comment on video content than blogs or related social posts. Create fun videos to encourage social shares. You can also measure ROI with video by measuring the click-through rate, drop-off points, or number of times watched. And the use of video in email has been shown to double email click-through rates.
Technology is Making Video Even Easier
First, Facebook introduced video auto-play in Newsfeeds. Now those videos even auto-play with the sound on, assuming the volume is turned up on the user’s phone. In 2017 it’s easier than ever to create a video. While it used to take months and a big budget to create a video, it’s now much more affordable. With companies like VideoMakerFX, GoAnimate, and Magisto the creation of a video is about as easy as writing a blog.
With the increased consumption of video, technologies are leaning more and more towards favoring the video-marketer. In addition to curated video content, all the social media platforms also have live video options from Twitter Periscope to Snapchat, Instagram Stories to Facebook Live. YouTube offers live video options as well.
Video Increases Customer Conversions
The biggest reason of all? Videos equal sales. Adding a product video on your landing page can increase conversions by 80%. And 74% of users who watched an explainer-video about a product ended up buying that product. Video conversion rates outperform all other marketing content.
Ways to Use Video For Your Business
Now that you’re thoroughly convinced you need to start using video for your business, where do you start? It might be obvious that the biggest video opportunity will be with marketing. But don’t stop there, video content can be used across your entire company.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos should generally be between 30 and 90 seconds long. This translates to a written script of around 200 words or less in most cases. Users are 85% more likely to buy a product if they are introduced to the product with an explainer video.
Provide a Webinar
Webinars can raise brand awareness, develop authority and trust, and create business relationships. Record your webinar so it can reach a larger audience later. And consider repurposing your webinar into short video clips. Plus, 40% of webinar participants turn into leads.
Deliver Product Training
Training videos are best when they are short. Whether that’s one short video or several shorter videos that make up a longer training sequence. People tend to consult a product training video when they need to know something specific. But training videos are a great resource as we tend to remember 80% of what we see but only 20% of what we read.
Provide a Testimonial
Nothing captures our attention like a good story. And the best stories, aka most persuasive sales messages, don’t come from your marketing department, they come from other satisfied customers. 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
More ways to use video for business: interview influencers, explain a case study, share tips and tricks, answer common sales and support questions, introduce new features and updates, show behind the scenes, even attract new employees.
Video content is more important for your business in 2017 than it has been before. And that importance is only going to grow in the future. Start with one of the ways to use video that we have mentioned and then incorporate video across your entire company to see the best results.
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