It’s no longer acceptable for businesses to ignore video as a major part of their marketing strategy.
For too long, businesses have allowed other’s to test the waters, believing video campaigns were limited to brands with big budgets, however this simply isn’t the case. If your phone has a decent camera then you’re already half way there.
Video can work for your business in so many ways, from product reviews and guides, HTML5 banners, social content and through getting video’s present in SERP’s. Below are the top considerations when it comes to video marketing in 2017.
Video Demo’s & Advice
More and more retail sites are using video’s instead of pictures to highlight their products and their usage. In many test results, adding a video product demo on retail sites has shown to increase the conversion rate by 30%. This jump in sales should easily cover the cost of producing these videos in the long run.
On the other side, many people use YouTube to find out more about a product or service. You need to help directly answer your potential customer’s queries, so you become the go-to brand as a knowledge expert. Instructional video’s make up a huge proportion of YouTube’s video database.
If you don’t know how you can build an ‘instructional video campaign’, try to use recipe’s as a base. People selling food or kitchen utensils don’t make videos showing the product, they make videos of great tasting recipes being created, involving their product. If you run a brand that produces shoes, don’t just focus on the shoes, why not create video content highlighting what socks or other clothes would match well, or maybe hints and tips on how to keep your shoes clean.
HTML5 Video
You’ve undoubtedly noticed it on a few sites, such as AirBnB, where they have a video on a loop, rather than using a traditional image based banner.
Applying this for a client, we managed to increase the lead conversion rate from 7% to 12% using three changes. The main banner area was made larger, a video was used instead of an image (played on a loop) and the CTA button was made more significant.
At the end of the day, you’re a business and the people who land on your website are intrigued, so a video can help to convince the buyer that you’re the right business to go with. Whether it’s a holiday, a new laptop or a paintballing day, a video can help inspire and excite the audience.
SEO Benefits
John Mueller (Google Webmaster Trends Analyst) himself has stated that adding rich content to a webpage, such as video’s, can help to offer a greater experience for the visitor and therefore could potentially have a knock-on effect on your rankings.
Beyond this, you can have video’s directly show up on Google search results, with a rich snippet. Another ranking factor which video could help to improve would be to lower the bounce back rate by keeping people on the page for longer. Or to explain this further, a pogo stick effect (clicking on a website from a Google search result and then clicking back and choosing a different site) can damage your rankings, however if they spend a decent amount of time on your site before they bounce back then this negative affect can be eliminated.
The final highlight in this area is that a good video can help to build links for your brand. Using Moz’s White Board Friday as an example, I have linked out to this page on multiple sites, when writing about good places to learn the basics of SEO.
Brand & Viral
I like to partner these two together, as they partly come hand-in-hand. If you do decide to build a YouTube account for a business, then your main target should be to build an audience of subscribers, who tune in at regular intervals to watch your videos. To this effect, you will be building your brand, so they have a connection which goes beyond just a traditional sales process.
The issue is that so many businesses try to go viral, but it can be incredibly hard to predict what will work. Some efforts can be painful to watch, while others almost seem to obvious that it is surprising nobody thought of it first. The likes of T-Mobile’s flashmob events have millions of views, while some are simply out of reach for some brands, such as the Redbull Felix Baumgartner skydive from space.
Unilad Affect
The days of sharing a YouTube video on Facebook are long gone. The tactic now is to directly upload it to Facebook. Why, you ask. Well if you link through a video from YouTube, people can click and play, however if you upload a video directly to the brand Facebook page then it will play automatically as they glide past it on their news feed.
This has been shown to significantly increase the response rate, with 65% more comments. Famous Facebook pages such as Unilad, Brobible, SportsBible and The Lad Bible all successfully built up their following by releasing video’s on their pages at an average of a post per hour. They will occasionally release these just as pics or blog posts, but the most viral posts are always the video.
The issue in this is gaining and creating content quick enough, therefore pages such as these will use other people’s content and will then credit them with a citation to the originators.
Video Ads
You can use video’s on your landing pages, created directly for your PPC campaigns, which allows you to experiment and test what works best, before you apply this to your overall website.
