To be human is to be almost irresistibly drawn to video content. We spend millions of hours each month glued to YouTube, and on Facebook we collectively consume 4 billion videos every single day. So it makes sense that video has emerged as a powerful digital marketing tool, Tyler Lessard – CMO of the video marketing company Vidyard – said during a presentation at Marketing Nation Online, a virtual marketing conference held earlier this month.
By 2019, Cisco predicts that 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic will come from video content. Given its increasing prevalence, it’s more important than ever to hone your video marketing strategy to engage your online audience, boost your brand and drive business success.
“Video works as a marketing tool,” Lessard said. “Customers love it…the average person stays two minutes longer on sites with video content.”
Including video content on your company’s website and incorporating it into your digital marketing strategy has numerous advantages, from improving SEO to giving you the valuable ability to track the impact of your marketing efforts using data and analytics. Here are four notable benefits of video marketing that Lessard identified in his presentation:
1. Greater engagement.
Having video content available across your company’s website (for example, by placing a video on the home page that plays in the background in addition to creating a dedicated page for videos) is a great way to educate people and help them become familiar with your brand. It moves people more effectively through their buying journey while emphasizing your brand’s personality.
“People will build a greater affinity to your brand by interacting with video content,” Lessard said.
Additionally, making video content the star of your marketing campaign is an effective way to pull people into your story and tug at their heartstrings. After encouraging emotional engagement, your video can present the hard sell or call to action, such as downloading an ebook.
Because videos have higher click-through rates, and people who watch the video have a higher likelihood of downloading the ebook, this approach is more effective than presenting a call of action to download on its own, without video content.
2. Better SEO.
Posting videos and search optimizing them could notably improve your organic ranking. Google’s adoption of “blended search” – or the practice of displaying images, news stories, videos and other types of content along with regular results – gave marketers the opportunity to boost SEO with video content.
Additionally, YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine (No. 1 is Google, of course), so posting videos there can help your search engine rankings, on top of engaging current and potential customers.
3. More lead generation potential for webinars and events.
Live webinars and events are already a great way to attract potential customers. By recording them and posting them on your company’s website, you can continue to leverage that lead generating potential long after the live event is over. You’ll also give your current customers year-round access to presentations and thought leadership content.
4. Access to data and analytics to help refine your strategy.
If you post a white paper on your site, you can track how many people have downloaded it. However, whether or not they actually read it remains a mystery. If you invest in video content, though, you can track not only how many people watch it but also how much of it they watched. You’ll even be able to monitor whether viewers skipped portions or, alternately, watched certain parts more than once.
Once you’ve got that data, you can use it to improve your video marketing strategy to best fit your audience. Using analytics, you can identify the types of videos that engage your customers the most and subsequently generate the most leads.
5. Enhanced email marketing.
Including videos in your company’s emails can increase open rates as well as click-through rates. You’ll see the best results if you use a large thumbnail with a play button in the body of the email.
It also helps to create an animated gif of a section of the video to get your audience interested and compensate for the fact that most email clients don’t support video playback. You should also make sure it’s easy for people to find the video: Link the thumbnail/gif in the email to a landing page where the video is the main focus.
These are just some of the ways that video content can benefit your business. If you’d like guidance on how to develop an effective video marketing strategy, the Traffic Jams team of experts can help. Contact us today at (855) 599-9998 or email sales@trafficjams.com.
