Video can tell a lot more than text in a small amount of time, which can be compared to 1.8 million words per minute. This is the primary fact businesses should keep in mind when deciding whether or not to invest in video marketing.
There’s no other channel like video which can be so effective for achieving various marketing goals: engaging customers, showcasing products and services in action, promoting your brand, boosting website SEO and generating high-quality leads. As a part of your marketing toolset, video can add a great amount of value to your business without the need to invest excessive costs. Let’s see how:
1. Using video for SEO and link building
Although a lot has changed in Google’s search algorithms since Forrester Research revealed their study showing that video content is 53 times more likely to reach the first page in web search, the main point is still relevant today: video is prioritized by search engines over plain text. Search engines consider embedded video on your website as an indicator of a higher page quality and relevance. When your website visitors share a video from your website (or a web page with video) they create backlinks for you. It’s particularly helpful to optimize a video player on your website with social sharing buttons, to let people share a video they like, in a couple of clicks.
2. Increasing audience engagement
Visual content is processed by human brain 60,000 times faster than text. Given this important fact, it’s no wonder that people prefer viewing to reading. Video lets you deliver a business message to your audience in the most engaging way, for example, by showing behind-the-scenes of your company, testimonials, success stories, etc. When potential customers are excited with what they see about your business, they will be much more likely to spend more time watching your content, react to a call-to-action or share their contact information, whatever is set as your marketing goal.
3. Monetizing your video content
If your business deals with a great number of video content, which is either created in-house or generated by users, why not to turn it into a direct source of income? This can be done by placing third-party ads in your videos. The same option can be used to cross-promote your own content, which means directing traffic from popular videos to custom website pages or to any related media content. Video platforms like YouTube allow to monetize multiple videos on your channel, but in this case the system will show contextual ads and determine a cost per click depending on a specific user’s interests, location, language, and a few other factors. When it comes to publishing custom ads on videos embedded to your website, you may want to take full control over placement, format, timing, and pricing. VAST (which stands for Video Ad Serving Template) can be a great option for this kind of needs.
4. Promoting your brand
Video is a great way to make your brand recognizable even without expensive advertising. Most video hosting platforms enable publishers to brand video content with a logo or watermark, add annotations containing custom links. Another great option is adding a catchy call-to-action in a form of a clickable text or button. This requires some time and patience, but the result can be amazing.
5. Generating leads with video
Speaking about leads, we typically regard them as people who are highly motivated to learn more about your business offer and agree to share their contact details with you. The most popular way of reaching leads is email. And this is right where the video can power up your email marketing. Video can serve as a source of high-quality leads, sending viewers to a landing page, where they can submit their contact information or showing up an email form directly in the video player. If they really like your video content, they will be happy to know about your products or services. When they share contacts, you are allowed to include them into email lists and reach them with a personalized business message. It’s important to use smart video data to learn who your viewers are, to know their preferences, and to be able to reach them with the right proposal.
