Not using video to promote your business? Know why you’re missing the train!
More than 192 Million Americans watched online videos in September 2014 alone, according to Comscore. Similar numbers were recorded in previous months. People are watching videos online more than ever, and not only for fun, but for business too.
Everybody knows the saying “one picture is worth one thousand words”. If that is true, what is a video worth? According to a Forrester research, one minute of video is worth 1.8 MILLION words. That’s the equivalent of 3600 typical web pages. Let’s say you write an average of one web page an hour, it would take you 150 days of writing to achieve the impact of one minute of video…
A few more numbers, just to make the point even more clear:
- 64% of consumers say they are more likely to buy a product or a service after they watch a video.
- Website visitors will stay twice as long on a website to watch a video.
- A video is 53X more likely to be found on the 1st page of Google searches than text.
- Videos have a 41% higher click-through rate on searches than text.
- 80% of web users prefer to watch content in video form as opposed to text.
The truth is that people today don’t have the time or the patience to read, and if your marketing is based solely in words, you are certainly missing a lot of opportunities. More than that, you are missing opportunities to get found by potential customers. As you can see from the numbers above, video is not only a highly effective conversion tool, it is one of the most efficient lead generation tools available to businesses today.
So what’s the best way to use video for your business? A few tips:
- First of all, make sure that your video looks as professional as you do. The same way you wouldn’t use a hand-made sign on your storefront, you don’t want your video to look amateurish.
- Make it engaging not only visually but also content-wise: tell a story, your story. People hate to be sold things, but they love a good story, as personal as they come.
- Create a YouTube Channel – it’s free – and post your videos there. YouTube is the 2nd search engine after Google, and it’s of course owned by Google. That’s why YouTube videos rank high on Google searches.
- Embed your videos on your website. This will not only make people stay longer on your website, but it will also improve your website’s ranking.
- Include videos on your email marketing. Studies show that emails with video can increase your click-through rate by 96%
- Use videos on your Facebook ads. Facebook recently launched their video ads platform, which allows users to post video ads for very targeted demographics. Low cost and highly effective.
Businesses that incorporate video marketing into their overall marketing strategy see higher engagement rates, higher click-through rates and higher conversion rate.
So the question is not “why use video?”, but “why are you not using video yet?”
