Video is a versatile and engaging content format that provides pictures which are entertaining, engaging and easy to share across multiple platforms.  Following are four key reasons why video is crucial for your marketing strategy, along with tips for best practices.

Video is one of the best ways to get close to your audience and give them a glimpse of your business.

1) Informing and Educating

  • Over 95% of marketers claim that videos help customers understand products.¹
  • Videos excel at giving customers a close look at a product/service.

2) Search Engine Optimization

  • It is projected that over 80% of all traffic will consist of video.²
  • Search engines love videos because of their high-quality content: optimize videos with the right keywords, a solid meta description* and a strong title.

3) Staying Competitive

  • Just over 80% of businesses use video for marketing.¹
  • By using storytelling and unique types of media, you can catch, and hold, people’s attention.

4) Boosting Conversions

  • Ninety percent of consumers claim a video helps them make a purchasing decision³ and video boosts conversion rates** by 80%⁴.
  • Videos keep people around long enough to continue looking on the site: consumers watching video stay two minutes longer and are 64% more likely to make a purchase⁵.

5) Tips for Best Practices

  • Boost your SEO: use captions for autoplay, incorporate call-to-action***, keep the video on silent if it’s on a landing page and ensure your video is mobile friendly.
  • Organize a library of videos on YouTube and incorporate them into various forms of content such as blogs and emails.

Video is one of the best ways to get close to your audience and give them a glimpse of your business.  Think beyond profit and product:  share your philosophy, provide news on an interesting event, or offer valuable information.  The more they know about your positive practices, the more likely customers will remain loyal to your business.

*Meta description:  an HTML element that summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines (wordstream.com).

**Conversion rate:  the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors (e.g., if a site receives 200 visitors in a month and has 50 sales, the conversion rate would be 50 divided by 200, or 25%) (optimizely.com).

***Call to action:  a prompt on a website that tells the user to take some specified action, typically written as a command or action phrase, such as ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’ and generally takes the form of a button or hyperlink (optimizely.com).

 

Source:  digitalmarketinginstitute.com; ¹Hubspot; ²Cisco; ³Social Media Today; ⁴Wyzowl; ⁵Comscore