Today’s guest post is written by Adria Saracino.
YouTube has more than 800 million unique viewers every month.
And more than 500 years of YouTube videos are watched every day on Facebook.
This is evidence enough video is incredibly popular, and not only for social purposes.
With such a captive video audience, video marketing has become increasingly popular thanks to improved technology, Internet connections, and the sheer popularity of video consumption demonstrated by these statistics.
If you’re in marketing and you aren’t producing videos, you might want to consider doing so.
But what if your executive team isn’t convinced video marketing is the way to go?
What is Video Marketing?
Video is one tactic in your overall marketing strategy. It integrates visual, aural, and conceptual content, and should not be viewed as a type of content that is interchangeable with text and image, but rather as an integration of these elements, requiring the full attention of your audience.
During the past few years, faster connection speeds have allowed easy, instant streaming of HD web video on both desktop and mobile devices, making video instantly accessible to web users and an important form of engagement for businesses of all sizes.
Why Video is Important to Your Marketing Campaign
Using video as a supplemental tool in your marketing campaign can add three main benefits:
- User engagement;
- Personable branding; and
- Search engine optimization (SEO) benefits.
1. User Engagement
Video consumption is inherently a passive experience. When viewers play a video, they are being shown something. They receive the content in an integrated, multi-disciplinary form rather than having to actively dig through and explore the meaning themselves, as they would when reading text.
In this way, engaging a viewer in video is a very different experience than engaging with text or static images. With video, comprehension is more immediate—through body language, sound, movement, narrative elements, and a short timescale. Consequently, the amount of information that can be displayed through one second of video vastly outnumbers the amount of information that can be read.
2. Personable Branding
Video provides viewers with a more direct and realistic simulation of a face-to-face experience. Viewers can pick up on tone of voice, body language, and subtle physical indications that characterize who they see on the screen.
This allows viewers to see someone much more fully and honestly than they could through images or text. As a branding tool, it allows companies to demonstrate a personable, human side to their services, employees, or products, which in turn creates a sense of trust and loyalty in viewers.
3. SEO Benefits
Using video can help your business build more links and improve conversions. This adds up to helping you get found on search engines.
Links are the main standard search engines use to determine the authority of a piece of content. Links to a website are seen as a “vote” in favor of that website. In general, people link more to pages with video, and people embed video on their websites often.
The personable branding aspect of video marketing, and the trust and loyalty it creates in the viewer can help improve conversions, especially on a commercial landing page. This is why product videos have become popular in the e-commerce world – as a method of improving the rate at which users click “add to basket” and complete a full purchase.
Tips for Getting Buy-In from Your Boss
Be Prepared
Remain company-focused in your preparation. Ask yourself why your boss would want to use video marketing for the good of your company. Show how it will affect your business goals and how you anticipate it to improve customer conversions. Use the information above, but create specific goals for your company and show how it will improve the bottom line.
Bring examples of successful video marketing campaigns and ideas the company can use to demonstrate you’ve been giving the issue more thought.
Distilled released a comprehensive video marketing guide you can download to help you create your plan. It’s not available to the public yet, but this is a sneak peek – with an option to download the complete white paper at the end.
Start small
You don’t have to go all in at the beginning. Build trust with your executive team by showing small successes with one to a few videos at first. Once you can establish a baseline and show how you are helping to achieve your business goals, you’ll be given the go-ahead to do more.
If you need more ammunition for your argument or plan for video marketing, click on the downloadable PDF guide below. If you find yourself convinced video marketing could give your marketing projects the boost they need, then don’t be afraid to be a leader of thought in your office – bring it up, and bring it up now!
Have you been thinking about video marketing? Are you using it? I’d love to answer questions or hear about your experience.
Adria Saracino is the head of outreach at Distilled. When not consulting on PR and content strategy, you can find her writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet. You can follow her on Twitter at AdriaSaracino.