Why You Need Video Within Your Marketing Strategy

With the ever growing media war for attention, video is now seen as a staple weapon in the majority of a company’s marketing arsenals. Cisco predicts that by the end of 2020, 82% of consumer traffic will be video. It has become the most valuable way of promoting products or services in an increasingly viewed format. So much so that Youtube is now the second largest search engine with over 3 billion searches per month, more than Bing, Yahoo, AOL and ask.com combined.

Youtube is now the second largest search engine* (*Forbes)

Video content such as creative brand films, educational “How To’s” and case studies are preferred to reading blog posts. To run alongside this, there’s never been a better time to gain detailed analysis into internet traffic, customer demographic, sales leads and more to ensure businesses are able to make informed decisions when planning their Video Content Strategy.

In 2019, video was the #1 form of media used in content strategy, overtaking blogs and infographics* (*Hubspot).

Below are five ways video marketing can grow your business and boost sales and conversions.

1) Video can improve SEO.

A video on your home page ranks your site 53 times higher on google* (*Hubspot)

With the rise of video social platforms and ever increasing internet bandwidth, high-quality video is increasingly capturing viewer engagement, piquing audience attention and driving traffic to your website. This is crucial as traffic and click-through rates are major Google ranking factors. Therefore, the more traffic and clicks your site's videos get, the higher your site will rank in the search engine results pages.

With Google getting better and better at machine learning, the search engine can now recognise thousands of image elements within a video. Google's Video Intelligence API can catalog relevant keywords within a video, which could give you a huge SEO advantage.

Video also helps SEO because it is responsive across multiple devices. As various video platforms like Youtube and Vimeo adjust to multiple screen sizes and are optimised for mobile devices, you can reach a wider audience.

With Google's algorithms increasingly prioritising pages with video content in search results, it's especially important that businesses adopt videos as part of their digital marketing strategy.

A few key tips for creating SEO friendly content would be:

Short and sweet. Videos under two minutes long get the most engagement. So it's important to get your point across in the shortest amount of time. A four-minute video can still work well but anything longer would require particularly engaging content or risk losing significant viewership.

Transcribe and subtitle. When you transcribe and subtitle your video, Google bots can crawl your content with more accuracy. This makes it more likely your site will be featured in a wide variety of internet searches.

Optimise videos. Adding relevant titles, subtext, descriptions and meta tags can also help search engine bots crawl your video efficiently.

Create high-quality thumbnails. Creating eye-catching thumbnails can grab the attention of searchers, and thus increase your click-through rates.

2. Video keeps users on pages longer.

The average user spends 88 percent more time on a website with video than they do with any other type of content, according to data published in a Forbes article. This means that by adding videos to your website's pages, you can increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site. This reduces the bounce rate which tells Google your site is useful.

One reason may be that most people find watching videos more entertaining than reading text. Another reason might be that people tend to retain information better when it's explained in a video. Creating product videos, how-tos, and demos can not only increase your chances of reaching your target audience, but also provides value and higher retention rates to your potential customers.

3. Video is captivating.

Video keeps viewers' attention more than text because video combines auditory and visual senses. In other words, video brings together two things that catch our attention: noise and movement.

Humans are highly visual creatures. In fact, people process visuals 60,000 times faster than they process text, according to a Management Information Systems Research Center study at the University of Minnesota. Also, most of the information that comes from the brain is visual, meaning that viewers will better retain a message through video than they will through text. And because of this, the average viewer remembers 95% of a message when it is watched, compared to only 10% of content that was read.

4. Video leads to more conversions.

Adding video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80 percent or more, Replacing an image with a video on a landing page will likely increase conversions. Why? Videos offer a more detailed description of your product or service. As viewers become more engaged, they're more likely to retain the message. They also tend to trust brands more after watching a video. And trust can eventually lead to conversions.

The top priority for marketers in 2020 is “generating leads” Hubspot

Social video gets 1200 percent more shares than text and image content combined

5. Video is more shareable.

Social video gets 1200% more shares than text and image content combined, according to Wordstream data. On platforms like LinkedIn, video is shared 20 times more often than other types of content formats in the LinkedIn feed, according to Sales and Marketing Solutions. What makes videos so shareable? Because they're not only entertaining, but also bring practical value by providing tips, tricks and hacks.