Brand videos are the new platform for all thinkers and doers to hit the mass audience in 2017. Only big brands have the spending power to hit the millions is an old news, now even startups are hitting big numbers with growth hacking ideas. Running ads to maintain a brand credibility is not the case anymore, videos are proving to be a lethal platform. Let’s dig deeper into why videos top the list.
Scroll down to know how are videos benefiting businesses
Building a relationship with buyers
Customers buy products and services from the brands they trust, and video can prove to be really effective in building an emotional connect with them. There are 7 touch points between buyer and seller before they make a purchase and videos help in reaching out to the customers with the right message. It can be used in different ways, right from creating a business video card for networking to welcome video on the website home page.
Google loves videos
Videos increase the time spent by visitors on your site, and longer exposure builds trust and tells search engines that your site has good content. The video embedded on your website also increases the engagement and Youtube being a part of Google helps. There has been a significant increase on how much videos affect your search engine ranking. People prefer videos and therefore search engines are also likely to rate the website with videos, higher than the website without it.
Videos bring great ROI
Video production brings a good return on investment. Although it’s not an easy task, it pays off big time. Videos are directly linked to sales, 74% of users who watched an explainer video have most likely bought a product. Therefore, crafting a video is better than just displaying visuals of the product. Forbes found that 60% of people prefer to watch a video than reading text, and about 50% of who watched the video will make a purchase.
Videos increase traffic
Videos can increase the traffic that’s coming to your website and increases the time spent by visitors on your site by an average 20%. Business folks regularly view business related videos, and about half of them visit the website homepage after watching videos. Moreover, videos are also shared more on social media sites. Video content is more likely to be shared with friends and social shares increase traction to your site.
Videos engages even the laziest buyers
Videos are not just a great tool for learning, but are also super easy to consume, even for the laziest of the learners. Modern customers prefer to see the product in action and videos are emerging as one of the strongest tools to give the live experience of the product usage. So, in a few minutes, you are giving all the necessary information to lazy buyers and boost their decision making.
Explaining in the best way
Video marketing captures a wide audience and it works on many levels. 83% of businesses feel that home page explainer videos were effective for their marketing. Not only you can explain a difficult concept, but also bring concepts to life to break through the clutter.
Engaging the mobile buyers
Mobile users have limited screen real estate and therefore videos have better engagement rates on mobile phones. Mobile video consumption is on the rise 100% every year. Smartphone users build a sense of personal connection with brands, showing video content or ads on their devices.
Videos in email marketing
Video messages in email marketing have been found to increase the email open rates and are emerging as the effective ways to increase engagement with potential buyers.
Ten type of videos
1. Commercial Video
These videos are great for raising awareness or advertising about your company’s product offering. They are more like an announcement of the product without digging deeper into how it works. These are short videos with a wide appeal, based on a quick and focused theme. These can be YouTube pre-roll ads, social media shares or broadcast commercials.
2. Educational content videos
Similar to commercial videos, educational videos are used to attract new customers at the awareness stage. They contain a useful piece of content leveraging the knowledge treasure of your company. These types of videos are ideal for content marketing on your blog, FAQ page, and social media channels.
3. Animation videos
Animation videos are great for tech companies and web services to show a concept, creating awareness about a technology or a new product. Animation works well with branding videos and is mostly found on the website homepage and being reposted everywhere on the internet to create awareness about the product.
4. Explainer videos
When you have a tangible product or service with you, an explainer video showing its functionalities and features, is a great way to connect with your audience. These videos are most likely to be placed on the website homepage, product page, YouTube and searchable sites.
5. Branding Videos
Branding videos are a mix of advertising and editorial and mainly targeted for building awareness about your company. These videos are generally 60 seconds or short, target your core audience, and have a strong mention of your company, products, and services. Branding videos are reserved for social media, YouTube, and for advertising.
6. Company story videos
Refreshing replacement of the boring About Us page for companies. Story videos are great for introducing team, company culture, and philosophy. These videos are mostly 5 minutes long and go about introducing founders, employees, and executives. These are to attract the new talent and also to create a loyalty and personal connection with the existing clients. These videos find a place in newsletters and About Us section of a website.
7. Case Study videos
We have moved on from the textual case studies long ago to graphic rich case studies. Now interactive videos are gaining popularity to showcase the challenge you came across, how you solved it and the results. You can talk about the project and involve the clients. They are perfect to showcase products, send out as newsletters, can be featured on the social media and in About Us or testimonial sections.
8. Customer stories
What’s better than customer testimonials? Live customers talking about their experience and vouching for your product or services. These videos will work wonders to push other customers and clients up with purchase funnel and make a purchase. They are again perfect to put on the home page, product page, and promote through newsletters and promotion on social media.
9. Tutorial videos
The best way to simplify a complex software is by creating an intuitive video explaining the application. The walkthroughs of desktop, web or mobile application are highly sought after by the customers and help in-app support for tackling queries of the existing customers. Video can even cut down the customer service interactions drastically. Good product demo can even help sales teams to acquire new customers in a better way.
10. Retention videos
In the recent times, customer retention is as difficult as winning them, therefore it’s very crucial to engage with customers regularly. Videos can replace the emails and can evolve as a quick way to connect with people when your team is not physically available.
Some tips for making a great video
#Short
Our attention span is really small, close to 30 seconds highlighted by a study. Therefore unless it’s a product explainer video, keep the video really short and save the rest of the content for follow up videos.
#Mix
Bundle up everything and anything that your potential customers will be interested in, add video, stills of your product, employees, or location to add a variety to your products.
#Message
Messages make videos effective, you can add a message from one of your employees or a client testimonial or recommendations or review from buyers to add authenticity to your brand and product.
#Humorous
Humorous elements have better chances to click with the audience than a video with grave looks.
#Action
Every video should have a purpose attached to it, if customers liked your videos, they should have the option to reach you directly from the video. You can add CTAs to reach your website, or explore your products, or a special coupon or offer to give the user a chance to visit you again. Your customer should exactly know where to find you, so don’t forget to include your phone numbers, address, website address, and email. Even include your map for them to locate you.
#Viral
Videos have more chances to be viral than online ad campaigns and it can be easy promoted on new platforms like social media and YouTube.
New alternatives are replacing the boring advertising campaigns, Don’t wait too long to add videos in your 2017 strategy.