VIDEO MARKETING SECRETS TO BOOST YOUR TRAFFIC AND CONVERSIONS

A video’s ability to influence is unbeatable in the marketing landscape. Indeed, I would rate video marketing as the highest converting form of marketing yet! Video is a must to include in your digital marketing strategy, especially adding it to key conversion pages on your website.

The two key parts of digital marketing are traffic and conversion. Video produces both! Video marketing not only has been proven to build brand awareness and generate traffic from search engines and video sites, but also social media sites. With Internet speeds continuing to increase and smart phone proliferation, video is becoming more and more prevalent.

Bitable shared the following video marketing statistics from around the web, which prove that video marketing, coupled with other marketing tactics like social media and email marketing, produce compelling results:

• Video increases organic search traffic on a website by 157 percent.
• Ninety-seven percent of marketers say video has helped users gain a better understanding of their products and services.
• Fifty-two percent of marketers say video is the type of content with the best ROI.
• Adding video to your emails can increase click rates by 300 percent.
• Sixty-four percent of consumers will make a purchase, after watching branded videos on social platforms.
• Video is expected to make up 82 percent of Internet traffic by 2021.

If these statistics aren’t getting you excited yet, following are video marketing benefits:

• Connection – With the advances in technology and the ability to connect with your audience with personality, emotion and speed to convey a message, video allows you to be in front of your target audience, showing your credibility and thought leadership.
• Time and Territory – The Internet has taken every local business and made it global. Advances in automation and personalization has brought the global marketing concept and since made it individualized. The ability to create separate marketing and sales messages for micro target audiences allows savvy marketers to communicate with prospects 24/7/365.
• Search Engine Optimization – YouTube has emerged as the second most popular website, right behind its parent company Google. Google loves YouTube videos, so it ranks them extremely high in search results. A website is 53 times more likely to reach the front page of Google, if it includes video. With search engine optimization (SEO) so difficult, it’s much easier to show up in YouTube for specific search phrases than Google.
• Conversion Rate Optimization – Adding video to your digital marketing strategy and specifically adding it to key conversion pages on your website attach 300 percent more traffic and help nurture leads. In addition, including a video on your landing page can boost your conversion rate by up to 80 percent.

Here are video marketing secrets to boost traffic and conversions:

1. Develop a video marketing strategy

Since there are so many video marketing benefits, video needs to be central to outreach and campaign efforts not just one piece of your overall marketing plan. A critical part is having a social media strategy and ways to measure marketing ROI. Your video marketing strategy needs to include different strategies for traffic building and conversion rate optimization.

Think about the different stages of the buyer’s journey and the intent behind the video. When you begin with the end in mind, it’s much easier to determine the style, content and distribution of the video. Whether you are creating video ads, products, corporate explainers, social media or FAQ’s, always start with asking the question: What impact do you want to have on your audience?

Carefully consider the type of video and content, based on your objectives, target audience, etc. Some examples include explainer videos, product videos, personalized video, social videos, online videos, brand videos, video ads and live video. A video marketing ideas infographic, posted by PR Daily, offers content suggestions such as product reviews with customer testimonials, helpful tips to show off expertise and build credibility, video blog (vlog) to bring content to life, and tutorials to better explain a product or service.

To build traffic from video marketing, you’ll need to include strategies for both search and social traffic. Understanding SEO and key phrase research is paramount to generating traffic with video. For search engines, be sure to include targeted key phrases in your title, tags and description. YouTube can be a major source of traffic alone, between optimizing for key phrases, showing up in related searches and building your audience on the platform.

2. Get more mileage from blog posts

To attract readership and conversion, as well as get more mileage out of your content, smartly embed video in blog posts as part of your content strategy. Begin by creating vlogs, based on your blog content. Barring the limiting belief that it’s difficult to produce a video, it’s never been easier to add video to your digital marketing strategy.

If you currently have an editorial calendar for blog posts or articles that you’ll be producing, repurposing them as videos is one of the easiest ways to produce multimedia content and add video to your blogs. Couple that with distributing your videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, to achieve a broader reach and increase your chances of showing up in search engines. Users view more than one billion hours of video each day on YouTube.

Once a month, CMA produces a vlog that we branded as Reel Results. Videos feature the firm’s industry thought leaders and are based on one of our new and timely marketing or association management blogs. As a result of adding video to blogs, page time and engagement rates have doubled.

Additionally, CMA recommended to its customer Amerlux, a B2B LED lighting manufacturer, to add video to previously published blog posts to improve average time spent on a page. Results included a 149 percent improvement in average time on page.

3. End video with a strong call to action

This is often one of the most overlooked and simplest pieces of advice to implement. Simply end your video with a strong call to action (CTA), by telling your audience what to do next. This embedded command makes all the difference in producing videos that convert and those that don’t.

Consider the following for your CTA:

• Type – Text, audio or images
• Action – Register, buy, contact or ask a question (like I do at the end of this blog)
• Placement – Beginning middle or end

4. Use video on your website to increase conversions

Having videos on your website increases conversions, merely because you can convey personality and leverage influence and persuasion, to a greater capacity than the written word alone. Reading takes effort. Unless you have a gifted copywriter, many websites lack the persuasive writing to turn visitors into prospects. Video increases your chances of turning a visitor into a prospect.

Landing pages are key to driving conversions, since they should be hyper targeted to a specific audience and key message. Video simply delivers that message faster and in a more persuasive way. With the continuous time crunch, people are looking for the most expedient way possible to get the information they need and make a decision on what to do next. People tend to want to be fed information in a passive way, rather than actively reading and researching. Video provides that passive learning format.

5. Encourage social sharing and boost traffic

Promote your video on your own social media channels after you choose the right social media platforms for your brand. Providing valuable information will make people want to share your video. Increase your social sharing chances by presenting key information that hooks and draws the user in quickly. Social videos that tend to get the most engagement and shares are short, to the point, provide great content and entertain in a way that’s easy to digest.

To boost traffic from social media, you’ll need to develop the mentality of creating consistent, sharable content. Here’s where personality comes into play. This is less about the key phrases you’re using and more about speaking the same language as your target audience. Be sure to infuse either your personality or your company’s personality into each video, so it resonates with your target audience.

Video is key to a quality digital marketing strategy because it can address all stages of a buyer’s journey. Thus, creating a funnel effect that informs, educates and converts views into fans, subscribers, prospects, leads and customers. Video also has proven to be invaluable from a conversion aspect, having the ability to influence and persuade visitors to move through the buyer’s journey.