Why do you need Video Content?

There is a huge potential in this medium, as it is visually-appealing, engaging, versatile, and profitable. It is also relatively easy to re-edit and repackage it on the multiple platforms that your target audience frequents. 

Consider the following advantages:

1. You will live up to customer expectations

Did you know that one-third of a consumer’s internet time is spent watching videos? Facebook users alone spend 100 million hours each day on the platform just watching videos. By creating videos, you will be providing your customers with content that they resonate with and consume. Recent studies show that 68% of consumers actually prefer watching explainer videos to solve a problem, as opposed to contacting the business or a customer support representative. 

This isn’t a passing fad, as all the major social media platforms have caught up with this trend and now offer their own proprietary video platforms.

• Facebook currently has 360-degree videos, Stories and live video. 
• Instagram now allows 60-second videos on posts and 15-second videos on Stories. 
• Twitter has Periscope that allows up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds of an uploaded video. 
• Snapchat, the first platform to bring to the market ephemeral video content, allows users to upload 60-second videos.

As the digital landscape evolves, the kind of content that succeeds with your target audience is one that lives up to their expectations — what they are looking for, when they want to see it, and how they want to consume it. 

2. Videos drive traffic to your website

Search engines continue to update their algorithms to provide relevant and high-quality content to the end user. These crawlers have been increasingly prioritising websites with video content. YouTube is, in fact, a primary example, as it’s the second most trafficked website next to Google.

Studies show that companies with videos on their websites see 40% more traffic than those without. You can also potentially see a 157% increase in organic traffic, all the while lowering your bounce rate, as people tend to spend twice as long on a page when a video is present. 

The top three spots on the search engine results pages (SERPs) is where you really need to get your content ranking, as these positions see 55% of all clicks on Google. To get to this point, your videos will need to be well optimised for Google and YouTube, as well as engaging to your target audience (although these two things are rarely mutually exclusive). 

Video optimisation is often as much about art as science, with popular videos gaining more exposure and thus more view time and shares and backlinks, the former of which is a strong ranking signal to YouTube and the latter of which is a strong ranking signal to Google (we’ll go into more detail on video SEO later on in this guide).

3. Influence customers throughout the buying journey

It has become increasingly difficult for brands to turn consumers from potential customers to loyal patrons. Brute force — that is, bombarding them with ads on top of the amount of content they look at every day—does not work anymore.

Reaching them is only half the battle; convincing them to buy from you is just as challenging. Video content can help ease the customer journey (from top of the funnel down to converting them into actual customers) through the use of storytelling.

 Such is its power that it can help you create a deeper emotional connection with your audience, alongside the more traditional rational appeal of sales messaging.. There are various approaches to this kind of emotional marketing. You can be as subtle or as unsubtle as you choose, but the important thing to remember is that storytelling should follow a clear narrative arc, which should remain intact and not be compromised in favour of overt sales pitches.

To strike a healthy balance between brand promotion and storytelling, you should make sure your narrative contains these three core elements:

• Interest: This should come in early on in your film, setting the emotional tone and scene of the entire video, allowing you to grab the viewer’s attention.
• Evaluation: The second phase is where a huge part of the storytelling comes in. This is also where you should introduce your brand but be careful not to be too overt that it distracts the viewers from the core narrative arc.
• Empathy: As the story closes, make sure that your video brings in the viewer in a way that they can see themselves in the narrative. Turn their emotional investment into positive associations with your brand.

4. Reach mobile users

As of 2018, more than 50% of global internet traffic was generated by mobile phone users. Smartphones make content consumption easy and convenient, as you can now go online anywhere, any time. 

As such, video content is much more accessible to your target market than reading a 3,000-word article, whether they are killing time waiting for their connecting flight or in line inside a store. This category is also continuously expanding, prompting 85% of marketers to invest more in mobile marketing in the last year alone.

5. ROI

Brand awareness is crucial when introducing new products or services into the market. It’s what helps your audience remember you and set you apart from your competitors. However, if you lose their attention in the middle of your marketing content, brand recall suffers.

This often happens when reading text. A phenomenon called “regression” (the need to re-read what you just read because you didn’t understand the text the first time) hinders your target audience from remembering your articles. Videos remove this risk. 

In fact, if videos and text are both present on a page, study shows that 72% of consumers would choose to watch the video. On top of that, landing pages with videos increase conversions by as much as 80%. After watching a social media video, 64% of consumers are more likely to purchase from you. 

While creating videos require a certain amount of investment, it would pay off, as videos help 90% of consumers decide to purchase from a brand. It’s no surprise then that business owners with videos in their marketing campaigns see a 49% year-on-year revenue growth. 

Looking for a new approach to video production? Get in touch today. EMAIL: [email protected]