One of the key reasons you market your brand is to increase conversion rates. Studying how well different forms of marketing perform is a wise use of time and money. Marketing is one of those endeavors that you can throw a lot of money at without seeing results. Knowing what is effective for your brand is a good first step toward successful marketing of your product or services.
Video marketing ups your conversion rates in a number of ways. More and more businesses see the method as effective — about 81 percent use video marketing, which is a rise of eight percent since 2017. Videos are a popular marketing choice for many reasons, including the conversion rate optimization abilities of good video.
Video marketing may be something you’ve tried before, or you may be new to the game. Here are some things to consider when deciding if video marketing is right for you and how you can implement it into what you’re already doing for marketing.
1. Tell a Story
Do you have a compelling story to share? Perhaps it’s the way your business grew from zero-based funding into a mega business. Maybe your product is unique and there are customer stories to share about how consumers use your brand to improve their lives. Is there any type of story within the product or brand? If so, a video will help tell that story and create a solid image for your brand.
Storytelling offers a way to brand your company in the mind of the reader. Enhancing that storytelling through video is particularly powerful. Instead of just coming out and stating a message, a good story shows the message to the reader through strong characters and a specific storyline, which allows viewers to make up their own minds about the brand.
Telstra shares a story about changes they’ve made to give consumers exactly what they want. This material gets right to the point and shows the consumer that the company listens to customer needs and meets those needs.
The video takes the viewer through the new features of the website in a fun, illustrated way. Include a call to action within your video as Telstra does at the end, and you’ll enhance the overall impact of your video and create an opportunity for the consumer to make the decision to buy.
2. Keep It Short
You don’t have to invest in an hour-long video to grab the attention of your site visitors. The longer a video is, the more it costs to produce anyway. In fact, it only takes about 10 seconds before a viewer bounces away from a video. However, if you engage users before those 10 seconds are up, they’re likely to stick around and watch the end of the video.
The ability to keep the video short and to the point saves you time and money and may be just as effective as longer videos. If visitors are so busy they refuse to watch the end of a video, getting right to the point will only help your conversion rates. There’s no reason you have to wait until the end of a video to include your call to action.
3. Create an Urgent Need
Video marketing shows what urgent needs the consumer has that they aren’t even aware they have. This process then allows you to show that consumer how you can solve the problem. Anytime you solve a problem for shoppers, you enhance the likelihood that they’ll buy your product or service.
Showing what the urgent need is ups your conversion optimization rates because instead of just watching the video and thinking it’s cute, the user sees that there is a need to take action now. Creating that sense of urgency simply sets a ticking time bomb the person feels the need to diffuse.
Note how this video from Quincy Compressor tells the story of a young woman trying to get ahead in her career. The problem is that she’s chosen a computer system that uses inferior products, and all her hard work is about to be lost or at a minimum, severely delayed.
The video already established how important deadlines are to the character Julia, so this delay will be her undoing. This problem is about to cause all sorts of issues for Julia. The viewer surmises that their own computer might cause similar issues for them and feels compelled to prevent this scenario before it happens.
4. Know the ROI of Videos
Is the investment in videos worth it? After all, if you hire a company to create your video, costs could add up quickly. What if you do the video yourself? Assuming you have the skills to create a professional-looking video, you’ll still face the costs of hiring actors, reserving a location and editing the video for production. The cost of producing a video can grow fast, and that’s before you take out Facebook ads to promote it.
Take the time to really study the return on investment (ROI) of videos you’ve used in marketing. What could be done better, and was the investment worth the cost? On average, video marketing gives businesses about 66 percent more leads every year, but they aren’t just any leads — they’re qualified leads. You’ll get a lot more sales from a lead that’s highly targeted in this way.
Figure out what the average new customer spends and how many leads you typically get in a year, and weigh the cost of creating video with the value of the new leads. This course of action will give you a good idea of ROI before you create a video in the first place.
5. Generate Excitement
Videos are great for generating excitement about your brand. Videos mean storytelling, humor and showing ideas and products from a unique perspective. You don’t have to be humorous, but your viewer wants a unique outlook or information they don’t already have. The worst thing you can do is create a boring video that makes the viewer want to click away from your site. Just be aware that humor is subjective, and not everyone will find your video funny.
There is a reason 72 percent of people indicate that they prefer video to learn about a new product. Instead of reading dry material, these consumers expect to be entertained. Short videos, by their nature, demand that you keep facts concise and get right to the point for your viewer. The user doesn’t have to think but simply processes the information quickly and efficiently.
KENZO World shows the excitement behind their fragrance through a storyline of a young girl at a formal dinner. She listens to a boring speaker and tries to keep her composure. She excuses herself to go out into the grand hallway, which is deserted. She suddenly releases all that pressure and starts dancing like crazy and running through the building.
The video is fresh, different and very exciting. It taps into an emotion most people have had at some point at a boring event. Even the music to which she dances creates excitement, all leading up to announcing the new fragrance.
6. Shine on Social Media
The statistics on video viewing on Facebook are staggering. About 500 million people watch videos every single day on Facebook. Add to this the people watching on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and you can see why video is such a popular marketing medium. Video and social media are like peanut butter and jelly — they just go together. The number of video viewers continues to rise, and the number of available videos on the internet goes up every year too.
Branded video content is up 258 percent on Facebook and 99 percent on YouTube in the last couple of years. Stand out from your competition by taking advantage of the large number of potential leads viewing videos on these platforms. In addition, target videos to your exact audience through some of the ad filters on both of these sites, but in particular on Facebook. There’s a reason brands consistently create video content and attract new customers.
CRO Improvements
If these statistics don’t convince you that conversion is optimized when you include video, consider that most site visitors seek information that’s easy to absorb so that they can decide if they want to buy from you or not.
When you provide video, it’s simply another way for consumers to learn more about what you have to offer and make an informed decision. While the person might not read a lengthy white paper, they’ll watch a two-minute video describing the advantages of your product.
Take the time to entertain your target audience, and they’ll reward you with more sales and brand loyalty. The happiest customers are also likely to share your video with those they know, creating word-of-mouth advertising you simply can’t put a price on. In the end, creating videos increases CRO and has an excellent ROI for most business owners.
