Marketing Experts Believe in Video
In a previous post, Signs You Should Invest in Video Marketing, we discussed the reasons why you should invest in video marketing for your website in 2014 and the reasons it works so well. Video marketing increases the confidence that potential consumers feel to do business with you, it increases the conversion rates of your website by as much as 50% and it enhances your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. Despite the overwhelming growth in video marketing, many companies still fail to invest their advertising dollars in video for a number of reasons. Those that we have spoken to cite various reasons as to why they haven’t made the leap into video marketing. The only problem is that most of the reasons or excuses we hear are myths. If you familiarize yourself with these video marketing myths, you can make sure that you’re not unintentionally holding your company back.
Video Marketing Myths
1. No one will see or find my video. According to YouTube Statistics, 100 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute and over 600 billion hours of video are watched every month. Many businesses incorrectly believe that no one will find, let alone watch their online videos. When you work with professional services that help you to optimize all aspects of your video and work with you to promote and distribute your video to the correct channels, this myth couldn’t be further from the truth. With solid content concepts, compelling script creation and calls to action, combined with skilled filming, editing, and optimizing all aspects of the video, you’re video marketing should receive traffic the minute it’s posted and that traffic should grow over time.
2. Video production is too complicated and time consuming. The Xcite Group’s online video marketing platform makes planning, ordering, reviewing, managing and marketing your videos easy. When you work with a professional services company that has experience in video marketing, you shouldn’t have to worry about it taking up too much of your time. You will work with us to create the vision of the video and our creative team begins developing the script and the concept. The video shoot is then scheduled and completed and the editing process begins. We take care of the heavy lifting but we still want you to be involved to make sure that the project is laying out the way that you want. You, however, don’t have to worry about spending too much time on it, as if you were the producer. That’s our job. Best of all, you’ll get your video in as little as 14 days!
3. Professional video production is too expensive! While it’s true that professional services can be more expensive than making your own video on an iPhone, the return on investment that comes from good video production is one of the strongest of any marketing. If you’re concerned about spending thousands and thousands of dollars on production and promotion, rest assured that’s not necessary. The Xcite Group and our partner network have revolutionized the video production process, making it possible for you to produce video content to suit your needs and your budget.
4. My website doesn’t need it. If you want to differentiate yourself from competitors, increase conversions and add professionalism to your products and services, your website needs video. You want your video marketing to result in more conversions and more revenue for your company or brand, but this shouldn’t be your only goal. Some videos can be heavily targeted to showcase a specific product and encourage purchases, others can be used to raise overall awareness of your brand, strengthen your online image with customer testimonials or even teach people how to use your products.
Much of the apprehension that exists around video production and marketing is unfounded. Video marketing may not be the magic marketing solution that you’ve been searching for, but it’s an extremely powerful one. Are you taking advantage of the power of video marketing for your business?
What Can Professional Video Marketing Do For Your Business?
We’ve spent a bit of time talking about why you should invest in video marketing and some of the myths involved with professional video production. You’ve also likely seen hundreds of articles that talk about how video will help your website, but have any of them really spelled out how? Here are simple ways video marketing can help not just improve your website’s reach, stickiness, SEO and appeal, as well as your overall business. Adding video to your site doesn’t have to cost a fortune either.
Video marketing boosts SEO. Blog posts that include video will attract three times as many links to it than a plain text post. Video in universal search results have a 41% higher click-through rate than plain text results. When you post the video to YouTube or other video sharing site, it’s another place for Google to connect your message, your content and your brand to your website.
- Video engages audiences. People love videos. Even with our on-demand, technology-shortened attention spans, millions of people still consume hundreds of hours of video every day online. A clever, interesting, and instructive video will help people connect with you and your company’s message. Viewers retain 95% of the information they view in a video while they typically only retain 10% of what they read in plain text.
- Video is descriptive. The saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words, so what about video? A compelling 1-minute video can explain your company, product and your message better than a full page of text.
- Video is sharable. Great videos get shared. Even if you’re video is a simple “how to” tutorial for your product or an explanation of who your company is and what it believes in, people will share it with their friends and colleagues.
Video marketing sells. When your videos are compelling and descriptive, they make your site “sticky”. Visitors will remain on your site longer, engage with more of your content and become more likely to reach out and connect with your business. In fact, if you use a simple message at the end of the video with a good call to action, you can turn that stickiness and engagement into a lead for your business or whatever you need people to do on your website. Using video on landing pages can increase your conversion by 86%. As an example of video marketing’s effectiveness, Shoeline.com experienced a 44% increase in overall sales by using videos to showcase their products.
- Video adds credibility. If you have a service business, video is a great way to increase your credibility. Creating “how to” videos designed to educate the viewer can demonstrate your expertise in your service field, thus lending you credibility and giving the consumer a sense of confidence in your business. You’re advertising your company while also establishing yourself as an expert in your field.
If video marketing is going to grab viewers’ attention and keep their interest, it has to be engaging from the start. Video analytics tracking enables you to know who viewed your videos, how long they watched and where they clicked. That information lets you target your video marketing efforts better. If you haven’t already begun implementing a video marketing strategy, now’s the time to start. Remember those engagement and lead-conversion figures – and remember how easy it is to get professionally produced videos made. That should be enough to get anybody animated! Are you considering adding video to your marketing mix? The reasons to jump on top of video marketing far exceed any of the perceived negatives.
Looking for visual representation of these perceived myths of online video marketing, check out our infographic below:
If you would like to see some examples of videos we have created for our clients, http://bit.ly/1eQStJn.
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