Online Video is big; it adds life and vitality to your business.
If you are an individual, it helps you grow an audience, boosts your credibility, and allows you to tell your story.
Instead of just waxing eloquent about the impact of videos on your brand and your profits, let’s explore how video achieves miracles.
If you’ve been thinking whether video works for your business, here are at least 12 substantial reasons why video marketing is a blessing for your business:
The Online Video Stats staggering
More than 96% of online users prefer watching videos — from brands and businesses they like (or they have no idea how much they end up liking later, thanks to those videos).
The average person spends 100 minutes a day watching videos, according to Zenith Media
A whopping 90% of all consumer IP traffic originated from video then. Comscore noted that about 85% of U.S Internet users watch 22 hours of online video. It also recorded the total number of video viewers at 180 million.
Fast forward to 2022, and the numbers are even more staggering.
According to optinmonster, more than 55% of users deep dive into videos before shopping (Ref: ThinkWithGoogle) and 66% of users prefer watching a video instead of “reading about a product”.
Youtube alone has more than a 2.3 billion active users (logging in each month). Each week, about of the entire Internet population watches an hour worth of video on Facebook or YouTube. More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube alone.
Here’s the kicker: more video is now uploaded every 30 days than all the video ever created by major U.S Television networks for the last 30 years.
With more than 61% of marketing professionals swearing by video content, it’s time you dust off that camera or whip out your smartphone. Now.
Video offers the best engagement & Conversions
Lindsay Kolowich of HubSpot points out that just by putting a video into your email boosts engagement by 200-300%? Or when you combine video with full-page ads, the engagement goes up by 22%. Landing page conversions increase by 80% just by adding a video on your landing pages.
If consumers get to watch a video, 64% of them are more likely to buy products online.
All those little calls-to-action that run through the video such as “learn more”, “visit us”, “practice for free today”, “sign-up for more” work tremendously well within a video taking user engagement to a whole new level.
Not to mention the traffic that you’d get from YouTube alone, and now that’s a channel by itself.
Videos convert like magic
Armando Roggio of Practical Ecommerce drives a point straight home: nothing beats video as far as conversions are concerned. The article mentions a case study of Treepodia.com (a video creation company) at least 46.22% increase in conversions for two retailers.
So, you think only big budget retailers use video for high conversions? According to the folks at Visual Website Optimizer, Carl Juneau – a personal trainer – uses videos at his website SixPackAbsExercises.com and saw his conversions peak at 46%.
Bodybuilding.com — the popular authority site on Muscle Power building – almost entirely uses videos for training, conversions, and boosting its own store sales or paid expert training programs.
Video brings personality. As close to being real
The video is the closest your can come to actually being “In-person” with every viewer watching videos. Video multiplies the power of “being there” to an enormous scale. With video instruction videos, for instance, it’s as good as sitting in a class.
While the video itself is hosted on a scalable infrastructure allowing for multiple views at the same time, every user gets the feeling of exclusivity apart from the flexibility of viewing, pausing, stopping, or returning to the instructions much later.
With the sheer potential of video, you are left with more possibilities for marketing, a humongous chance to build your brand, engage with your audience, and tap into profits.
Use video to grow your business
Onemarketmedia.com published at least 51 Ways to use Web Video to Help Your Business grow, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For all you know, your videos might just get “viral” with you possibly flirting with one of the many secret strategies that make videos go viral.
But then, I’d say this while on the topic of being viral: don’t count on it; just focus on the content.
As for most things in business, you’ll need a strategy to use videos, but it’s a strategic that has a resounding payoff making videos an undeniably tempting marketing channel.
Teach your audience
Videos engage, teach, communicate, inform, motivate, convert, persuade, and sell. Videos are as good as you sitting in a conference, taking a class, doing a meeting, or conducting a group coaching session. There’s a reason why the “How To” Category on YouTube is popular.
In fact, the ability to teach can be a real differentiator for your brand or business. As Jennifer Rooney of Forbes writes,
Teaching brands, or brands that educate consumers on not just the product they’re buying but the context in which they’re used— think Betty Crocker teaching women how to cook or Lunchables teaching kids how to assemble a sandwich— hold a special value and can build attachment above and beyond brands that don’t provide such education.
The opportunity to learn from brands can possibly lead to longer-term loyalty and referral.
What will you teach today? If you ask me, I’d just started a YouTube Channel trying to do my best to teach and educate (please do let me know what you think about it?)
If you are confident enough, I’d highly recommend you start your own online course — with Podia, Thinkific, or Payhip
Focus on 1 Video per campaign rule
This is more of a rule than an idea. Since this rule is often forgotten or overlooked, I thought it makes sense to include it here. Every piece of content (audio, video, and text) should have a purpose. Your campaigns should lead readers/visitors/users to something specific.
You don’t get much with generic videos or generic traditional campaigns all leading to the same URL. Follow the 1 video – 1 campaign rule: create a separate video that sits on a specific landing page you want visitors to go to. For instance, have unique videos for newsletter sign-ups, landing pages, home page, your blog, or any other web property.
Period.
Video For Calls to Actions
Those CTA buttons are everywhere. It’s getting harder to have people “opt-in”. Maybe video is how you’d stand out.
Building your list, getting subscribers for your newsletter, having people sign up for your recently launched mobile application – each of these are results you might want for your business.
Calls to actions can come within videos with tools like Turnstile for Wistia or Convertplayer. Or you could use videos to further nudge buyers to take action on landing pages and on web pages where you have prominent Calls to action buttons placed.
Video could very well be the virtual handshake you could extend to your potential customers or subscribers.
Video series on Youtube and Vimeo = Links Back to Website
Video is big, and so the video hosting sites such as Youtube and Vimeo are even bigger. Thousands of visitors through video sites everyday, and for a business that should be reason enough to show up. Create interesting videos, punch in a message with relevant information, and then drive your conversions sky-high.
A video packs in quite a bit, but it makes sense for viewers to take action towards the end of the video. So where would they go from here? What’s better than your website, a landing page, or even your blog?
Did you know that you could have your QR code show up on videos too?
Video for Live Chat and/or contact form
Depending on your business model, there are often times when your customers might want to contact you, chat up with you, send in a request for proposal, ask for a quote, or perhaps do a live chat session. They have questions and they want you to answer.
With the current crop of LiveChat tools and solutions available, you could do that easily.
But using online video for a live chat before you send in a quote, a proposal, or while have them contact you with their requirements can take your sales closure rate to another level altogether.
Use Video for free downloads & to grow your list
“Free” is a powerful word (yes, even now) and you could use it to do multiple things, all at once. Give away access to your products or services; give out free whitepapers or reports that establish your expertise or credibility.
Earlier, it was impossible to re-route customers through other forms of lead generation such as traditional marketing, trade shows, inbound calls, etc.
You could now route your leads to have them download something for free. This way, you have a targeted list of potential buyers who can be nurtured and primed for a purchase (when your clients are ready).
Loom is a popular way to create quick videos — for a variety of use cases.
Get Loom for free. Use it to make quick that long pending online video.
Video To Pump Up Social media Impact
Social media is undeniably huge.
If you have been confused as to what role it can possibly play for your ROI, like many small and medium business owners still do, using video in combination with your regular social media updates be a great way to increase the size of your respective social media channels such as Facebook Fan pages, Twitter followers, or LinkedIn Connects.
Today, you can also easily create Ads for social media using Video — powerful, effective, and this can literally kiss your competition goodbye.
The common denominator for each of these different ways to get inbound leads or to elicit specific actions from your customers is a great video.
Creating great videos that work for your business doesn’t have to be rocket science.
Just ask us and we’ll show you the way.
You just have to start getting used to online video. Ask me, it’s tough for me to do online videos. But, I am trying.
Read more:
Free video tools for your business
Video Creation Tools You could use
Fantastic Video prospecting tools
Are you thinking of using online video for your business? Tell me how.
5 thoughts on “Online Video: 12 Ways To Amplify Conversions & Engagement”