Why you should use video marketing to engage your audience and strengthen your brand.
So earlier this week we talked about what, exactly, video marketing is. But now you’re probably wondering why should you even consider video marketing? Two reasons: the emotional reaction video inspires in viewers, and the SEO boost that video gives your online presence.
The Emotional Reaction
Video allows you to interact with your target audience in a more visceral way that just words or images, and that’s because video works on your brain differently than text does. When interacting with text, a customer perceives the text, appraises its meaning, evaluates its meaning, then has an emotional response. With video, on the other hand, the viewer perceives the video, has the emotional response, appraises the meaning, and then evaluates the meaning. What that boils down to is this: that kneejerk emotional reaction to video means that a customer’s understanding of the content is tinted by that emotion, making it more likely that they’ll buy what you’re selling. (They’ll pick up what you’re putting down?) And the benefits of the emotional reaction are threefold:
- When your video elicits an emotional reaction from your viewer, it makes your content more memorable. Think of Volkswagen’s Kid Vader commercial – everyone loved it because it was hilarious and adorable, which made it stick out in people’s minds. Right now, I bet you didn’t even have to click that link to know which video I was talking about, right? (But I bet you did anyway, because again – adorable.)
- A video that gets a reaction from its audience is automatically more shareable. Think about Dollar Shave Club. Their first video launched in 2012 – in 2015, it has 21 million views. And that’s just on YouTube! That’s not counting Vimeo, Facebook, or other users that have uploaded the video themselves. That is just their main YouTube account. So why so many views? Because the video elicited an emotional reaction – in this case, laughter.
- When a video makes a viewer feel a certain way, it drives that viewer to action. According to a Comscore 2010 study, 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. That same study found that visitors who watched a video stayed on web sites an average of two minutes longer. Finally, ReelSEO found that home page videos have been shown to increase conversions by 20%. Not bad! Speaking of driving action;
The SEO Boost
Having video on your homepage and having a dedicated YouTube of Vimeo channel can help improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What that means is that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing will be able to find you more easily, and will be more likely to put your page or content higher in their results. So here’s how it works:
- Having a video on a web page generally results in a “Rich Snippet” showing up in search results. A rich snippet is a search result that has a little image thumbnail that indicates video is present, and rich snippets have higher click-through rates than regular links.
- Pages with video generate more inbound links from other sites and social media channels, and inbound links are great for SEO. Truly, pages that have mixed media (text, images, video, etc) generate the most inbound links, but adding video to a page results in more inbound links than images and text or text only.
- Finally, by having video on a dedicated video search engine (like YouTube) you improve your chances of showing up in a Google search multiple times. If your web site, your YouTube channel, and a blog post you’ve written all show up in search results, you’re more likely to get clicked on, and thus more likely to convert.
So now you understand WHY you should incorporate video into your marketing strategy. Come back next week to learn some tips on HOW.