Crush It With Video

How’s your company’s video game?

No, we don’t mean or your employees’ prowess on Xbox, PlayStation, or Wii or a console game featuring your brand. We’re talking about how well your company uses video. And why upping your game can lead to better branding, more traffic, and more conversions.

Online, video is unavoidable. Just look at your personal Facebook feed. A lot of it probably consists of video. Who would rather read when they can watch?

The hours of video consumption not only grows each year (since the launch of YouTube in 2005, it has never not grown), but the percentage of time watching video versus time spent online has grown too. And every single major photo sharing platform, whether Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, or Flickr, offers video capability. You can even go live on most of them.

Video: Critical to Success

Having a video presence online today is not just something to be thought of as a future goal. It’s critical now. But it’s got to cut through because more hours of available video make getting noticed tougher. Which is why you shouldn’t just have video — you should have video that nails it.

Video makes learning about your company and its products and services easier. It’s much more likely that prospects will engage with your company through watching a video. Video offers versatility paired with the ability for sharing. It can be embedded in a website, put on a Facebook page, or uploaded to your company’s YouTube or Vimeo channel. And the prevailing thought is that the percentage of video content online will grow percentage-wise until it overtakes all other content.

Prospects hungry for information at any point in the sales funnel turn to video for important product and benefit information. A well-produced video can go a long way toward helping them decide. Chances are they’ll decide to spend with you if they see a video providing them insight into your company and helpful product information. And video does wonders for boosting your SEO.

Corporate Video

Of the many forms of video marketing, corporate video is probably the most recognizable. Many times, it’s the first interaction a prospect has with your company. For this reason, corporate videos must be the most polished.

Corporate and branding videos offer potential customers a bird’s eye view of your company, tells your story through a unique brand voice and speaks to your customers in an effective way. A corporate video piques the prospect’s interest, makes them aware of your specific advantages, and works to differentiate you from the competition.

Product Videos

Videos showing specific product attributes, capabilities and specifications give your prospect pertinent information that helps their buying decision. Prospects deep in the sales funnel will appreciate a video description or product demo. Whether the product is a highly specialized, such as industrial machinery, or basic, such as a shoe (Zappos creates videos for many shoes they offer), video offers tremendous opportunity for engagement.

Video Blogs

We’ve all heard about the benefits of blogging. Why not do it with video? Google and other major search engines love fresh content (and here’s another plus: Google REALLY loves video), and video offers a unique way to do blog posts. SEO company MOZ does this each week, via their Whiteboard Friday video blog series. Your business can do it effectively, too. Doing a video blog, at least monthly, can help you increase engagement, gain followers and boost your SEO.

Additional Benefits

Video builds trust with your target audience, boosts ROI, and shows engagement with your market. With video, there’s little room for misinterpretation, too. It explains what you want to show in a clear way. And with closed caption options on Facebook and YouTube (another way to boost SEO), you can provide more information to the viewer and they don’t even have to turn the volume up. You also can gain attention and action from people in your audience that don’t care to read content. Links to purchase a product or learn more can also be embedded in video.

Taking all these into consideration, it pays to start using video if you haven’t yet begun. If you have started to use video, enhancing your presence with professional quality video only makes your company look sharper, more knowledgeable and trustworthy.