Video has often been thought of as a way to make a website come to life. Well, it’s also breathing life into content marketing, email marketing, SEO, social and more. Not just because it’s eye candy – it improves brand affinity, customer relations and, best of all, marketing and sales results.
Audiences respond to video in a big way, and marketers should take notice.
- 54% of consumers want to see videos from brands they support.
- 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video.
- 59% of company decision makers would rather watch a video than read an article or blog post.
- Embedding videos in landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%.
- Video is projected to claim more than 80% of all web traffic by 2019.
Video marketing just keeps growing. Use of video in marketing is up, and the way it’s used is continually growing. Video offers an array of options for your marketing message from brand videos, educational how-to videos and testimonials to animations or even live coverage of an event or announcement. Whatever you want your message to be, there’s a form of video to help promote it.
Leading online retailers use video on product and category pages because of the purchase influence it has. In fact, 52% of marketing professionals worldwide say video is the type of content with the best ROI. Some of the other key applications of video? Email marketing, lead generation and analytics.
Email Marketing
For those who use video in email marketing, it has yielded a number of positive results for businesses. An article by Forbes notes that adding video in email leads can increase the click-through rate by 200%-300%. Plus, it increases the time consumers spend looking at and/or reading email, increases forwarded emails and offers greater conversion rates and revenue gains.
Want to include video in your next email campaign? Take note the of these quick tips.
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For your subject line, be sure to include “video.” Adding it increases open rates by 19% and click-through rates by 65%.
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Be cautious about embedding the video directly into the email. Not all email clients can work with all video platforms, which can cause a bumpy user experience. Another option? Use an image with a “play” button that links externally to where the full video is hosted.
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Keep your video content short. A majority of views will occur on mobile devices, where attention spans tend to be shorter. Plan a singular purpose for the video and create the content for that key message.
Lead Generation
By incorporating an email gate or lead collection form into your video (requiring consumers to enter their email address to view a video), you have another way to harvest qualified leads who are showing an interest in your brand. Using automation and CRM systems in tandem with that lead information enables you to tie consumer data back to engagement with your content.
Analytics
These days, you can track much more than just the amount of views your video is getting. Audience engagement, drop-off rates, revenue impact and more can be tracked with the right platform. Video analytics are giving marketers an understanding of who is watching and how each video is having an impact on the bottom line. Tracking video-viewing activity will help you qualify, score and segment your leads better. If you know that someone watches only a portion of your video, you can market to him or her differently than to someone who watches all of your video, enhancing efficacy and ultimately improving conversion rates.
You can’t do that on YouTube. Unfortunately, YouTube can’t give you all these lead generation and rich analytic capabilities, but there are other programs that can maximize your video marketing custom-branded playback, advanced analytics and more. Likewise, if you’re thinking that consumer-sourced video content or amateur video is what you need, think again. Professionally produced video content is key for a successful video campaign. The good news? Our in-house production department can help with all of your video needs.
Got video? We do, and we wouldn’t be practicing what we preach if we didn’t insert our own video in this blog. It’s our demo reel. Take a look at how we’ve utilized video and helped clients take advantage of this powerful brand-builder. And we’ll look forward to hearing from you soon.
This article was originally published on August 17, 2015, and has since been updated.
