Video should be an integral part of your marketing strategy and a key component of your approach to traffic acquisition. There are many reasons why you should invest in video marketing and perhaps the most significant is that your users are likely to favour video above any other type of content. There’s strong evidence that web users favour video more than on-page text, and that includes those in B2B markets. A study by Brainshark found 59% of senior execs favoured video above text, meaning if you’re trying to engage with this group, video would be the medium your audience favours most.
But more significantly, video is thought to work better than other channels in many key ways. For instance, video content is thought to drive better engagement, more sharing and better retention of key messages. Insivia identified that viewers retained an astonishing 95% of a message viewed in a video compared to just 10% of a message read as text. A similar study by Brainshark found that information retained from a single minute of video was equal to around 1.8 million written words.
There’s also evidence to suggest that viewers are prepared to spend more time on a webpage if it offers video content. Mist Media identified evidence that users spend 88% more time on a site offering video: Marketing Sherpa said the figure was closer to 100%.
Video for traffic acquisition
So video works well once users are on your site. But did you know video can also be a key tool for driving visitors to your site in the first place? It’s been clear for a few years that search engines are increasingly favouring video content. Following 2011’s Panda update to the Google algorithm, sites which had low video content seemed to rank lower than they did prior to the update. In fact, according to Comscore, adding video to your site can increase your chances of getting to Google’s front page by more than 50 times. Facebook also favours video posts and your followers are much more likely to see video content you post in your feed than a text or image post you publish.
Video is also an effective tool in other channels as outlined in this 5 ways to use video for inbound lead generation article. Use of video in email has been shown to almost double click through rates in some instances. The specific study (by Implix) found that if a video was added to the introductory email then the click-through rate rose by 96%. Mobile video is also an effective choice of destination for mobile action codes such as QR codes. It’s thought that around 40% of QR codes link to video content.
There are many reasons to recommend using video as part of your marketing strategy. Not only do customers favour it, but it’s thought that by 2017 video content may constitute 69% of internet traffic. Perhaps this is the most significant aspect to video marketing: as the amount of video content on the web grows, do you want to be the only brand that isn’t using this popular channel to reach your audience?