Video marketing has become a powerful means for promoting anything you want online and videos are now an expected component of any website. More than 150 million people view videos online every year, and most of them are ripe to hear your business’s pitch if you produce and market your video effectively. Having a video on your website is one of the best things you can do to increase your search rankings because an optimized video indicates to search engines that you have a strong online presence while also pushing your competition further down the rankings. If you see a video in the Google results… it stands out a lot more than a regular website listing does, so it tends to attract more clicks. In Part 9 of our ongoing discussion of the Top 10 Marketing Strategies that you MUST follow to be successful in 2012, we present some interesting facts that should convince you that video is an effective form of communication that needs to be integrated into each and every aspect of your existing marketing efforts.

Grabbing a persons’ attention and keeping them engaged for a substantial period of time is one of the best and quickest way to gain their trust. By using online video marketing effectively to gain that trust is a great way to convert your audience into happy, long-term clients/customers/subscribers. Whether it’s a product, service, opt-in form, website, blog, etc. … videos make text-based content look more comprehensive, and more appealing to readers, which increases the value of the content and the probability of it being shared throughout your social media channels. In fact, what you are actually doing is making it easier for the viewer to be exposed to the information you are trying to communicate.

If a picture says 1000 words, then a video tells the whole story. Actually it is better than a story because the brain can fill in the gaps and elaborate with its vast imagination. YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine on the Web, and statistics back up the fact that users will spend longer on pages that contain online video versus those that don’t. The fact of the matter is that people actually like to find video answers to their questions, as opposed to searching pages and pages of text, so all you need is 30-45 seconds and good images to engage your audience.

Social media sites and video go hand-in-hand, and most sites encourage video posting and sharing. By engaging with your fans on Twitter and Facebook and posting your videos online, the opportunity for them to go viral becomes endless as your friends/followers share with their friends and so on. In today’s world of “new” content marketing, customers are on the lookout for companies that make them feel engaged with valued based information along with helpful advice and tips. Although no amount of sophisticated technology will ever take the place of connecting live and in person, a video shows real people, who work for real companies and allows you to communicate that “up close and personal” feel towards many people at one time.

Some Facts About Video Marketing
- Online video is becoming a must for any business with a serious online presence. According to an estimate, in the very near future if a website doesn’t contain video content it won’t feature on Google’s first page of search results.
- Business decision makers LOVE online video because it gives them the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time.
- According to a recent study by Forrester Research, adding video to your website makes your site 6 times more likely to convert a “browser” into a paying customer?
- That same study showed that only 20% of web visitors will sit and read the majority of the text on a website, but 80% will sit and watch the same content when presented in the form of a video.
- A company web site is also 50 times more likely to be ranked on the front page of Google if it contains video. Click-throughs on a video are often much higher than a standard website listing on the front page of Google.
- In a study of nearly 1 billion emails comparing the opening and click-through rates, video email had a 5.6% higher open rate and a 96.4% higher click-through rate than non-video emails.

The beauty of video marketing is how well it works. In fact, it works better than most other forms of social media, both in terms of front page ranking and audience size (real audience as opposed to Facebook friends!), plus it also outranks others in terms of the actions taken as a result of the videos. The key to its effectiveness comes from the unique qualities of the video medium – to convey the atmosphere and emotion of a story, the human dimension – rather than simply duplicating the factual content that you already have in the text of your brochure or website. Once you can see the whites of someone’s eyes – whether it’s a customer testimonial or a passionate, un-scripted interview with a Chief Exec – you are really unlocking the power of what video, and only video, can do.

Video marketing is extremely efficient, but it sounds clichéd to say that what matters is the content. By this, I mean that given the new age, videos need to be quick and to the point; there needs to be an effective catch phrase to receive immediate attention. Statistically, the videos that are effective to the new generation are videos with fast, moving, and short clips. Video works best when it provides the creative glue that blends other ideas together. For example when you can get a video on YouTube and then post it into Facebook and get others to use it as well and then it gets tweeted about and is circulated onto other sites, then you have effectively created a viral video.

However, the opposite is also true. If your video doesn’t match the markets/viewers needs/expectations or it isn’t informative or entertaining enough people will likely not spend their time watching. It’s not enough to just sit in front of a cheap camera and babble about what you think people should listen to. If you want to do video marketing right, get a qualified team to make a story board, use the right equipment and help you design your ideas so that they appeal to prospective visually.

In summary, video is an incredibly powerful medium that can engage the viewer in a far more memorable and effective way than text or images alone. Seeing is believing and the numbers say that marketing with videos, video emails, and teleconferencing is on the increase. In comparison to non-video emails, a video email is opened 75% of the time and viewed 85% to completion depending on the content and the quality of video. People remember pictures and images long after they have viewed the content. Much like a good book where the words produce a story and the story produces an image, however the video tells the story in a shorter time frame. Say you are grandparent and your grandchild is having a birthday party, would you rather read about his birthday party or see it in a video? Better than video emails, how about video conferencing? How about seeing it live and hearing what is going on? These tools are readily available, so why not make use of them?

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For more great marketing information, here are the remainder of the articles in this series that we have presented;

- SEO Equals Profits … Wanna See How?
- Tell A Story With An Infographic and Build Your Brand
- Large Format Printing – Go Big and Get Noticed!!
- Mobile Marketing with QR Codes and Text Messaging
- Marketing With Newsletters – Email or Print, Which is Better?
- If You Blog It They Will Come …. To Your Website
- Targeted Direct Mail Gets Better Results
- The Impact of Social Media on Business Success
- Top 10 Marketing Strategies that you MUST follow to be successful in 2012