“Content is King.” You’ve heard this age-old marketing adage a thousand times. But of course, it still rings true. In fact, with a multitude of marketing channels and mobile accessibility from buyers, it matters now more than ever. Here’s how you can leverage video content to close more deals.
Video has quickly become a dynamic and effective means of increasing sales conversions within online marketing.
Incorporating video into your marketing strategy diversifies your content and provides higher levels of engagement from your customer base. A Kissmetrics analysis showed that “visitors who watch video stay on the site twice as long and visit twice as many pages versus those who don’t see video.” With such an astounding difference in conversion with video as opposed to without, it seems like a no brainer to become savvy at producing marketable video content. But as usual, you want to produce videos with content that is high quality, and relevant. Posting videos just for the sake of video won’t effectively bring in or convert new leads. In fact, it may be detrimental if the videos are unprofessional or off-topic. So stick with what you know, and do it well.
Did you know that YouTube and Vimeo are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to video hosting? There are a number of Online Video Platforms, or OVPs, which can provide additional benefit on top of simply hosting your video content on the web. We’ve listed a few here, but it’s highly encouraged to research one that is best suited to your business and marketing needs.
Wistia: Wistia’s point of pride is its robust analytics capabilities. In-depth heat mapping allows you to see what segments and areas of a video are getting the most views and activity. You can visually see which moments of the video are getting skipped or rewatched. Wistia provides advanced video SEO with JSON-LD to help bring viewers to your site, not just to YouTube. Wistia’s API makes it easy to integrate with your favorite marketing platform so you can track videos right from your dashboard. It’s also highly customizable, and works well with mobile (great for the millennial audience!).
Vidyard: Vidyard is great for increasing engagement with your consumers through live video. The player can actually track the “digital body language” of your viewers to provide insight on how interested they are. Vidyard has easy integration with all major CRMs, so you can instantly and automatically receive meaningful data on your audience. You have the option to upload your videos directly onto the Vidyard hosting platform, but they also allow you to pull up existing videos from YouTube.
Brightcove: Brightcove represents the enterprise choice for video marketing. They have extensive history with large companies (Puma, Showtime, Lowe’s) and can provide additional features like hourly metrics reports and employee training programs. Brightcove shines brightest with large volumes of video content, monetization and advertising.
Once you’ve found an OVP that is right for you, it’s time to set up a comprehensive video marketing strategy that your team can execute efficiently and for the long term. In order for marketing automation to be most effective, it is important to spend ample time in the planning stage to make sure your video content is reaching the right audience, through the right channels, at the right time.
Pro Tip: For more information on how to engage, nurture, and convert leads with video marketing automation, check out this recording of a live webinar Direct Images hosted in partnership with Wistia.
The goal is to provide information that goes beyond text, and adds a creative and engaging element to your sales funnel. People love companies who diversify the way in which they communicate their value to the public. In fact, RendrFX reports that “90% of daily internet users said that product videos are helpful in the decision-making process.”
Start by branding your video with text and graphical overlays. This adds a personal touch which your viewers will appreciate. The videos should be personalized depending on the style, content, target audience, and viewing channel. Once they are tailored with a specific buyer in mind, track the video conversion with quantifiable metrics like total views compared with the click-through rate. With many OVPs you can also add “live links” which are clickable links that pop up directly in the video. Make sure to set up a system to track these clicks so that you can gain insight into the most effective marketing channels that your customers are responding to.
An often-overlooked capability of video marketing is to be combined with your existing email marketing efforts. When considering using video in your email campaigns, consider this: HyperFine Media collected data on hundreds of companies with dedicated marketing departments, and found that including video in an email led to a 200-300% increase in click-through rate. That is a statistic that simply cannot be ignored. If you’re still skeptical, set up an A/B testing framework: send half of your marketing emails without video and the other half with a personalized video included. The results should speak for themselves.
Reach your audience on their own terms by incorporating mobile video into your content marketing strategy. Although millennials might not be the core focus of your target audience, last year’s report by BusinessOfApps showed that 48% of millennials view video solely on their mobile device. This has major implications for mobile marketers who want to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to customer engagement. In the age of smartphones and instant accessibility to information, your company can either become an industry leader in mobile video marketing, or get left behind. HubSpot found that 92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others. This provides a unique opportunity to spread your online influence by having mobile users become your greatest and most organic brand ambassadors. To make the next viral marketing video is to launch yourself into the spotlight. Example below:
Grasshopper is a company that can turn your business into a mobile-office through your smartphone. They tapped into the collective consciousness of tech entrepreneurship by posting a humorous, creative spin-off of a popular Jay-Z song.
The video has well over a million views on YouTube, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Facebook shares, retweets, and “likes” from a myriad of websites led to Grasshopper getting news coverage, and an epic increase in site traffic. Your video content certainly doesn’t have to be satirical, but this illustrates the creative control you can have over the content you produce.
Video marketing is a rapidly-growing asset to both B2B and B2C companies. The world has been connected through the internet, and knowing how to navigate the sphere of e-commerce can pay enormous dividends for your marketing and sales team, and ultimately your bottom line. Incorporating video into your strategy adds an engaging, interactive, and trackable metric to your marketing efforts. Now get out there and publish some quality video content!
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