If a picture is worth a thousand words what is a video worth, especially if it influences your sales? Why are videos so popular in our daily lives? Whether for entertainment purposes or educational purposes, a video can have far more impact than reading lots of tiring text. Besides, our attention span in the digital world is much more short-lived! We are presented with so much information, videos help process some of it, and allow us to digest this type of content because motion is always more eye-catching. But most importantly videos can evoke an emotional response much easier than a static image.
Videos are just the preferred way to consume content
And this is backed up by numbers not just hearsay. Doug Ridley pointed out that YouTube has become the second largest search engine globally reporting:
- Over 1 billion unique visitors per month
- More than 6 billion hours of video watched each month.
Increase conversions
The reasons why we should capitalize on videos are many-fold. According to Neil Patel “viewers are anywhere from 64-85% more likely to buy after watching a product video”. That’s a huge incentive to consider videos in your activities. It helps conversions and increases your sales.
Increase “Time on Page”
Other similar statistics indicate that subject to your industry, including instructional and how-to- videos entice visitors to stay twice as long on your website than those who don’t see a video. Videos enhance your website experience and can easier achieve a connection with your target audience. Especially if the content / videos are well made and relevant to the per se respective audience.
Improves your SEO
The longer a visitor remains on your website, it contributes to improving your search results and ranking on Google. Therefore, every keyword you are targeting poses an opportunity to create a video. Especially given the fact that Google displays videos in its search results too, increasing your chances of being found in the abyss of the world of the web.
Videos are shareable
If you create unique content, you can distribute this via various channels. Be it your social media or newsletter you can drive traffic to your website, which should be your ultimate end destination to help increase your website traffic, conversions and so on.
Flow of videos
According to Shane McGeorge it is estimated that “close to 75% of business professionals watch promotional videos frequently” of products or services they are interested in.
Think about it. You can search for a product you are looking for directly on YouTube, or via online ads served to you because you fit the demographic of the ad. And if properly done it will end up in a website selling those products you are looking for which means it will increase traffic and possible conversions.
According to George, “it has been rumoured that Facebook has updated its algorithm to favour video posts above all other types of content”. This is something that you can check yourself. Whether your video content is outperforming your static posts and content.
How can videos be used?
Videos are a great tool and can be applied and serve so many different purposes and industries.
Product videos
Product or service videos aim to highlight the attributes and main selling points of a product. When shopping online if you are ready to make a purchase you will definitely click on a video, if available to see the 360 views of the product or see its attributes up closely. In fact, the video can be the influencing factor to convince you, that this is the right product/brand for you. Which is why it is imperative that it is professionally done.
Check out the video we created for JCC Payment Systems regarding an app that was about to be launched JCCUp.
And below is a simple product video from a series of videos we created for A. Stephanides & Son Luxury Goods to be able to utilize and promote across their official social channels, for certain items they wanted to promote.
Service videos
Often the best way to explain a service is via a video. Remember, the attention span of your online prospect is very short. If you compliment the text with your detailed description of your service offering with a catchy video, you are closer to convincing your prospective customer to convert to an actual one if he/she is ready to purchase your service.
Let me show some examples to spark some ideas which might help you:
BeFlexi video
Be Flexi is an innovative supply chain solution focused on flexitank technology. Now how do you explain that especially given that it can be used cost-effectively across many industries? Upon request by the client, we created a series of services focused videos to help explain what they do and bring up the main USP’s of the service. Moreover, we followed the style of a previously created video, by enhancing it slightly, to ensure brand consistency across all their communication touchpoints.
Lifegoals Funds video
Emergo Wealth is a leading firm providing personalised investment services for people of all walks of life by investing globally diversified, low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on your goals and risk tolerance, which was to be launched as Lifegoals fund. Say what? How do you explain all that in layman’s terms? We created an animated video with a nice drawing technique. And we decided through storytelling to introduce this service so that every simple person could understand it and see its potential. We introduced two characters, Eleni and Petro a couple that was about to have a child and was looking for Investment opportunities to safeguard the future of their soon to be a child.
Educational and/or How-To
Educational videos, how-to videos and/or tutorial videos are very common to help you explain how to use a service or learn something that might be of interest to you. Even how to set up a new toy and simple stuff in our everyday life.
Check out a sample we did here for a leading Forex player in the UAE:
Entertainment
At BLEND we occasionally create videos in various creative ways. For example, this one was created a few years back to send our Christmas wishes in a more personalized yet entertaining way
Enhance your website
On a general note, videos are a great way to enhance your website experience by portraying the desired branding, as we did for Equfin:
Event
Moreover, videos can be a great pre-cursor before any event, like we did a few times for TedX Nicosia.
Or to promote the Stoli club & Bar Awards
Case Studies
As we produce videos in-house, we also create videos to showcase our work. This complements the lengthy and detailed descriptions per case study, but at a glance enables the user to see the project aspects we wish to highlight.
Visit our case studies section to view the videos
You get the idea. The sky is the limit as to how you can capitalize on the benefits and creativity of videos to serve multiple goals and portray yourself as a more professional entity.
Techniques to be used
Videos can take many forms. They can include raw footage. Or footage with edits and intros and outro’s. At BLEND we specialize in post-production videos or else known as animated videos with custom made illustrations. But even here we give ample choices to our clients. What animation style they like. In certain cases, we can even put together a mood board to help our clients identify their desired style. More often than not, though our clients send us video styles that they like to guide the process.
Many elements need to be decided such as the duration of the video, the main selling points, the goal of the video, animation technique, illustration style if we will add music and whether we will hire a voice-over talent. If yes to the latter, in which language, what gender, what dialect e.g. British English or American English and so on.
Conclusion
To conclude no one can dispute the benefits of making use of videos and their wide range of applicability. Moreover, it is proven that people, in order to make a purchase, need to make an emotional connection; and in the digital sphere, one good way to achieve this is via videos. Videos propagate that association to the consumers mind allowing for greater trust or evoking emotion and hopefully a connection if the video is well made.
So, if we can help you in any way, you know where to find us.
