Content is King and Video reigns supreme!

Video has become an essential ingredient in nearly every successful online marketing strategy. The reason is that video rises to the top of the search results and once viewed, pays off with dramatically higher conversion rates.

Here are some findings from reputable independent analysts:

• 16% of customers who watch online video ads will purchase.¹
• 21% of video viewers make a purchase.²
• 26% of retail web video viewers visit a store.²
• 21% of retail web video viewers request more information.²
• ShopNBC Customers who watched videos on product pages converted at twice the rate of customers who did not.³
• Video marketing increases sales of services and products by over 70%.⁴
• Well-optimized video is fifty-three times more likely than text to appear on the front page of Google.⁵

Now consider that the above research does not differentiate between high quality, strategically produced video and ill-conceived and shoddy video. It would be reasonable to suggest that well produced, strategically planned video could outperform even these amazing “average” results.

Note that the first statistic is limited to “online video ads” and customers. While the next stat (not specifically ads) is even more impressive. The takeaway is that nobody wants to watch your ads! Plain and simple, “video ads” are less effective than informational videos that get found in response to viewers search queries. That’s good news if you are on a budget.

A video marketing strategy involves:

• Determining topics (keywords) that are best conveyed with video
• Determine customer segments that are more likely to prefer video to text
• Add the  most important, relevant  and  highly competitive and  keywords -- a video will help pages rank higher
• Match the style and tone of the videos to customer expectations (personas)
• Serialization - video content is well suited to episodic content which can be used to improve conversion
• Production planning - Allows creating multiple videos in a single production day
• Versioning - each video is re-edited to fill multiple needs. Ex. languages, short and long versions, broadcast versions and compendiums.
• Media deconstuction - Transcriptions become blogs, audio tracks  become podcasts, images become stills.
• Distribution methods
• Development of release calendar

The only reason more businesses do not take advantage of the power of video is the perceived high cost, but in when combined with a content marketing strategy, a video marketing strategy can increase effectiveness and benefit from the economy of proper planning.

Sources:

1. (Online Publisher’s Association)
2. (BIA/Kelsey User View study data, February 2010)
3. (Internet Retailer, August 2010)
4. (Wharton School of Business)
5. (Forrester Research, January 2010)
6. (International Journal of Education and Development using Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT), 2007, Vol. 3, Issue 3, pp. 105-114.)
7. (Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says By Metiri Group – Commissioned by Cisco)

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