Guest post by Vaibhav Kakkar.
A well-made video is like poetry in action. Videos tell stories; and for your brand, product, and services to make an impression with potential customers, those stories must be succinct and compelling.
Customers’ purchasing decisions can be significantly influenced by your video content. Persuasion and high-quality video production complement each other.
Videos are so popular that even Google loves them; they make up as much of 70% of the top 100 search result listings for some products and categories. Given the influence, value, and popularity of online video, it probably makes sense to prioritize video marketing as one of the anchoring techniques in your company’s overall marketing strategy.
This post dives into video marketing and explains why professionally produced, well-scripted videos have such a high success rate. It details how to differentiate yourself from your competition and develop a video marketing plan that encourages signups and conversions.
What are product videos?
At the risk of stating the obvious, a product video is any video that highlights the characteristics, capabilities, and distinctiveness of your service or product while also demonstrating it in use. Product videos are one of several types of videos needed for marketing.
Product videos are highly effective at educating and informing potential clients about your products or services. It’s simple to use videos to illustrate how a product may improve your prospect’s life.
Videos are even more important for giving businesses a platform when they don’t have physical stores or even tangible things to sell (e.g., for services such as creating quality content for clients). In the decision step of the buyer’s funnel, videos rank among the top tactics. Videos can be the deciding factor in persuading a customer to purchase a good or service.
What distinguishes videos?
Videos significantly reduce the amount of time a potential customer needs to spend studying a product in comparison to other forms of media. The simplicity and portability online videos are among their best features. It’s faster for busy consumers and business professional to watch videos than to read in-depth explanations of goods or services.
Videos enable prospective customers to see a product in use. Videos can inform, convince, and entertain—or even do all three at once. Here are six qualities that distinguish videos from other forms of media:
1. Videos encourage user interaction.
Videos are excellent learning tools because they capture our attention both visually and audibly. Video stands out from other forms of online content because it’s more effective at creating a narrative, evoking emotions, and spurring action.
Videos can create an emotional connection, which is directly reflected in consumer engagement with your business and the goods/services you offer.
To further show how effective videos are at generating user engagement, here are a few statistics:
- The most popular video length is up to two minutes.
- People linger 6 times longer on pages with videos.
- Videos have the highest rate of comprehensive consumption (55%) of any type of content.
- GIFs are 3 times more likely to get retweeted than videos are, and photos are 6 times as likely.
- Facebook is the social media site with the most impact on videos, outperforming all others by 4 times.
2. Videos foster trust.
Commercial success is built on trust. It serves as the cornerstone of conversions and signups. Any effective marketing or business strategy must first establish trust.
The foundation of content marketing is creating long-lasting relationships between businesses and consumers. The ultimate objective of any digital marketing strategy is to increase traffic, but this can’t be separated from the need to win prospects’ trust and their confidence in your product or service.
Videos can help build this trust. As noted above, watching videos can arouse our emotions and grab our attention. Effective videos, along with other forms of social proof, help alleviate skepticism about online shopping concerns about fraud and dishonesty.
The reach and credibility of a service or product significantly rise when video campaigns are promoted on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. A digital content marketing agency can help one design these campaigns to perfection.
3. Videos deliver a thorough multichannel experience.
Before making a purchase decision, consumers research many sources of information. To make an informed decision, business buyers and online shoppers to typically browse multiple channels to compare and contrast various reviews and offers.
Consider moving to a new city and starting your search for a reputable and reasonably priced martial arts class there. As you do your investigation, you come across a 10-second Facebook video about this martial arts and boxing studio.
Further research leads you to their website, where you discover an introductory video that describes their background, credentials, and goals.
Since the first two videos piqued your interest, you genuinely want to learn more about this location before making a choice. When you visit the website, a video describing the modules and programs is there.
In addition to text (article, blog posts, reviews, reports, etc.) and audio (podcasts) buyers today often base their judgment on information from several video sources.
Because of this, a company must have a presence on as many platforms as possible, including:
- Social media sites
- Website content
The idea is to make the information gathering and purchase processes easier.
4. You get a great ROI with product videos.
Many brand marketers still think of video as expensive to produce. Actually, videos can be quite affordable, if done right.
To produce customized videos, there are several options including adding music, voiceovers, captions, and transition effects. There is now a wealth of educational content available, as well as easy yet powerful video editing tools, to simplify the video production process.
Brands may generate a significant return on investment (ROI) from their video content even if they hire professionals to produce it. Higher-quality videos generally increase brand credibility with viewers.
Making the investment of time and budget into producing high-quality video content can pay off handsomely and yield attractive returns.
5. Videos are shared more frequently than other media formats.
Word of mouth and customer recommendations are enduring marketing strategies for attracting prospects and converting them into buyers. Videos can help spread positive ratings and sentiment.
Some research suggests videos are shared on social media 1200 percent more than all other types of material combined, including links, texts, and photographs.
Not surprisingly, video is increasingly being used by all types of businesses for marketing. Social media video sharing can increase your conversion rate because, according to numerous polls, over 80% of customers trust recommendations from friends and family.
6. Videos help spread knowledge and provide answers to queries.
- Have you recently turned online to look for a recipe for a new dish?
- Or viewed unboxing videos comparing the specifications of cellphones?
- Do you turn to YouTube when you have simple questions regarding household repairs?
These types of inquiries as well as more business-oriented questions demonstrate the power and popularity of videos for presenting useful information and aiding in decision-making.
A well-produced product video can address many concerns of potential customers which may consciously or unconsciously prevent them from making a purchase.
Videos can cover every aspect of a product, including how to use it, its description, specifications, and capabilities. They help consumers make decisions by visually demonstrating many elements of the product.
Guidelines for Creating High-Conversing Video Content
Videos generally draw attention, but it takes extra work to create a video that keeps viewers’ interest long enough to encourage channel or product purchases.
It’s crucial to make a memorable impact and set your offerings apart. Here are nine helpful tips for producing high-converting videos:
1. Allow experts to handle the task on your behalf.
If you don’t have the expertise in-house (or the time to become an expert yourself), look for a company with the technological know-how and experience necessary to manage your video content marketing.
Full-service video production companies can manage all facets of video creation and marketing, from whiteboarding to creative services to delivery logistics.
2. Keep your videos brief, entertaining, and fun.
It’s important but challenging to keep the attention of users. Nearly two-thirds of marketers say the optimal length of a short-form video is 60 seconds or less, and even then, people only watch 46-48 seconds of that content on average. That makes it vital to keep videos entertaining and direct.
Limit your content to the most essential information, and keep the presentation succinct. To generate high signup/conversion rates, you need to quickly engage your viewer with entertaining content that will keep them watching.
3. Include a Call-to-Action (CTA).
Your CTA is a crucial component of video marketing when your goal is to persuade viewers to purchase a product, subscribe to your blog or newsletter, download an eBook, or sign up for a service. CTAs such as “Buy Now,” “Add to Cart,” or “Sign Up,” make the next step clear to the viewer.
Keep your CTA brief. Another approach is to place different CTAs at different places in your video to increase the likelihood of a conversion.
4. Customize the thumbnail image for each video.
Your thumbnail image shapes the viewer’s first impression of your video. Choose or create an image that will pique their curiosity and imagination. A thumbnail image should accurately represent the video content and be at the highest resolution permitted by the platform.
A call-to-action overlay that encourages people to play the video makes it much more effective. Additionally, thumbnails are displayed in the search results. Therefore, it’s vital to make them compelling and to reflect the personality of the video.
5. Use cross-channel integration.
A multi-platform approach maximizes your brand exposure and the payback on your investment. Add social media buttons to the product pages of your website and distribute your product videos across social media channels.
Ensure that the product videos you upload are keyword-rich and search-optimized, with appropriate tags and titles. Don’t forget to incorporate your product video into your email campaigns as well.
6. Inform the audience about your product.
Concisely provide as much information as you can about your offerings, including photos taken from multiple angles. Don’t forget to highlight the key features, practicality, quality, value, and ease of use.
7. Include a lead capture form.
Create a heat map for your video as soon as you publish it. By doing that, you’ll gain valuable information about your video, such as which sections visitors repeat and what they skip.
Using this knowledge, you’ll be able to identify the most interesting sections and decide where to place your CTA. This is an ideal spot for asking your audience fill out a form because they will be most engaged. Your lead capture form will be the CTA.
8. Send customized videos to potential clients.
To nurture leads and increase conversions, consider producing at least one video for each phase of the buyer’s journey.
By understanding where each buyer is on their purchase journey and presenting information that’s relevant at that stage, you’ll increase trust and make your prospects more likely to take action.
9. Implement video SEO properly.
By extending users’ average page visits and lowering bounce rates, incorporating videos on your landing pages indicates to Google your website is relevant.
The result is higher ranking on Google. The chances of your content being seen, clicked, and acted on increase significantly if you rank within the first few results on Google.
Consequently, your website rank on Google may be improved by including search-optimized video content. When creating YouTube videos, optimize the title, description, and keywords to optimize it for YouTube search.
Conclusion
The value of video content in generating more clicks and conversions is clear.
A well-produced video can engage the viewer’s imagination, earn their trust, maintain engagement, and impact their purchase decision, making it an extremely potent tool.
Brand marketers who figure out how to fully utilize video content can gain significantly in terms of revenue, influence, and relationships with their target audience.
In planning your video content strategy, keep in mind that the most effective videos are straightforward, concise, amusing, informative, and enjoyable to watch.
Vaibhav Kakkar is the Founder and CEO of Digital Web Solutions, a globally trusted agency with a full suite of digital marketing services and development solutions. Vaibhav believes in building systems over services, and has helped scale up agencies from scratch to niche-leaders with million dollar turnovers.
Reference articles:
https://www.siegemedia.com/creation/high-converting-content
https://www.volusion.com/blog/the-importance-of-product-videos/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/importance-of-product-videos-for-ecommerce
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