The Benefits of Including Video on Your Website
Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on Including Video on Your Website
Video has become a foundational element in marketing. Why is video so important? It’s how people want to consume content. They want the ability to listen without reading, to be hands-free, and to just have the content coming at them.
There have been numerous studies demonstrating that the highest ROI for any marketing output is coming from short form video.
Types of Video You Need
There several kinds of video content you should be including on your website. Here are the categories of short form video you need.
1. What We Stand For
This video should go on the home page above the fold. It should be the first thing people see, and it should give them a sense of who you are, what you do, what you believe, and what your brand stands for.
Creating a video like this is one of the greatest trust-building activities today. So much of business happens online, but in the end, we don’t do business with a website or email address; we do business with people. An introductory video like this allows you to establish a human connection that makes your brand instantly relatable to people who land on your website.
2. Simplify Your Benefits
Video is also a great way to simplify the benefits to what you do. Sometimes reading through your products and services, particularly if you work in a complex or jargon-heavy industry, can make prospects glaze over. Video allows you to simplify difficult topics and introduce your products and services in an easily-consumable format.
3. Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ videos allow you to build trust and answer questions in a format that makes it easy for people to engage. Not only that, if you have any sites ranking for voice search, video FAQs are amazing for ranking. Videos answer the question in a simple form, and it’s something that Google really wants to see.
4. Personalized Team Bios
This also ties in with the idea of doing business with people, not some faceless business on the web. Sharing personal bio videos for salespeople, technicians, or customer service representatives allows visitors to put a face to a name (or email address) immediately. Particularly if you have a business where someone is coming out to the customer’s home to offer a service, it’s nice for customers to see a video first that gives them a sense of security and allows them to feel like the technician is a friendly face—even if they’ve never met before in real life.
How to Produce Your Videos
Producing video becomes easier each year. Access to high quality cameras and simple editing tools mean that you don’t need to be a Hollywood editor to create content that looks decent. Plus, the content and intent of the video is far more important than a high production value.
There are three basic ways to go about creating video content:
- On your iPhone. When you use an external microphone and either a simple lighting setup or natural light, you can get great results on your phone’s camera.
- In a studio. There are lots places that allow you to rent studio space, with access to professional lighting and video equipment, so that you can film all of your video over the course of one day for a low cost.
- With a videographer. You can hire a videographer to come to your office and do a day of filming with you and your staff.
Video editing software is fairly easy to use, but if you don’t want to handle this on your own, it’s easy enough to find someone on a site like UpWork or Fiverr who can do basic, inexpensive editing.
You also want to transcribe your videos. Having the words close captioned on the screen is important. When someone is viewing the video on a mobile device or from their desk at work, they don’t want the sound on, disturbing those around them. That’s where captions come in; they can still get the full effect of the content without having to listen to the video.
Why Video Matters
Video keeps people on your website longer. This is not only important for the obvious fact that any visitor staying on your site longer is more likely to want to do business with you. It’s also a known SEO ranking factor. If people go to your site and stick around to watch a video that’s a few minutes long, Google notes that people are hanging around on your site, and that positively influences your ranking.
Google also owns YouTube, the largest video site in the world. They love to show video in their search results. When you optimize your videos by putting them on YouTube and embedding them in your site, you’re giving your video content a shot at ranking on Google for certain queries. If you’d prefer not to host your video content on YouTube, Wistia is another great site.
Beyond benefits with Google, video allows you to tell a story and create a connection in a way you simply can’t with the written word. Storytelling is at the crux of any good marketing effort, and video is certainly no exception.
Video Applications Beyond Your Website
Incorporating video into your website is only half of the game. There are other marketing channels that allow you to harness the power of video. Video ads can help you stand out and drive attention to your site. Video emails are a hot trend right now, and the technology here continues to improve.
Finally, you can create personalized video messages to send directly to clients and prospects. Let’s say you’re a web designer; you can share your screen and go through a prospect’s website, narrating issues you’ve identified and what changes you’d make to improve it. Not only does this give them highly personalized service, it’s quicker and easier for you to record a video than it is to type everything out in an email. We at Duct Tape Marketing like to use Loom for sending one-to-one videos.
Bonus Video Tip
Once you shoot and transcribe a video, you suddenly have a lot of content! You can use the audio from your video to include in a podcast. The written text from the transcription can be turned into one or more blog posts. Video is a great way to capture the initial content, which you can then spin out into a three-for-one deal: video, audio, and text.
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Steve mostly shared the low cost set of tools he employs to create his video and it got me thinking that I should do the same.