Getting the attention of the right demographics is becoming more challenging, particularly when you are trying to promote goods or services in an environment that is already saturated with different marketing content.
Marketers trying to boost engagement must do more than pick the right moment and the right type of content; they should also accommodate the audience with content that is fun, engaging, and easy to digest. And that’s where video comes in.
Video marketing has only grown to prove successful. In fact, by 2022, an estimated 82% of all online traffic will be video content. And this is only one of the many reasons companies need to dig into video marketing.
So, if your goal is to leverage the power of video content to drive engagement for your business, this is the article for you.
By the end of this article, we’ll show you why videos are the best type of content material and how you can use video to drive engagement. Also, you’ll learn from the companies that get their video marketing right.
So let’s start.
What Is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is the digital marketing strategy that involves using video content as a form of marketing material to educate, teach, and show prospects and visitors a particular product or service for promotional purposes.
Why Use Video Marketing to Increase Engagement On Your Website?
Businesses can use video to increase sales by bringing their business to life and capturing their customers’ attention in a way no other medium allows. Here is how.
Video Outplays Other Types of Content
Video crushes all other types of content. Granted, written content can still play a huge part in a business marketing success, they’re easier to produce and don’t require as many skills as videos. But given all the perks that come with video content, they’re worth the effort and we can’t even overstate their importance.
Videos boost conversion like no other marketing material. A Lemonlight survey found that when marketers used video content in their marketing plan, they experienced an increase in leads. 84% of marketers declared as such, and marketers claimed to have a 34% increase in the conversion rate with video marketing, according to Vidyard.
Moreover, video marketing yields a colossal engagement rate compared to all other mediums. 72% of customers prefer to learn about a product or service by way of video. Interestingly, viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in the text.
Video Increases Your Website’s Performance on the SERP
First of all, the presence of a video itself on your site affects the main SEO ranking factor examined by Google. A video puts you in the good graces of the search engine bots and 87% of video marketers confirm that video has increased traffic to their website.
Also, videos have the potential to engage and hook the viewers. If well crafted, videos capture people’s attention and draw them into the message. As a result, it increases dwell time on your site, which is one of the most important ranking factors in Google’s algorithms.
Consumers are increasingly demanding video in search results, which will likely increase the ranking factor of video in search results in the future. Thus, featuring a video on your website will go a long way in boosting your search engine rankings.
Video Wins The Heart of Gen Zs and Millennials
It’s no secret that Gen Z and Millennials make up the average person today. We are naturally drawn to video content more than we care to admit. Our attachment to video materials explains the rapid growth of social media platforms like TikTok and the many streaming platforms. Now, here is how this translates to brands and their marketing strategies remains to be seen.
People always inquire about products or services before they buy them and videos explain things better. Besides, video content allows brands to inject a human touch into their marketing strategies. The voice-over and live-action help build trust and brand attachment, as viewers can see their products and services in action.
Furthermore, videos show viewers that there are real people behind the products and services, not bots that know how to send emails. This makes videos and webinars both practical and effective – they’re a great way for marketers to showcase their offerings and strike a chord with their audience at a core level.
How to Use Videos to Increase Engagement?
Use User-Generated Content
There is no better person to convince prospects to dig into a product or service than the people already using it. That’s why you need to leverage user-generated content to easily make your case with your visitors and prospects. Also, videos are the best way to use user-generated content for marketing.
User-generated content videos receive more views (10 times more) than most other video types. They add credibility to your brand because they offer unique perspectives on your products from people who are happy about them. Thus, they enhance your brand’s reputation, provide audiences with insights into the sincerity and integrity of your business.
Create Short-Form Videos
When it comes to marketing materials, the shorter, the better. Even your die-hard fans will not watch a 40 min marketing video, it’s not the next Money Heist episode. No matter how much they love your brand, they’ll grow sick of it. Make your videos short and entertaining, that’s how you’ll get your message to stick into viewers’ minds.
For example, if you want to create explainer videos, experts from Vidico suggest that you make it 60-90 seconds long for inbound and 30-45 seconds long for outbound. Also, according to Wyzowl, 80% of marketers who create videos keep them 3 minutes long or less.
Personalize Your Videos
Keep your videos relevant and targeted to each member of your target audience. Your goal is to create a sense of one-on-one, closer, and more human communication. So, in addition to using the right tone, language, and voice, you’ll also need to create your videos around the aspects of your offering or brand that are most valuable to your target audience.
You can also use data from your analytics accounts, CRM accounts, or even more internal data-driven strategies, such as customer satisfaction surveys and feature customers in your videos to share their stories, to focus your marketing videos on a specific customer or group of customers.
Leverage Storytelling
Storytelling can be an effective way of understanding market trends. It helps marketers gain a better understanding of how their products and services affect their customers. First, you will need to know about the people who will listen to your story so you circle your story around their areas of interest.
Also, the best way to market your service or product leveraging storytelling is by telling your story with a bad guy and a good guy. Pretty much telling how your product or service (the hero) helps a customer like the viewers solve XYZ (the enemy or bad guy). This is effective because it’s not about just telling the story, it’s also about showing how your offering makes their life easier.
Create Eye-Catching Thumbnails
Your video thumbnails act the same as your email subject lines. Taking a look at these quick snapshots from your videos, viewers can decide whether or not to watch your videos and that’s what makes them important. Like a book cover, it should entice a potential viewer to want to see more. In fact, they act as a preview of your videos, and your videos can generate results as long as your thumbnails entice visitors to click and watch your videos.
Evoke Emotions
We bet you can tell, you’re not the only one creating videos for marketing purposes. Your prospects and customers are bombarded with videos everywhere they land on the web. That’s why you need to cut through the noise to make your videos much more impactful than the average and boost engagement by evoking emotions.
Added to showing and educating the viewers about your products or services, you also have to make them feel your brand or cause. This will help you create videos with strong emotional resonance and viewers will be much more likely to identify with your brand.
Include Annotations and CTAs
So, you designed a great marketing video, people watched it and loved it, fine. What’s next? What do you want them to do after watching your video? Your video needs an integral part of your marketing plan and you need a clear CTA to walk the viewers down the next step.
A call-to-action is ultimately designed to encourage visitors to engage more with your content and ultimately to become paying customers through conversion to a marketing-qualified lead.
On the flipside, video annotations are little bubbles of text reminding you to subscribe to the channel, comment, or view another video. They encourage viewers to engage with your videos, watch other videos from your brand or subscribe to your channel so they don’t miss out on any video you publish. This is a great strategy if you post your videos on big video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo.
6 Examples of Engaging Videos
Here are 6 examples of brands that designed engaging videos you can learn from.
If you have complex software and a not-so-technical audience, one way you can drive engagement is by making your software simple to your target audience. That’s what IBM did. They took a complex software and spoon-fed it to a non-technical audience with a simple video so they could easily understand and use it to solve their problems.
- Linode (Linode – Explainer Video on Vimeo )
Great product marketing focuses on the people it targets, not the product itself. People don’t care about your products but they do care about themselves. The marketing video crafted by Linode capitalizes on this psychological trick, driving high engagement. The focus on people over products elevated Linode’s brand image and communicated its core philosophy of empowering developers all around the world.
- Koala (Koala – Never Uncomfortable on Vimeo )
The takeaway here is simple: you don’t have to blow a bag to design an effective marketing video. Koala designed a simple, fun video that shows viewers how their product can improve their lives. The simplicity allowed Koala to achieve an overall increase in the positive response rate of 20% and simply outperformed work with a budget that is probably 4-5 times larger.
This is a great example of featuring your happy customers in videos and how effective this strategy can be. Summer created simple videos with clients and turned them into effective marketing videos. The customers share their stories, the problems they had, and how Summer helped them solve the problems. Those customer videos do a great job of boosting Summer’s chance to close the deal.
If you’re selling software in a video, your video is as effective as your user interface is beautiful. By designing a video with a clean user interface, Airtable was able to make this video even more appealing and easily achieved its goal – mass adoption.
- mParticle (mParticle – Data Master App Video on Vimeo )
This is an explainer video that introduces the new Data Master designed by mParticle. The video brings out potential problems their target audience faces on a daily basis and shows how the Data Master takes those problems out of the equation for them. The video communicates the core product’s value proposition and features from a high level and it helped mParticle improve the conversion of new prospects.
Wrap-up
Video marketing is highly effective and allows brands to facilitate their marketing processes and strategies. They can easily deliver on the support experience and the human feel their target audience love. However, the success of video marketing lies in the execution of a well-thought-out marketing plan.
There is no such thing as a standalone video marketing strategy, your video marketing strategy needs to be part of your overall marketing strategies. That’s how you’ll be able to drive engagement to your brand and easily win the hearts of your customers.
