The average Internet user reportedly watches 186 videos every month on a variety of topics, including news and entertainment, advertising and personal videos. In a survey among online retailers, a majority revealed that online sales jumped tremendously after adding videos to their sites. As a complement to other online marketing strategies, video is highly effective because it engages people on a personal level while providing authenticity to prospective buyers or clients.
Benefits of video online marketing strategies
Buyer connection: Eye contact with a potential buyer is essential for sales. Through a video, the seller communicates his message to the buyer while establishing eye contact, a factor that text content and image files lack.
Authenticity: Putting a face to a product or service lends authenticity in an arena where identity theft, online scams and bogus deals abound. Customer testimonials that attest to the product’s effectiveness help erase the initial skepticism consumers have.
High Value SEO Content: The search engines know that some people prefer to watch videos rather than reading text, people engage better with a video and studies have shown that some people learn a lots faster and easier from video rather than text. They reflect this in the ‘quality’ that they assign to your pages content. A webpage with video will outrank a page with just text, all other things being equal.
Evergreen content: A single video, such as an instructional presentation, can be edited and used several times for various marketing strategies. Using video editing software, a video may be divided into bite-sized chunks of information for blogs or for sharing in social networks. The full video may be given away for free as an enticement for signing up or subscribing to a website.
Increased sales: Converting website visitors into buyers or conversion is an important Internet marketing technique. Online retailers maintain that adding videos to a written call to action significantly boosts conversions while lowering shopping cart abandonment. Moreover, when incorporated in email sales letters, a video can boost conversion rates by as much as 50%.
Inexpensive tool: Video cameras with advanced specifications provide high quality videos but are not necessary for video marketing. Any video camera, even of a smartphone, can take simple videos which can be adjusted or modified using video editing software.
Using videos for online business
Product or service demonstrations: Informed consumers tend to buy a product that is clearly explained to them. A video breathes life to how-to guides by demonstrating how a product or service works.
Customer testimonials: Potential clients often relate to customers and their testimonies on how a product worked to solve common problems. Customer testimonials boost sales by informing viewers that a product’s claims are real.
Introductions: Introducing the creator or team behind a product adds a human element and credibility, particularly for information products. Use a conversational tone and keep the video brief.
Creating videos for online marketing strategies is an inexpensive yet powerful technique for driving traffic to a website, increasing sales and maintaining customer relationships. Business owners who are not tech savvy or are time-poor can rely on Internet marketing specialists to deliver video marketing services according to budget.
There is a Secret Weapon that Internet Marketers use for making videos quickly, cheaply and without any equipment.
A great strategy that I implement with my websites, is to create a quick video made out of the images and text of my blog post. I do this using Animoto which automatically creates stunning videos from your text and slides. Animoto has it’s own stock music and themes that you can choose to use for your videos and then all you have to do is upload your images and text and it does all the rest, it even outputs in HD quality. They have a free version with limits and branding or for a small annual price you have no limits, get heaps of extra features and have access to the royalty free music.
The secret strategy here is to upload the animoto videos to YouTube to create backlinks to your site and then place the YouTube video on all of your web properties for that site, increasing the quality of those pages and creating backlinks to your YouTube channel.
