Why you need to be creating on-site video content today!

Users want video, it’s as simple as that. It has become the format that people are used to: they prefer videos, they trust videos, they automatically gravitate towards them. This is undeniable. The great news for companies is that video is also a great way to improve your website and increase sales. Win-win. Here’s why it works.

When a user visits your site, one of the first things they will notice is whether it has video – 60% of site visitors will even watch a video before reading any text. (source: Diode Digital) It has become the most effective way for companies to communicate with their customers. Why is this? Well, it partly comes down to ease of access. Getting information without taking the effort to read is one video’s major selling points. In fact, 4 out of 5 consumers prefer demo videos over reading instructions. (source: Animoto) If you need anything to convince you of this, look at Jamie Oliver’s tutorial video, ‘How to cook perfect scrambled eggs’ – this might seem like something dull to watch, but it’s been viewed over 11 million times.

You can argue that Jamie cooking up some breakfast grub isn’t relevant to brands, except that you can’t, because it is relevant. Brands have already recognised that imbedded video on their website improves its performance. On-site video is massively important in making sure your page ranks well on search engines and is therefore far more likely (53 times more, in fact) to be viewed by the consumer.

Anyway, back to Jamie’s eggs: we expect to see brands moving towards a video strategy of tying their own product demos into search queries like clever Jamie. This is mainly because YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, so if you have a video that performs well on YouTube, you will bring huge numbers of people to your site. That is why embedding your YouTube videos on your site rather than uploading them is crucial. There’s no need to slow down your website by uploading heavy video files when you can embed them and make the most of the second largest search engine in the world. It’s effectively the digital equivalent of hitting two birds with one stone.

If you’re convinced by now that video is the way forward you should be asking one important question: what kind of video works? Well, we have some tactics that we think are pretty vital.

Firstly, make the videos short. One of the main points of a video is explaining something faster and more effectively than written content. So, keep it under one minute where possible but two minutes is the limit: no director’s cuts.

Secondly, don’t stretch yourselves too thin. Try to keep each video about one specific aspect, product, service or topic rather than covering a number of things. It’s a lot more effective for the consumer to remember one clear piece of information about what you’re offering than it is for them to forget four vaguer things.

Thirdly, video is nothing without audio. You will undoubtedly already know this from the number of fantastically vivid concert videos you’ve got on your phone that are accompanied by an unrecognisable crackle that’s meant to be your favourite song. So, make sure the quality of the audio and the video match up.

Lastly, a little bit of digital savvy: create a video sitemap. Basically, a video sitemap organises your video content into related categories, this helps Google’s crawling mechanism to find and understand the video on your site. If Google can do this, it will rate your site more highly, which will raise you in the Google rankings, which means your site will be more likely to be seen, which is something that we’ve already mentioned is very important to increasing customer numbers.

To put it simply: video works.

If you’re already bought into the idea of video and want to learn more then check out our tips for creating cost-effective video here. If you’re not, then get in touch and we’ll have you convinced by the end of the call!