Not enough businesses are using video on their websites and, as a result, they are missing out on some great marketing opportunities. When we are evaluating a client’s website, the absence of video content is something that always stands out immediately. If you have a product, show it. If you provide a service, post a video of your team talking about what they do. In both cases, have a video of customers giving testimonials.
Here are five good reasons you should be using more video today.
- People hate to read online. Most websites are full of text and stock photos. They all look the same and they sound the same, make the same platitudes and promises about their products and their customer service. People tend to just skim over the copy, looking for something interesting. A video, however, is different. Most people will watch 30 seconds of a video to see what you’re about.
- 85% of communication is non-verbal. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but that’s what they say. If you’re trying to convince someone that your business can be trusted, and you have a few seconds to communicate how serious you are, you had better be using video. That’s why I posted the video on our homepage. I’m convinced that 30 seconds of seeing someone on video is worth more than pages of text.
- It’s cheap! If you have a smartphone made in the last couple of years, you can shoot high enough quality video for a website or YouTube. Get a decent microphone, a couple of lights and a tripod, experiment a bit, and you should be able to shoot something that’s good enough. If you don’t feel up to doing it yourself, find someone under the age of 25. Editing tools are cheap and available on every platform, including smartphones.
- Your competitors aren’t doing it. Want to stand out from your competition? Put more video on your website. If a potential customer visits five websites, yours and four of your competitors, and yours is the only one with video, which do you think is likely to make the biggest impression?
- Google loves it. One of the things that you can put on your website that will help bolster your SEO is video. Why? Well Google is always trying to send people to the highest quality websites. And they figure that points 1 – 4 are true – a website with video is likely to be more visitor friendly than one that doesn’t have video.
So pull that smartphone out and learn how to use it. Or ask someone under 25 to teach you how to use it.