Your website is your greatest online tool. Don’t leave it to rust in the shed!
One of the greatest pitfalls of video marketing is distribution strategy. Marketers spend time and money creating impactful video content. Then they dump it on YouTube and their homepage and wait to see what happens. It’s like watching a pot of water come to a boil, on low heat – nothing gets rolling.
Everyone knows that their website is a prime place to publish video, but not everyone knows just how much opportunity exists within their digital pages. We’ve got the ultimate checklist for website publishing. Check it out!
In the Background
Audiences want a highly visual online experience, and your website is no exception. Static background images are great. Background videos are better. Video backdrops allow you to create a more dynamic and engaging experience. Check out this example. See how One Billion Nets connects visitors with the cause by panning across the faces of the people directly impacted by their efforts? Here’s another example. Adopt A Love Story uses powerful family-centric video to tap into the emotions of their visitors.
Pro Tips
Keep it simple. You don’t want video to take away from the rest of your online content or create a chaotic environment that toys with your visitor’s attention span.
Make sure the video background supports the messaging on the page.
Place your video background on the top half of your homepage screen.
On Your Home Page
This is the most obvious place that brands host video content. The key is knowing what type of video content to showcase. What can you show visitors up front that will keep them on your website? The answer to this question depends entirely on what type of business you are, and who you’re targeting. A CEO is looking for something different than a millennial consumer. In many cases, an explainer video is your best bet.
Pro Tips
Invest time and budget for a well-written script. As your story gets told, be sure to include the 4 pillars of explainer videos: the problem, the solution, how it works, and a call to action (CTA).
Keep your video reasonably short. One to two minutes is ideal. Anything more and you risk losing viewer interest.
Address your viewers directly by using personal pronouns like “you” and “your”.
On Your Sales Pages
Social proof is a powerful motivator. In fact, online reviews result in a 74% increase in product conversions. Here’s how social proof works:
Imagine you’re strolling through a quaint downtown area on a Friday night, looking for a local restaurant. You window shop for the right atmosphere, gloss over the menu posted at each door and check to see how busy each option is. Do you choose the empty restaurant or the crowded one? Probably the crowded one (within reason), because its volume of people is proof that the food and service is desirable. This social science is backed by the 2015 Buyers Survey Report, which identified the two most prominent things buyers rely on when researching vendors:
Peer Reviews
Colleague Reviews.
Translation: create and publish customer testimonial videos on your sales page.
Pro Tips:
Create an outline with talking points (a basic script) to help guide your customer’s testimonial. They should cover their pain points and challenges that lead them to your solution, and how your solution impacted their business.
Build in plenty of filming time so your customer can do a few practice runs.
Encourage the customer to follow the guidelines you created, but talk freely. You want to capture their authentic story, including any spontaneity.
On Your About Pages
Again with the social science — people want to see other people. By using video to introduce the team of people behind your product or service, you will humanize your brand, partake in a digital form of socialization, and root visitors to your mission and value.
Pro Tips
Don’t just shoot voiceless daily activity. Capture your employees speaking directly to the camera. It will help viewers feel personally addressed.
When employees do speak, ask that they introduce themselves first. Sharing our names is how we begin personal connections.
Encourage employees to be themselves. Their diverse personalities and senses of humor are what makes your company culture unique. Show it off!
On Various Other Pages
If you are a regular follower of our blog, you already know how powerful video is compared to text alone. In case you forgot, we’ll leave these juicy stats right here for you:
More video content is uploaded in a month than all the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years!
87% of online marketers include video content in their strategy.
1/3 of online activity is spent watching video.
What’s our point? Use promotional videos wherever possible; pepper them throughout your site. Each type of video serves a different purpose (awareness, nurturing, converting). Promotional videos, in particular, are like strategically placed salespeople. When combined with social proof, explainer, and about us videos, they help complete a powerful marketing cycle that drives prospects to the right purchasing decision.
Pro Tips:
Pay close attention to the context in which your viewers will be watching (i.e. on the move via mobile device, at work via desktop, at home on a tablet, etc.).
Cinema setting: you’ll have their full attention. Be persuasive, entertaining, and informative.
TV: your viewer might be multitasking. Be entertaining and informative.
Desktop: your viewer might be multitasking. Entertain them on one screen and inform them using another.
Social Media Browsing: your viewer is in “share mode”. They are also highly distracted. Be as entertaining as possible up front. Subtly inform them throughout the video.
On Your Landing Pages
Landing pages have three jobs. 1) Target a specific flow of traffic. 2) Allow your brand to capture information about visitors. 3) Convert visitors into sales qualified leads. To successfully carry out this hefty list of responsibilities, landing pages must have: A) An obvious CTA. B) Trust signals. C) A sense of urgency. D) Relevant visuals. And E) Creative messaging. The only form of content capable of tackling all of these elements at once is video.
Pro Tips:
Make sure your page speed can handle video. If your video doesn’t load within 5 seconds, the vast majority of your viewers will move on. Google has a tool: PageSpeed Insights.
Create an attractive poster image with a play button overlay so that visitors know it’s a video.
Match the CTA on the landing page with the CTA in the video. CTA’s should always guide visitors to gated content that leads them further down the marketing funnel.
Before publishing video on your website, check to make certain your site is optimized to handle such rich content. A video marketing agency knows exactly what needs to be in place to host your video content without slow load times, buffering, skipping and other issues that irritate visitors and diminish your ROI.Still don’t have your fill of video marketing facts? Check out this article:10 Common Misconceptions About Video Marketing.
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