The Growing Importance Of Video
Many internet users today are turning to video for their news, entertainment and even research, making online video an increasingly important tool for your business.
What are you waiting for?
From desktop to mobile phones, social media and straight web searches, people are viewing promotional videos, commercials, announcements, how-to videos, where-to and what-to videos for all kinds of information. And that’s where you can step in.
Having video content on your site to answer customer queries, present information about your products or even just to entertain can benefit your business in many ways.
Read on for more information on the advantages of online video, how to use it, and the DIY approach.
Benefits of Online Video
Finding a Niche
If you’re in an industry where other businesses are not utilising online videos as part of their marketing strategy, there is the potential to get ahead of your competition. If someone is searching on YouTube for a product, or looking for a how-to video related to your service area and you are the only business they can find, you’ll have a huge advantage over your competitors.
Even regular Google searches will sometimes yield appropriate videos in search results, which means with a little research and SEO savvy you can target videos to answer common searches, potentially gaining a big win if your videos start showing up in search results.
The Social Touch
Video viewers are more likely to watch, feel personally connected to your brand, and then share the video on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where other users can then share further.
You don’t necessarily need Van Damme doing the splits between two moving trucks just to get shared on Facebook.
Mobile Benefits
We’ve already talked about the shift of online traffic from desktop to mobile. The same is occurring for video channels such as YouTube, where 50% of global viewership now comes from mobile devices (source: YouTube press release).
Research has found that users, particularly millennials, are more likely to be focussed when watching video on their phones than they are on desktop computers or even the TV (source: Think with Google). The mobile is no longer the second or third screen, it’s the first.
One of the biggest search engines in the world, Google has been heavily promoting the importance of video media on your website.
While at this stage videos on your site don’t necessarily give you a ranking advantage in search results (other than also appearing in video searches), Google’s algorithms are constantly changing.
Often something they once hinted at being important becomes a distinctive advantage in the next update, which we saw recently with the mobile friendly website.
How to use Online Video
If you’d like to take advantage of the benefits online videos can have for your business you can talk to us at e-CBD. We have associations with videographers experienced in producing quality videos for the web, while our SEO team can help with adding the finished product to your website, a YouTube Channel for your business, and optimising them to improve their performance in search results.
The DIY Approach
Not everyone has the budget for professional video production. Even if you don’t have a top quality camera you can get away with shooting yourself with as little as an iPhone, so long as you have reasonable lighting and audio.
The links below can help with filming your own online videos on a tight budget;
If you have any questions about online videos or how they could help your business, contact us at e-CBD today.
