Why Online Videos Are Important

When a person searches online they operate in a very different way to a customer who walks in from the street. An online browser usually has a specific thing that they are looking for and they search for it. They want to get relevant information as quickly as possible. Their attention span is very short and they can click away in an instant. The reasoning for this is obvious. You are one of probably thousands of sites that could help them. If you don’t do what they want quickly they can move on at the click of a button and look at the next search result. They have no loyalty to you and time is of the essence. Video is an important tool in the battle for people’s precious online attention.

Here are a few of the reasons why online video is important

Search engines

Video is important with optimising your website for search engines like Google. There are lots of ways video helps with this. We go into greater details about this in my other blog posts.

YouTube and similar sites

YouTube is now the second largest search engine behind Google – an important fact to remember! If you don’t have a video you can’t be on YouTube and you can’t reach any of the people who are searching on this huge website.

External links

By having video on other sites you can link traffic back to your site by using external links.

Useful keywords

The keyword “video” outranks nearly any other keyword you can think of. For an example run this test. Go to http://www.google.com/insights/search/ and type “video” into the top spot. See how many words you can find that have a larger global search rate. Post answers in the comments. PS when I tried it, “video” even outranked “porn” and “sex” although after some searching we found “lyrics” a tiny bit higher. For website keywords “youtube” and “facebook” are pretty much neck and neck.

Social media/viral marketing

Social media often thrives with video. It is easy to share a video and a well created video has a lot of potential to go viral – more than a blog post and far more than a website! Videos can be shared via Facebook, Youtube or even good old email!

User preference

Many people prefer to watch video than read text. It is a quick way of getting media rich information about what they want to know. They may turn off from a text/image only site.

Video is emotional

Video material can often pull on people emotionally more effectively than text or even a photograph. Music, expression, tone of voice… all these things connect with us. Emotion is an important marketing force.

Video gets remembered

By combining sight and sound video reaches us on multiple levels and as a result “sticks” better. Scientists have found the more senses that information engages the more of it is retained (see graph). It’s important people not only view but remember your content!

Video can be the most appropriate medium

Some things just work better as a video. Things like testimonials from clients. It’s one thing to have a printed paragraph of someone singing your praises but to see and hear a normal person enthusiastically ooze about your brand… that’s an entirely different thing!

With video you can be a star and build connection

If you can appear on a video and a viewer hears you speak, sees your body language and senses your passion, she will feel connected to you. We invest energy into celebrities and personalities because we feel that we somehow know them. Simply by being viewed online you will be building a connection with the individual and earning some important loyalty from them, even if they are unaware of it!

Video can create an interactive world

Video is more and more commonplace online. People are familiar with it and consume a LOT of it. It can be hard to compete without an equal footing. Text and images will always be the mainstay of a website but in all likelihood you have that already. By not utilising video as well you are probably missing out on a lot of searches and clients you might otherwise have reached with your marketing efforts.