At the end of 2013 mobile video traffic made up more than 50 percent of all website traffic. By 2016 two-thirds of the world’s mobile traffic is forecasted to come from visitors watching videos. The stats on videos go on and on and reveal the importance videos play on things like conversions, SEO, time spent on sites and other important metrics that are important to marketing directors.
If your brand wants to increase the likelihood of your visitors making a purchase by as much as 73 percent it may be time to start considering video as part of your overall marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at how a few aspects of video, and particularly YouTube videos, are helping brands:
- Rank Better in Search Engines (SEO benefits)
- Increase the Time Spent on Websites
- Convert YouTube Video Searches into Leads
How Companies are Currently Using YouTube Effectively
To get a sense of what can be accomplished through YouTube it helps to see what some other brands have done through video that have propelled them to great new heights.
DollarShaveClub.com
Dollar Shave Club, a small company that offers a monthly shipment of razors straight to your door for as little as a dollar a month, made YouTube marketing history with its “Our Blades are F***ing Great” spot. According to their YouTube page, the company only created two videos, but the success of their nearly 14 million hits-strong, seemingly low budget video still creates a buzz to this day.
Geico
Geico’s ‘Hump Day’ ad has trended every Wednesday since it was launched and has enjoyed over 20 million hits since May of 2013. This ad gets about 67 percent of its traffic only on Wednesdays, the same day the famous camel banters about throughout the ad.
Dove
Dove created a video titled ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ that tells a story of how women are more beautiful than they think they are. The three-minute video has more than 4 million shares across social media and has been labeled the most viewed online video ad of all time with over 60 million views.
Perhaps what is most revealing about the above three ads is the company with the smallest budget made the biggest splash in terms of ROI. According to Entrepreneur, Dollar Shave club only spent about $4,500 on their production costs. In addition to some Google ads Dollar Shave Club has not done any other marketing yet has become something of an overnight success all because of their creative YouTube video advertising.
Why Video Needs to be Part of Your Marketing
- Rank Better in Search Engines (SEO benefits)
- Increase the Time Spent on Websites
- Convert YouTube Video Searches into Leads
The SEO Benefits of Video
With video traffic expected to rise to as much as 70 percent of consumer traffic by 2017 it would make sense for brands to begin to prepare for the inevitable. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine (behind parent Google) and brands should capitalize on the fact that they can drive additional traffic to their sites from YouTube searches if optimized correctly.
According to aimClear marketing agency, video search results have a 41 percent higher click-through rate than text results meaning brands need not rank first to enjoy significant click-through in the search engine results pages. Then there’s the sharing element of videos; consumers say that they are likely to share a video if there is a “share” button included at the end. Social sharing, as we know, is said to have high correlation to search engine rankings giving brands an extra opportunity to expand their message as well as their ranking.
Video Increases the Time Spent on Websites
It goes without saying that the more time visitors spend on your website the better. If a user is on your site for a prolonged period of time it means they are likely engaged with your content, looking to make a purchase decision, or getting closer to one of your site’s conversions.
An effective way to use your YouTube videos is by embedding them on your website and surrounding them with relevant content. These videos can engage the more visual visitors and can get them excited about your brand. If you have more generic videos you can ask your visitors to embed them on their websites and you can enjoy additional branding from their network.
According to YouTube’s statistics page, over 6 billion hours of video are watched on the site each month, YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any other cable network, and each day millions of people subscribe to YouTube channels (like yours?) so that they get notified each time a brand or content producer comes out with new content.
Converting YouTube Video Searchers into Website Leads
If you start to use YouTube to help market your products, services or knowledge there is a good chance you can keep your visitors engaged from the beginning to the end of your videos. However, given the popular nature in which people find videos on YouTube (i.e. via search) it can be difficult to funnel these visitors (leads) to your lead capture pages. There are three effective ways in which you can do this:
- Annotations: YouTube permits video owners to add annotations to their videos so that they can provide additional insight, increase viewership, engagement and subscribers. YouTube provides some helpful uses of annotations on the previous link for things such as:
- Asking viewers to like, share or ‘favorite’ a video
- Making it easier for viewers to subscribe to your videos
- Link to other videos in a series
- Highlight your website
- Add clarification to a specific part of the video
- Branding: As you can create videos essentially any way that you want, it is important for a brand to make visitors know that the videos are created as part of their company’s offerings. We suggest using an intro card at the beginning of your video as well as at the end with your brands contact information or logo so that viewers will associate the content with your brand. You can also list your brand’s domain in the video description and your YouTube brand page so that viewers can locate you and engage with your brand outside of YouTube.
- Social Elements: Unlike normal TV, YouTube users have the opportunity to engage with the producers of the content. If you enable comments and promote discussion you will be helping others to discuss your videos with you. Like other social media outlets this gives your brand an opportunity to engage with people who are interested in your brand and gives you the chance to respond to them directly. Use this area to direct users to relevant links or landing pages within your website to help with conversions.
Incorporating YouTube into Your Overall Marketing Strategy
As you have learned it doesn’t take a huge video marketing budget to make an impact on potential customers. Even a company that sells razors was able to drive a ton of leads to their website and increase brand awareness for less than $5,000.
Video marketing campaigns should go hand-in-hand with your other marketing efforts and can be used to complement them or as we saw from Dollar Shave Club, stand in isolation from them. While creating just any video won’t likely help you get a million hits, putting some planning into what it is that your ideal consumers can really benefit from can help you get some ideas of where to start your video marketing campaign.
Done correctly, videos can greatly influence your ability to rank in search engines (both Google and YouTube), keep visitors engaged for longer periods of time on your website, and eventually help turn these visitors into leads or conversions through effective YouTube video strategies.
