Why Your Website NEEDS Videos, and How to Make them Work For Your Business

IT service is a highly-competitive field, making it more important than ever to both attract prospective clients to your website, and engage them with your content. Adding videos to your website is one easy way to increase your search engine rankings, as well as improve user engagement. It’s a marketing trend that many businesses are taking advantage of, meaning that your website must have videos in order to be competitive.

The Compelling Benefits of Videos

To give you an idea of just how effective videos are for online marketing, consider this statistic from Forrester Research: Websites with a video on their homepage are 50x more likely to achieve a page 1 ranking! Therefore, what’s keeping you from adding a video to your homepage, and what does it take to make an effective video?   

One primary concern for business owners that may prevent them from producing a video is the cost. While this might have been a legitimate concern in the past, the emphasis that search engines are now placing on videos make it easy to see the return on your investment.

In addition to using videos to drive traffic to your website, videos are a powerful tool that increases brand awareness. By populating your website with video content that’s professional and well branded (achieve this with your company’s logo, tagline, and a consistent message), your audience will walk away with a solid understanding of what you’re about. Subsequently, it may even be the professionalism of your video that convinces a potential client you’ve got what it takes to meet their needs.  

What Every Dynamic Video Needs

When it comes to making videos, just having a professional-looking end product isn’t enough; the content of your video is equally important. For informational videos like what’s typically found on a company’s website, they not only need to have a perceived value, but also evoke some sort of emotion, whether it be laughter, anger, excitement, or even sadness. Making an emotional connection like this is how you’ll get a viewer to really remember your brand. Creating a professional video that connects emotionally to its viewers is no easy task and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

When making multiple videos for your website, consistent branding is important. The most successful business videos are branded in such a way where, from the start of each video, the company is instantly recognizable. Not sure how to do this? Take a look at any number of tutorial or promotional videos from large and recognizable brands and you’ll notice a similar look and feel to each of them, despite the range of topics covered. Additionally, it’s important to have an attractive bumper and a great lower third graphic. Branding each video is a powerful way to give it a professional feel and distinguish it from the sea of amateur-quality videos making up the bulk of the Internet.  

Getting Your Video Out There

Now that you’ve got a hot video, the next challenge is getting people to find it and watch it. How do you do this? There are certainly arguments for self-hosting videos on your website, but you’ve got a better chance of connecting your video to a wider audience by publishing it to a popular website like YouTube.  Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet? In fact, YouTube boasts over 1 billion unique user visits a month, eclipsed only by its parent company, Google. 

Videos uploaded to YouTube are more likely to generate interaction from people that wouldn't have otherwise come across your video if it were hosted on your website. YouTube likes, comments, and shares are huge tools that can vastly improve brand visibility and drive traffic to your video. Do this by: 

• Incorporating keywords into the title of your video.
• Providing the proper tags.
• Uploading a dynamic image to represent your video. 
• Providing an accurate and compelling description of the video.
• Be sure to add a link to your website. 

Rarely do videos take off out of nowhere. When building successful video content, persistence is key. It’s essential to build a base with your videos to connect with. This requires investing an online presence, which takes time. Social media is a great (and free) place to do this. It’s only going to help if you post your video on your company’s Twitter and Facebook pages, and sites such as Reddit, Digg, and Stumbleupon are more great outlets to use to share your video. Additionally, you can pay to promote your video so that it’s guaranteed to be seen by more eyes. 

We take great care in assisting our clients in the creation of great video content, whether it’s an ad for your website, a talking head video highlighting a specific surface, or even a video testimonial. We have educational resources available, as well as a resident expert on video, our CEO Chris Chase. Want to learn more about the world of MSP Videos? Let us know!