Part of Google’s algorithm for search rankings considers the amount of time visitors stay on your website, which is one reason online video is seeing explosive growth. Explainer videos have boomed in popularity over the past year due to their affordability and proven effectiveness in growing a business. This makes explainer videos an excellent marketing tool. Increasing your conversion rates, clarifying your product, and boosting your sales are just 3 of the 10 reasons your business needs an explainer video.
Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Video
Increase Conversion Rates
According to a recent survey conducted by Video Rascal, 85 percent of people are more likely to buy a product once they see an accompanying explainer video. Explainer videos help budding business owners keep tally of how many visitors on their sites could become actual customers. Although most businesses manually count sales to see what products are most popular, explainer videos keep track of what product or service potential customers are interested by displaying the number of views on each video.
Clarify the Objective of Your Product
Text can be tricky since there are so many ways people can interpret what they read. Explainer videos take the guess work out of explaining the usefulness and basic function of a product or service. People gain a better understanding of a product or service once they see and hear someone explain it. An explainer video helps you to connect better with your potential customer by explaining what your business can do for them and why they should choose you over other competing businesses.
Generate Increased Interest
More and more businesses are choosing to use social signals to spread the word about their businesses. They do this by using media such as images and videos to generate interest in their product. According to a study published in The C100, over 70 percent of Internet users watch videos online, and over 50 percent of the population will watch videos this year!
Rank Better in Google Search
Statistically speaking, stale websites don’t do well. Websites that contain endless pages of block text and images rank low in Google search, which means less exposure. This also scares away customers who want to quickly understand a product, and purchase it right then and there. In most cases, the average person takes less than a minute to make a purchasing decision. An explainer video will get their attention immediately.
Note: According to Spork Marketing and several others, websites with videos rank higher in Google universal searches.
Increase Web Traffic
Going “viral” is a term that has been around since the dawn of YouTube. A viral video is one that seemingly pops-up out of nowhere and gets a large viewing in a short amount of time. Unfortunately, there is no set formula for “going viral”, but quite a few products have gained popularity through viral videos, including some of the brands we know and love today.
Some popular examples are:
- Apple iOS 5 by Apple (over 2 million views)
- Google Currents by Google (over 1.2 million views in 8 months)
- Sham Wow (so popular that there are literally hundreds of remakes and parodies with millions of views)
- Dove (over 15 million views)
- Old Spice (over 42 million views) According to Ad Week Old Spice’s sales have increased by 107 percent using viral video.
Help Your Audience Retain Information
The average person retains only 10 percent of what they hear, but 50 percent of what they see according to a study conducted by Wharton Research Center. What does this mean for your business? An increase in word-of-mouth advertising. Word-of-mouth continues to be the main way that businesses attract customers. If the customer likes your product, they’ll share your video.
Liven Up Your Pitch
A paper pitch is…let’s face it—boring! Liven up your pitch by using an explainer video. PowerPoint slide shows and pamphlets with a bunch of words and pie charts don’t do much to engage your audience. However, a well produced explainer video with a solid script and engaging visuals can capture the attention of your audience immediately. Explainer videos are especially helpful if you have a complicated product or service.
Grab Audience Attention
You can only go so far with traditional web content. In a failed attempt to bring more interest to a product, some business owners cram loads of pictures, flashy animation, and colorful fonts on their web page, which does two things:
- Confuses the potential customer.
- Slows down the load time of the web page.
Both of these results are total disasters for businesses. Why not take all of those cool ideas and have them played out in a video. It keeps the website looking clean, while providing enough material to engage a potential customer.
Easily Shareable
An explainer video doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to just YOUR site. In fact, free video hosting sites such as YouTube and Vimeo have useful tools that allow you to upload your videos and use keywords to draw interest to them. The added bonus to using these sites is that they are Smart phone compatible, whereas your site may not be viewable on handsets. Videos are easily shareable, unlike text web pages. People are more likely to share and watch videos on the Internet than read text blocks on a website.
Showcase Your Personality
The number one thing that makes a customer become a repeat customer is your personality. It is important that a customer can put a face to your name. This is especially the case for online businesses where the customer will have little, if any contact with you directly. It helps a person to gain a sense of trust in you and the products you sell if they can see you and create a ‘virtual’ connection.
Aside from boosting sales, gaining popularity for your brand, and explaining your product successfully, there are so many more benefits to using an explainer video that we would need an explainer video to list them all. People all over the world create videos about everything from cause awareness to reviews, proving that videos are the most popular medium for people to share information and advertise.
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