If you’ve been paying any attention to the internet of late, there has been a storm slowly brewing over the past few years. Videos have suddenly acquired more and more presence to the point that SocialMediaToday reports 86% of all marketers use video online and 90% of viewers say video is helpful in making decisions.
With an additional 68% of people saying they would rather watch a short video to gain information about a product, it’s not hard to see why it’s gained such popularity over the masses. Videos have been known to relay information faster and make short snippets easier to understand than a lump of paragraphs on a page.
Once you look through all the hype and fuss, what kind of benefits does having videos on your site have for your business?
1. Drive traffic to your site
Search engines, especially Google, love it when you post new content, regardless of whether it’s a press release, a new blog post or a new custom video on your site. Ever noticed how big sites seem to have a new video on their landing page every month or so?
Videos, above all else, represent fresh content as they are indexed by your favorite search engines. Adding titles, tags, and description with keywords is an efficient way of boosting your ranking.
A combination of videos and a WordPress-hosted site is like magic when it comes to optimizing content for search engines. One of the reasons WordPress has been so popular after all is the ease with which users can optimize crucial details like title tags and specific keywords in order to increase view count, retention and CTR.
2. Video is an easy way to engage visitors
Once a lead is on your landing page, you need to make sure they are introduced to what you have to offer by somehow hooking them. Since there’s no better way to hook your visitors than presenting them with a video, you are in excellent hands.
With video, visitors end up staying longer and viewing more pages per session. On average, this leads to a 340% increase in session duration, according to Lemonlight. 71% of people do profess that video helps to explain a product than text or images.
3. Video Increases Your Reach
On the biggest social media outlets, video content has been slowly taking over. For instance, Twitter reports a 10x engagement on videos with content over ordinary tweets. On Facebook, one executively famously speculated that the site might turn into an all-video site by 2021.
The ideal way to leverage your WordPress videos on social media is to use a video hosting platform like Cincopa that allows you to brand and control your video content. It will also automatically distribute the videos to all your favorite social media platforms with a single click. The video player even allows you to add social media icons to the video that will encourage your viewers to share.
In essence, using social media is an ideal way to maximize your reach by exposing your brand to more businesses and potential customers that may not have heard of your brand or interacted with it. With strong CTAs and engaging content, there will definitely be an uptick in visitor count.
It should also help that 76% of users say that should they find video entertaining and fun, they are willing to share it with their family and friends.
4. Video content has great ROI
HubSpot reports that 53% of marketers believe that video content has the best ROI of all the marketing methods they have tried. Admittedly, a well-produced video isn’t the cheapest thing in the world, but if SmartInsights is anything to go by, video can increase ROI by as much as 80%.
Besides, video doesn’t have to expensive. Computers for editing and phone cameras are constantly increasing and becoming more affordable than ever. At this point, the latest iPhone can make pretty decent videos.
You don’t have to be a multi-billion dollar company spending millions of dollars to make a good video. The content of the video matters a lot more than the quality of the video itself. Users are more likely to be turned off by videos that don’t do a good job of explaining the product or service rather than poor design. Good design does matter, but not as much as the content itself.
5. Videos foster trust
In order to make any conversion or sale, one important prerequisite has always been creating a relationship based on trust with the customer. This trust helps to keep the customer over the long-term rather than acquiring them alone.
Video does this really well. According to Nielsen, for example, 84% of people are a lot more likely to buy a product you’re offering if it is recommended by someone they are familiar with. In other words, a recognized industry professional can turn your whole campaign on its head. This can be done using promotional videos, testimonials or the like. Visuals are so important that customers are 58% more likely to trust a company using video as it’s a method of pushing products. 45% are also likely to revisit a site with videos.
Besides which, video content is a lot more likely to engage with the viewer’s emotions than any other kinds of media, if well executed. A person whose emotions have been captured is a lot easier to convert into a paying customer. 57% of customers are more confident in buying a product after having watched a custom product video, thus less likely to return it.
Embedding vs. Self-Hosted Video
Before you rush off to fill your pages with high-quality videos, it’s important to remember that WordPress is infamous for handling video uploads very poorly. Other than which, there are a ton of reasons why self-hosting a video is a bad idea.
Embedding a video means uploading to a third-party website and making it accessible to your site directly using code or a link that the video host provides.
It’s almost always a better idea to use a third-party host o store your video data, for a couple of reasons.
First things first, bandwidth is expensive. This is going to lead to your website being slower and you paying a lot more cash at the end of the month if your host even allows you to purchase more bandwidth. Some hosts just let your website freeze. Another catch is that even if they do, bandwidth is pretty expensive.
Second of all, third-party hosts have been around for a while and give you access to complex mechanisms that can only be had as a result of lots of time spent on trial and error. For instance, imagine trying to implement your own analytics system from scratch because you’re too stubborn to use private hosting. Even worse, scaling a video to huge load is a whole other issue.
Lastly is the kind of optimizations and tons of features hosts provide. This includes resolution-changing, auto-captions and customizing the video player to match your brand. This can’t be done on WordPress without, often expensive, plugins.
