Video Marketing: 5 Ways to Generate Leads for Your Business

Video marketing may appear too expensive and complex for marketers to implement, but there is no doubt about its benefits. Numerous studies and statistics prove that video marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote a product or service.

Let’s look at some of the stats that prove this fact:

• According to Facebook’s best-practice guide, posts including a video generate about 100% more engagement than the average post.
• According to research group Visual Web Optimizer, there is nearly a 46% increase in conversion rates with video compared to text.
• According to Forrester Research, a video is 53 times more likely to show up on page one of Google than a text article.

These stats prove that video marketing is a valuable marketing strategy for today’s businesses.

A video is one of the best and most persuasive marketing tools as it can deliver enormous amounts of information quickly and in a simplified form to your audience. Simplified messaging attracts people to your website or social channels. A high-quality, informative video with the right call-to-action can turn a viewer into a customer; this ultimately boosts your business’s revenue generation.

Here is a list of various ways you can generate leads through online video marketing:

1. Create Video-Embedded Landing Pages

A website has proven to be a powerful marketing tool for most businesses. However, many websites are trying to attract eyeballs and compete with your site for search rankings and viewership. There were nearly 850 million websites in December 2013, which is increasing daily.

When it comes to attracting visitors and turning traffic into conversions, the landing pages on your website play a significant role. Designing an attractive landing page will help you achieve your goals quickly.  Your landing page has about 8 seconds to make an impression on a visitor. So, how do you grab a visitor’s attention and make him stay on your site longer?

Video Is the Answer

Great landing pages explain exactly what your company does in a brief time, and video is an excellent asset for accomplishing such a task. According to reports, video on a landing page can increase conversions by 86%.

GE, for instance, took off all the text-heavy mission statements from its website and replaced them with videos of examples of the company’s work instead. Many of these videos have achieved 2 million views and make a potentially dull corporate website look more appealing.

Video-embedded landing pages will amaze your visitors and make them stay longer on your page, allowing your brand message to sink in. Videos also help in raising the trust factor significantly.

The main goal of your landing page is to convert a visitor into a customer. So, don’t forget to add a call-to-action to your video. It could be permanently visible, shown strategically during the video, or presented at the end.

In addition to a call-to-action, there are other essential tips for creating video-embedded landing pages. For instance, placing the video above the fold is an excellent idea to help capture the visitors’ attention and encourage them to watch it. Also, consider keeping your tape short and engaging to cater to visitors with shorter attention spans. Lastly, optimize your video-embedded landing pages for lead generation and conversions. You can do this by using clear and concise language, offering value to the visitors, and making it easy for them to take the desired action.

2. Creating Product Description Videos and Sharing It on Social Channels

Online users who view a product video are likelier to convert than users who view an ad. Using product description videos will help your business boost sales as users feel more informed and confident about their purchases. It makes sense to turn product descriptions into informative and engaging videos. The goal is to sell these videos. So, ensure you show off what the product can do and why customers should purchase it. It’s vital to clearly show the product’s benefits within the video.

Ensure the duration of the video is short. Using an AI video editor makes crafting short and engaging videos more accessible. It can automatically trim, apply effects, and enhance the overall quality. Including relevant tags and adding keyword-rich, interesting headlines will ensure your videos appear higher in organic search results and are found by more people.

Using an AI generator voice helps develop engaging video content by crafting realistic and nuanced voiceovers or dialogues. This technology can empower your product videos, giving them a unique storytelling and audience connection edge.

Video is the most commonly shared content on social networks, so do not neglect social media and promote your videos across multiple channels. If you want to realize a video’s full potential, you must make it easy for users to find and share it.

3. Embedding Short Video Replies to Customer Queries

Often, when a follower or customer questions a brand about its products or services on social platforms, the reply is sent via texts or links to the right page with answers. But why not use another way of replying to your followers—with a video? Visual replies are more engaging, and their very nature allows the recipients to understand them better. You can even integrate call-to-action in videos to leverage video replies for marketing benefits.

Warby Parker, for instance, uses video unexpectedly to double the response rate and truly connect with followers. It replies to people on Twitter with video responses. The companies’ followers frequently ask questions about the color, size, and/or shape of a particular frame, and instead of just responding to them with a tweet, the brand creates a video that shows the difference between the two frames.

4. Creating Content Videos and Posting on Your Brand’s YouTube Channel

Video blogs (also known as vlogs) are blogs primarily composed of video content rather than text. They are a great way to showcase a brand’s character and everything it stands for. A vlog helps improve traffic to your site and boost conversions for your business. Video blogging essentially enables you to build connections with your viewers like no other blogging format. Dell’s video gallery is a fantastic example of this.

Creating content videos and uploading them on your website is not sufficient. You should post these videos on video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Since YouTube is the second largest web search platform, it is a no-brainer that you should invest your marketing dollars in a branded YouTube channel to market your business. Moreover, the most recent statistics on YouTube are mind-blowing:  Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. YouTube is also a great way to garner social signals for SEO.

You can post many different types of business video content on your YouTube channel, such as explainer or tutorial videos, webinars, how-to videos, interviews of industry experts or people working for your business, instructional videos, video case studies, videos that talk about your company, etc.

Apart from these, if you’re an employer looking to attract top talent and increase recruitment lead generation, you may consider creating employer brand videos. This type of video can be a popular way of showing your company culture and proving that your company can be a perfect place to work and establish a thriving career.

Fortunately, many video recording platforms are available to create employer brand videos. They’re designed to give you an easy and fast way of recording videos for your recruitment and other branding efforts.

However, it’s essential to know that creating content videos and posting them on your social media channel require some strategies to ensure its success. In this case, you may check out credible websites and online resources to learn about these strategies. You may also take a cue from established companies like Dell to develop your video marketing strategies.

High-quality, interesting videos will attract subscribers to your channel. Post regularly on this platform to maintain your channel feed.

5. Posting Video Testimonials on Your Website

Testimonials validate your claims and instill confidence in prospective customers. A written testimonial is a powerful marketing tool, but a video testimonial is more potent than text when influencing shoppers. Video testimonials seem more genuine to prospective clients than written reviews.

Including consumer-generated video testimonials on your site will help build better customer relationships. By integrating their testimonials, you can empower your customers to be your best marketers.

Ensure the video testimonial feels authentic, is interesting, and delivers a relevant message. Let your customers say what your product has done for them or about the great service you delivered. People will love to listen to what your existing customers think about your company and then decide whether to buy your product from you or not. Capturing a video testimonial from a customer humanizes your company.

Rogaine, for instance, includes customer testimonial videos on their website allowing visitors to see what other customers say about their products.

Analyzing: Measuring Video Marketing Efforts

One sure-fire way of knowing whether your video marketing is working is to track different video metrics. Some video metrics are apparent, such as total views, unique views, average time viewed, etc. Other essential but not-so-common metrics are play rate, sharing, video SEO, content details, etc. You need to analyze all these metrics to gain insights into what appeals most to your customers.

While tracking these metrics, if marketers notice an increase in bounce rates, sharp drop-offs in video views, or visitors ignoring their website or call-to-actions, they should immediately change their video marketing strategies to get better results for their efforts.

Analytics track which videos keep people’s attention longer, lead to more customer conversions, and are the most shared. You can also identify influential customers by tracking how many people have turned to online buyers after watching a customer testimonial video. The more powerful voices can then be included in future marketing campaigns.

Video is becoming a powerful tool for modern businesses and if you are not using it you are missing out on endless opportunities. Cisco predicts that by 2015, at least 90% of all Internet traffic will be video. That’s why it is essential for all businesses, big or small, to embrace video marketing in their marketing strategies right now!