You might enjoy watching videos online, but have you considered creating one for your own business?
According to Forbes, 59% of senior executives prefer watching a video to reading a text. 65% of these executives then click through to visit the seller’s website, and nearly half report to have contacted the seller after watching the video. Videobrewery has similar findings – about half of people who viewed an online marketing video made a purchase afterwards.
Videos are a great marketing tool, which increases buyers confidence in your product or service, and you can convey more information via video than by letting your audience read about it. Today’s managers, purchasers, and even ordinary citizens are busy people, sometimes rather lazy to read, but watching a video is still considered more of an entertainment than work. Moreover, according to Cisco, video now accounts for over half of web traffic accessed via mobile devices!
So what type of business video can you create?
If your product or service is more of a commodity, the audience is aware of its existence and purpose, so you need to convince them that yours is the best one in terms of performance/functionality/quality/ design/service level etc. In that case you need a demonstration video that you can produce yourself, or you can even liaise with independent reviewers who will be keen to try your product out and shoot a semi-professional review video, which you can then place on your site and market it to the world. And here is another convincing fact from the Videobrewery – “90% of online shoppers at a major retailer’s website said they find video helpful in making shopping and buying decisions. Retailers who provide online video to show off their products report that the products with video sell a lot more than products with no video.”
If your product or service is more of an innovative solution, you need an explainer video, which should address three points: 1) remind the viewers of the horrific problem your targeted audience is facing 2) demonstrate a solution that deals with the problem 3) explain how it works, so that the audience is convinced that your solution is what they have been actually looking for all along.
How to make an explainer video?
While the focus of videos on common products is mainly on demonstrating how it works and its various applications, the process of creating explainer videos is more difficult. The video needs to be entertaining, swift, smart and surprisingly simple. That’s probably the most difficult part - remember, many video marketing exerts advice that your video should be ideally 1m30s long – and while 1/3 is about the problem, 1/3 is about the solution, you have only half a minute left to explain how it works. And why it the recommended video time so short? That’s based on the viewers’ attention span. Research by Visible Measures reports that 20% of viewers will stop watching after 10 seconds of your video, about 1/3 will stop after 30 seconds, and incredible 60% will stop watching after 2 minutes.
So congratulations if you’ve made it through this article and as a reward check out our own explainer video for some inspiration, get started with your own business video, and next month we’ll tell you how to optimize it for YouTube and the search engines!