This week we are heeding the advice (and listening to the dulcet Australian accent) of marketing expert Ben Angel as he outlines the four biggest fears that people have when it comes to video marketing and how to overcome those fears and start making millions in sales. (That’s not guaranteed, of course.)
These tips come from a video Angel made for Entrepreneur and he starts off that video with the revelation that businesses that use video marketing grow 49% faster year-over-year than businesses that don’t use it.
Although he has been using video marketing for years, Angel reveals that in the past 12 months alone, video marketing has generated over a million bucks in sales for him and a few million views that have helped grow his brand internationally.
It’s no secret anymore that video marketing brings people to your brand, but many businesses are still stuck when it comes to getting started. Let’s take a look at why this is.
The first roadblock Angel identifies is people’s fear of being in front of the lens. However, as the marketing maven points out, you don’t even have to be in front of the camera yourself if you’re shy.
You can:
Use animated video (we like this suggestion)
Hire an affordable spokesperson from Fivrr
The best thing about hiring a spokesperson, Angel notes, is that they’re already used to being on camera and they will likely already have their own studio setup.
For those who do want to be on camera for their own business, Angel has these suggestions:
As most people know nowadays, video doesn’t have to cost a lot. If you want things to look professional, but don’t want to spend the money up front until you see some results, Angel says you can get your scripts ready and rent equipment for a day to shoot with.
Once you do decide to take the plunge and buy some equipment, you can use your phone to shoot (at least to start) and buy an inexpensive lapel microphone and LED light bank off of Amazon. When you fully commit to video, Angel says, it’s really convenient to have all of the equipment on hand and ready to go.
We’ll interject here that you can also save money by hiring the most affordable animation studio in the market. (That’s us. We’re talking about us.) Here, look at this conveniently placed call to action:
You’re going to mess up multiple times.
That’s not a bad thing, though. Even Ben Angel, when he first started, had to do multiple takes to get it right.
Here are his “sneaky, little tricks” that he likes to use now that he’s a video marketing pro:
Take a couple of L-Theanine tablets to calm yourself. (It’s a natural green tea extract.)
Edit out mistakes instead of trying to do a perfect take in one go.
Realize you’re going to make mistakes, but don’t let fear of making mistakes hold you back.
It’s important to get over this fear, Angel says, because video marketing content is so useful. If he were to do a public speaking tour, Angel notes, he would have to be on stage every single day for a year to reach the same amount of people he can reach online from just continually driving traffic to his videos.
Not having any sort of strategy also burdens businesses that are hoping to get into video marketing, Angel says, particularly because they don’t know what type of videos to produce.
We’ve covered before the many types of videos you can create as part of a video marketing strategy. Angel suggests that at the very least you need two:
A direct sales video for your core product or service that speaks directly to the audience and encourages them to purchase or inquire.
Educational videos that show people how to solve a problem they have.
(Animation works great for either of these. Just sayin’.)
Regardless of what type of videos you use, you should always have a call to action. At the very least, you should have the good ol’ “like, subscribe, comment and share” CTA at the end of your video.
Once you figure things out, you can create your own templates for scripts and shots and really get rolling.
In the meantime, here is another call to action from us:
Click here to schedule an appointment with WizMotions to see how we can help you make the perfect business video.
video marketing
How to Grow Your Brand with Video from Seed to Sequoia
Why an Animated Series is the Way to Go When Using Video for Your Business
Many of the business customers we have end up making more than one video. Usually, they make a video, see how well it performs and then opt to have another two, three or four made. But, it can be a worthwhile investment to actually plan for having multiple videos created at the same time so they can be watched as a series.
Let’s look at why companies are moving away from standalone videos and opting to make series instead.
Multiple Products or Services
Large companies almost certainly have more than one product or service. And although small companies may only have a single product or service they offer, that product or service may be complex and require more than a single video to explain it properly.
Our client Drobo has multiple products that require promoting and they’ve made a video for each one so all their products get the attention they need to be thoroughly explained to customers.
Multiple Audiences
Even if you only have one service, that service might have more than one group of users, especially if it’s a service that connects businesses and customers. If your service has multiple groups of people who would be using it, then it’s better to make a video for each of those groups rather than trying to fit all the information into one video that addresses all the groups. By making multiple videos, you’ll be able to target their distribution better and all the various groups will be more engaged because the individual videos only address that specific group.
For example, JobFormance created two different videos for its JobFaxReport because the service is aimed at two different groups: job seekers and client companies who are looking to hire the best talent they can find. By making two different videos, JobFormance didn’t have to worry about trying to address both groups in one video, which could have overcomplicated it and which would have made targeted distribution difficult.
Avoiding Information Overload
Even though animation is usually more compelling to watch than live action business videos and it’s the perfect medium for breaking down complex ideas because you’re not bound by the sometimes pesky laws of physics, trying to shoehorn too much information into one video can overwhelm viewers and counteract the initial drawing power of the animation.
By having multiple videos and making the concepts in them even simpler, you make your messaging more effective. Plus, if you can get visitors to watch multiple videos on your site, it will be good for your SEO because it means they’ll be spending more time on your site. Viewers are much more likely to watch a series of shorter videos than one longer video.
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Evolving with the Products and Services
A company’s products and services tend to evolve the longer the company is around. If a new feature is added to your product or you offer some kind of upgraded service, a new video is in order. To make it fit with your older videos and add to the brand identity you’ve been building, use the same characters as you did in your initial videos.
Perfect Promos
If you have a big promo coming up, why not add some oomph to your announcement with a series of short animated videos? They are super shareable and a series of videos that explain different points of the promo can more easily answer customer questions. And if it’s a regularly occurring promo, like an annual giveaway, you can even use the videos multiple times.
One explainer video is a good investment, but multiple videos in a series is an excellent investment. As we’ve found with many of our clients, it’s quite common for a company to come back for more after their initial one is completed. By planning for a series of videos right up front, you have more control over how they complement each other. Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much an animated video series would cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)
How Videos Positively Impact Your Website’s SEO
When you think of SEO, videos might not immediately come to mind. After all, SEO is all about stuffing keywords onto pages and hoping you can trick the robots that run the internet into putting your page at the top of the search engine results.
Oh, wait. That was back in 2003. Now, videos are the most effective tool for SEO.
- You want to rank highly for a keyword? Video.
- You want great internet overlord Google to put your page at the coveted top spot in the search rankings? Video.
- You want your brand awareness to skyrocket from a combination of page visits and social media sharing? Video.
Some Relevant Numbers
- YouTube has over a billion users.
- Over 500 million people watch video on Facebook every single day.
- Video is expected to account for nearly three-quarters of internet traffic by the end of 2017.
Video is obviously taking over the internet, which means Google algorithms have started giving priority in SERPs to websites that feature good quality video content. Top of the SERP = more unique visits = high-quality backlinks and social shares = increased click-through ratio = more brand awareness = more leads = more conversions. Simple.
But, it’s not enough to just have video on your site. If it was, we would all just record some paint drying on a wall and watch our sites climb up the search rankings.
It’s the type of videos that you use on your site that count, too. Consider these numbers:
- Almost 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before even visiting a store. – Think With Google
- Shoppers who view video are 1.81 times more likely to purchase than non-viewers – Invodo
- 51.9 percent of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI – Invodo
- Retailers cite 40 percent increases in purchases as a result of video – Invodo
- 4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. – Animoto
- 1 in 4 consumers actually lose interest in a company if it doesn’t have video. – Animoto
- 4 in 5 consumers say a video showing how a product or service works is important. – Animoto
The bottom line is people are much more likely to visit your site if you have a video that showcases your products or services than if you don’t and they’re much more likely to take an interest in your business if you have a video than if you don’t.
The Longer People Stay on Your Site, the Better
SEO is multifaceted and one of those facets is the length of time people stay on your site. Faced with a wall of text, people will usually bolt in well under a minute if they have any trouble finding what they’re looking for.
But, give them an engaging video to watch and they’ll stick around. Wistia mined their own website analytics and found that out of the 100 pages on their site with the highest traffic, the vast majority of them were pages with a video on them. They found that visitors spend approximately 2.6x more time on pages that included a video than pages with no video.
Visitors spending more time on your pages lowers your bounce rate and raises the average time spent on your site, which Google bots love. They will prioritize your site in any searches that contain your keywords because of this. That leads to more traffic, more links, more engagement and even better rankings. Again: simple.
Having a video on your site when your competitor doesn’t (or having a more engaging video than them), can be the difference between who ranks where for a keyword you both want to be ranked for.
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Book a time and date that works for you and we will be happy to discuss options for your very own video.
An explainer video will take your real estate business to the next level.
Explainer Videos = Conversions
All these numbers and all this theory is great, but the only numbers that count are conversions and theory doesn’t count at all. Only reality does. And the reality is that explainer videos increase conversions. Let’s look at a classic example: Dropbox.
Today, Dropbox seems like a quaint little footnote to the internet that got trounced by Google Drive, but once upon a time, Dropbox was the only cloud storage site on the internet. When it was a brand new concept, people had a hard time wrapping their heads around it.
The company got a handy little animated explainer video made and added it to their homepage and it increased conversions by 10%, a number that doesn’t sound overly impressive until you realize that Dropbox’s homepage had about 750,000 visitors per month, meaning a 10% increase translated to thousands of new sign ups per day. People who didn’t know how the service worked and were therefore reluctant to join suddenly had it all laid out in a simple video and that prompted them to join up.
Quality Counts
Just as an amazing explainer video will increase your SEO, a subpar one that is made just to take advantage of the SEO benefits can hurt your brand. Improving your SEO should never be the top goal when you get an explainer video made. Improved SEO should be thought of as more of a fringe benefit. The top goal of an explainer video should always be along the lines of increasing brand awareness, explaining how something works (of course) and, ultimately, increasing conversions.
Click here to schedule an appointment with WizMotions to see how we can help you make the perfect business video, increase brand awareness, improve conversions and help your SEO.
Experts Explain the Most Effective Way to Use Video on Your Website
We asked a group of marketing experts and small business owners to tell us what they believe is the most effective way to use video on their websites.
The answers are varied and some of them are even surprising.
Work Sample for Web Design
Rafael Romis
CEO
Weberous
The video we employ on our site is actually the entire background of the site and we do this to help capture visitor’s attention. Weberous has a kind of “water” theme to it and when you land on the site, you’re immediately greeted by the site of a couple of goldfish swimming by (real ones, not animated). We’ve been told by clients that this video background played a part in them choosing us for their own web design because it’s an immediate example of our capabilities and leaves a favorable impression.
Customer Retention
Serhat Pala
Co-Founder
Barkily
While video can definitely be used to generate leads, it can also be useful after you’ve captured a sale. If you have a product or service that needs to be demonstrated to be fully understood, a video is useful for that.
Although not related to a website, you can also use videos in your follow-up emails to customers. These can be exclusive videos that only customers receive, which makes them seem a little more special than a public video. These are good for customer retention and word of mouth advertising.
Introduction to Upsells
Bryan Clayton
CEO
GreenPal
Placing your informative video on the confirmation page, confirmation email, or after you have collected your visitors information is an optimal place to use video. At this point your visitor and potential customer has expressed enough interest to where the odds of them watching a video are 10 times more likely as compared to when they visit your webpage initially.
A video at this stage of the customer on-boarding can be highly effective in clarifying what your customer can expect next, and more importantly, to introduce any potential upsells. After we implemented an explainer video in our confirmation email and confirmation page we noticed customer support inquiries about questions on what to expect next went down 30% and sales of additional services went up 15%.
Tool for Capturing Visitors’ Attention
Jonathan Razza
Senior Director of Emerging Technologies
Liaison Technologies
Using a video background on the above the fold section of the home page can captivate end users and lessen your bounce rate. Let’s face it, everyone loves a good video! To keep your end users on your website longer, you need something that pulls them in and makes them intrigued and a video does just that! So why not implement a solid video to reel in your users and keep them on your page from the get-go.
A Way to Save Money
AJ Saleem
Academic Director
Suprex Tutors Houston
The advantage of video is that you can actually save on the human labor part of your company. For example, we have been trying to push the video on my potential clients because we can avoid paying for tours of the school.
A Way to Announce Contests
Shayla Price
B2B Content Marketer
Video is effective for announcing contests and giveaways on your website. Instead of having customers read the details, your team can create an original video series to explain contest details and notify winners. The brand message is more impactful when your customers can see and hear your excitement.
Connect with us for a FREE consultation.
Book a time and date that works for you and we will be happy to discuss options for your very own video.
An explainer video will take your real estate business to the next level.
Personal Branding Tool
Travis Johansen
Video Producer
Provid Films
In regards to real estate video marketing, since we do a lot of real estate agent profile videos, the number one use is in branding and lead generation.
In today’s real estate market certain types of homes are selling fast. The hardest part for agents in this environment is to actually win the listing against other agents.
One way we’ve seen real estate agents effectively use video to gain new listings is through their branding videos that differentiate themselves as unique, competent, and more importantly, comfortable to work with for home sellers. In 60 seconds of web video, the potential customer watching the video ad on Facebook can get the feeling of the agent’s personality and it really warms up those leads from just cold lead to a comfortable conversation.
When that video showcasing the agent’s brand is cross marketed through targeted ad campaigns on social media like Facebook’s new lead campaigns and Youtube ads directing viewers to landing pages, agent’s can see dramatic jumps in their number of warm leads on a monthly basis – all pointing back to their profile video.
SEO Instrument
Kent Lewis
President
Anvil Media
The most effective way to use video on your website is as follows:
- Embed videos throughout your website, as it improves engagement AND rankings in Google
- Specifically, start with the home page, the most visited section of your website
- Incorporate videos into blog posts to enhance the experience and create more context around the videos (for Google)
- Incorporate videos into your case studies and success stories… customers tell your story better than you, with greater credibility
- Incorporate videos into your testimonials from customers, partners and peers
- Incorporate videos into customer service/FAQ sections to streamline customer support
Teaching Apparatus
Jeff Moriarty
Owner
TanzaniteJewelryDesigns.com
Another way to use video is to teach. This shows trust in your company. For example, in one video we showed what goes into cutting the gemstones customers are purchasing.
A Device for Pitching Clients
Luke Bastin
SEO Manager
TinderPoint
One of the most innovative ways we have used video is to make it the cornerstone of our proposals process. We decided to make proposals the centrepiece of our marketing strategy and to base the proposal content around video.
In practical terms, this meant researching the prospect thoroughly and identifying their needs, pain points and the solutions we had which could benefit their business. Allied to this, we are a digital marketing agency and we would therefore use screen capture technology to show actual examples of our work with analytics of how this had helped other clients of ours similar to them.
As you can see, video is an excellent tool for accomplishing a lot of varied tasks. One of the best kinds of videos you can utilize is an animated explainer video. And, we know just the place to get a great deal on one. Click here to schedule an appointment with WizMotions to see how we can help you make the perfect business video.
7 Stats About Video that Prove Your Brand Needs to Get that Camera Rolling
By now, you’re probably well aware that video is where it’s at when it comes to the internet. It’s almost mandatory nowadays that brands use video to get people’s attention. Whether you’re selling real designer handbags or real estate, you really need to be using video.
Companies that employ video grow their revenue 49% quicker than companies that don’t use video.
It’s clear that video usage is a fast track to revenue growth. But, it’s not enough to just make a video and have it sit on your site. You must pair it with a comprehensive marketing plan to make sure people watch it.
55% of people who are shopping for a specific product perform research on their mobile device.
The significance with this stat is that people are using their mobile devices to do shopping research and using that visual content rather than text to make more informed shopping decisions before purchasing a product. Particularly on mobile devices, video trumps text because it’s easier to watch something than to read on a cell phone.
4 out of 5 shoppers say a video that demonstrates how a product or service works is important to their decision making process about buying that product or service.
Again, this goes back to the reading thing. Even if people are looking at your product or service on a laptop or tablet, they might prefer video to text. If your product or service is even a little bit complex, having a video is crucial. Video also allows you to put the proper emphasis on the words you want and highlight the important features.
76% of millennials follow brands on YouTube.
If you’re trying to tap into that lucrative millennial market (and who isn’t), this is an interesting statistic. More than any other generation before them, millennials want to connect with the brands they love. They may not want to wear a logo, but they do want to stay in touch with brands they identify with.
Just how lucrative is the millennial generation? According to Kit Yarrow’s book Gen BuY, millennials will spend more than $200 billion per year starting in 2017 and will spend $10 trillion throughout their collective lifetimes. That’s a market you can’t afford not to tap into.
50% of advertisers are shifting advertising budgets from TV to digital video
The traditional big game TV commercial might become a thing of the past within the next century, as more and more brands are shifting advertising budgets from TV to digital video. That makes complete sense in this on-demand world. As people consume less of their entertainment on traditional television channels and more on non-traditional, on-demand channels, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to reach them via traditional TV commercials.
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Everyday, 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook.
True, much of that video is probably not advertising, but the point is that people are using the platform to watch video, which makes it another tool you can use in your marketing strategy.
Social media posts that contain video generate 1,200% more shares than posts that contain just text or images.
Brightcove via ResponsiveInboundMarketing
No surprise here. People love to share and aside from maybe a particularly witty meme, video is the most popular thing to share with someone else online. Short videos that make you laugh are particularly share-worthy.
One of the best strategies for using videos is animation. While talking heads can get tedious, animation keeps people’s attention like no other type of video. How much does an animated video cost? Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)