01 The Power of Video on the Web

A Guide to Everything You Need to Know to Get the Most From Your Video Marketing

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confessions of Video Junkies.

OK we admit it we’re biased.

We love video – we’ve loved video since we were kids sitting too close to the TV.

But this part of the guide isn’t some passion piece from video nerds (although we are).

This first instalment of Video Production for Clients is about you.

It’s about understanding the opportunity to use video on the internet to build your brand, get more people onto your email list and make more sales. It’s chock full of video statistics that are truly remarkable

For instance did you know that adding a video to a site that sells…
…well anything, will increase your conversion rate by an average of 30%?
Did you know that viewing a video on a website that sells a product increases the probability of making a purchase by 85%?

As you can see these are not small numbers.

Are we biased?

Yep.

Do we have an agenda?

You betcha.

– But we’re being open and honest about it and it doesn’t change the fact there are some very good reasons why video on the internet is just about the best kind of marketing you can do for your business right now – in fact add a little social media marketing into the mix and it’s pretty hard to find a more efficient, cost effective way to market your business and communicate to your customers.

So our agenda for this first section of the guide is to show you why we believe that not using video as part of your internet marketing strategy is actually a bad business decision!

And to do that we’re going to geek out and hit you with a lot of stats, but don’t worry, although  this is the geekiest we’re going to get in the whole series, it’s because we want you to hop on the video production bandwagon with us – because this sucker is leaving with or without you!

Ready? 
Lets go!

 Part 01: Table of Contents:

Each part of the guide has it’s own table of contents so you can get the info you want quickly and easily!

 

Why is Video So effective?  – The Psychology Behind the Numbers.

To tell you the truth, none of the very impressive video stats that your going to get hit with would mean didly squat if video wasn’t more effective in communicating and getting people to remember your marketing than anything else out there.

So lets start with just how effective and why.

Quick quizz: What are the two major of the 5 senses?

That’s right : Seeing and Hearing – and what senses does video engage with?
Yep you guessed it .. site and sound.
Our brain reacts more effectively from communication that contains visual and aural stimuli.

It’s this simple reason that video increases engagement and why viewers are much better at retaining the information that they experience.

After 72mins of viewing, the average person retains; 

10% of text

5% images 

95% video

It makes sense right? Our main mode of communication for pretty much the entire history of the human race has been that of talking and listening and watching the people that we talk with.
In fact you probably already know that body language is thought to be major factor in communication.

“One study at UCLA indicated that up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues. Another study indicated that the impact of a performance was determined 7 percent by the words used, 38 percent by voice quality, and 55 percent by the nonverbal communication.”
about.com

The 3M corporation and Zibisco have determined that of all the information that is transmitted to the brain 90% is visual – and visuals are processed by the brain a whopping 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.

Just don’t ask me how they worked it out.

You’ve heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words?
Well Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research says a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words.

But is the message retained longer than 72 minutes?

Online Publishers Association reports that 80% of Web surfers can remember viewing a video ad on a website they checked out in the past 30 days.

Of that 80% this is how the stats break down.

46% took some action after viewing the ad.

26% looked for more information about the subject of the video

22% visited the website named in the ad

15% visited the company represented in the video ad

12% purchased the specific product featured in the ad

Video Engagement. Start Strong or Not at All.

These days it’s no surprise that we have little patience to spend our time on anything that doesn’t grab us at the start – so many things are competing for our attention – and for every interesting piece of info that we’d enjoy there seems to be 50 that are a complete waste of time.

Which is why it’s even more important that when you communicate you do it as effectively as possible. [By maybe getting some professional help? hint hint]

It also means that you have to grab your viewers attention fast.

In the first 10 seconds.

Visible Measures reports that 20% of your viewers will click away from a video in 10 seconds or less.

30% of viewers will be gone by the 30 second mark.

45% by 60 secs

60% by 120 secs.

The remaining 40%?

Well here’s the good news – the majority of these are likely to stay until the end.

These numbers seem to be about same across the board no matter what duration your video is.

Is it possible for you to get better stats in your videos?

Of course!

By making sure that you are sending the right people to the right video.

And by making sure you give people a reason at the beginning to keep watching right till the end.

What About Duration & Share-ability ?

It used to be that to maximise video shares,  shorter was definitely better (think 30 secs – to a minute)
But as internet viewing audiences have matured and become more sophisticated this doesn’t seem to be a rule any more.
Instead the overriding factor seems to be not so much about the length of the video but more about how engaging it is.

In 2012 ReelSEO reported some interesting findings:

“David Waterhouse, the Head of Content for Unruly Media, has just compiled some interesting stats on the average length of the ads in the Top Global Video Ads Chart. It ranks brands’ social videos worldwide based on the amount of times content has been shared on Facebook, Twitter and in the blogosphere.

The data is pretty interesting.

Average Video Length for Top 50 Most Shared Global Video Ads:

Top 10 – 4 minutes 11 seconds (2,513 total seconds – does not include “Kony 2012”)

11-20 – 2 minutes 30 seconds (1,501 total seconds)

21-30 – 3 minutes 5 seconds (1,849 total seconds)

31-40 – 2 minutes 57 seconds (1,770 total seconds)

41-50 – 1 minute 45 seconds (1,049 total seconds)

Top 50 – 2 minutes 54 seconds (8,682 total seconds – does not include “Kony 2012”)”

And mobile video statistics seem to back that up – since the adaption of tablets as entertainment consumption devices and faster and cheaper broadband, people are happy to get comfy and view long form videos from the comfort of the sofa or bed.

How Many Videos are People Watching Online ?

Online video viewing has matured rapidly over the last 3 years and is considered a main stream activity with 78% of people watching at least once a week and 55% watching everyday.

According to comscore the current average per user per month is 32.2 videos,
with the average web surfer watching 16 minutes and 49 seconds of online video ads each month.

YouTube reports that more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, spending more than 4 billion hours watching videos

And here’s the crazy stat – Online video users are expected to double by 2016. (Cisco)

Video: Your Virtual Salesman.

When it comes to using video to drive sales and raise conversion rates video really shines.

eMarketer senior analyst Jeffrey Grau summarised the benefits of video as including “…a lower number of abandoned shopping carts, reduced return rates, and higher sales.”

EMARKETER, 2009

When it comes to your potential customers MEDIAPOST 21013 report makes it pretty clear.

90% of consumers watch online video.

57% of consumers say that product videos make them more confident in a purchase and less likely to return an item, up from 52% a year ago.

Online media influences more than 50% of in-store sales, making cross-channel campaigns for the omnichannel shopper more critical than ever. That number is expected to rise to 60% by 2017.

b2bmarketing.net reports visitors that watch videos of products or services are 85% more likely to purchase, this makes video 6 times more effective than print and online text. 

How about these results?

4 in 10 shoppers visited a store online or in-person as a direct result of watching a video

Zappos saw increases of 6% to 30% in sales for their products that had a video accompaniment

Animated explainer videos increase conversion rates by 20%. (source: Unbounce)

Videos on landing pages Increased conversions by 86% (WebDAM)

domain.com.au, saw a 403% increase in listing inquiries when video was used with the listing.

(That’s inquiries – solid leads)

It seems that pretty much all Internet Marketers agree, in 2013 Emarketer found that a massive 93% of Marketers used video for their online marketing.

While 81% of senior marketing executives now use online video content in their marketing programs, up from 70% in 2011.

With online Merchants not far behind, Multichannel Merchant stated that video was the no.1 thing that merchants plan to add to their e-commerce sites in 2014.

But when they do, they better make sure the videos are professionally done.
Comscore revealed in 2012 “Professionally produced video optimized for eCommerce, outperforms user-generated video (UGC video) by 30%, delivering a 24.7% lift as compared with an 18.7% lift for the UGC video.”

B2B AOK.

Video is effective for Business to Business too.

A report Published By Forbes Insight showed that when it comes getting to key decision makers video can help you there as well.

59% of senior executives would rather watch a video than read text.

75% of executives watch work related videos on business websites at least once a week.

50% watch business-related videos on YouTube.

65% of those who view a video click through to visit the vendor website,

50% look for more information

45% report that they contacted a vendor after seeing an online video ad.

About 50% of those who viewed an online marketing video went on to make a purchase for their business.

So what do these stats tell us?

Video is a great opportunity to engage with busy executives who are actively using video to make purchase decisions, and they can find you on YouTube.

Video for SEO.

Google loves Video – and Google loves YouTube videos even better (after all they own YouTube).

Not only is YouTube the second most popular search engine it’s now responsible of almost a third of all Google searches.

And it’s great for your website’s Search Engine Optimisation too.

With the proper formatting, just using video content can increase the chance of you getting to the front page of the Google results by a massive 53 X (that’s 5300%!!!)

Having your video come up in the Google search results with its thumbnail is likely to get 41% more visitors clicking through to your site than a plain text result.

But the benefits don’t end there – one of the main search engine ranking factors currently used by  Google is what they call user engagement – which basically just comes down to time per viewer on your site. While the average visitor will stay for 43 seconds on a text and image based site – Websites with videos have an average of 5 mins 50secs – making that a massive 88% more engagement!

The more sites you have linking to you the higher you are likely to rank in the Google Search results and the more visitors you will get coming to your site.

SEO experts SEOMOZ reports that posts with videos included are likely to attract 300% more sites to link to you than a plain text post.

Video & Email Work Very Well Together Too.

Who says text and video can’t work together?

Emarketer reported that Marketers who use video in email cite increased clickthrough rates, increased time spent reading the email, increased sharing and forwarding, increased conversion rates, and increased dollars generated as the top benefits.

Get Response says that from over 800,000 emails sent from GetResponse Pro accounts, emails with video received 5.6% higher open rates on average and 96.38% higher click-through rates than emails without video.

While Forrester’s stats are even higher – finding between a 200% to 300% increase in click through rate when businesses include video in an email.

It helps with subscriber retention also.
Eloqua revealed that 75% of automated email providers reduced their number of subscriber opt-outs by 75% when emails incorporated video.

Social Media & Video: A Match Made in Heaven.

Given the power of social media and the low cost to run very effective marketing campaigns, combining video marketing in your social media strategy can be very powerful.

Over half of 25-54 year olds share video online. (EMARKETER, 2013)

92 percent of mobile video viewers share videos with others. (emarketer)

Over 100 million people take a social action on videos every week. 

500 tweets every minute contain video links

68% of viewers share video links – every auto-shared tweet results in six new YouTube browsing sessions (ReelSEO). 

Here are some mind bending YouTube stats:

500 years of YouTube videos are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute (YouTube)

2 billion video views per week are monetized on YouTube. (ReelSEO).

1 in 5 Twitter users discover videos each day from tweeted links.

What’s more, two-thirds of Twitter users feel it worth watching videos tweeted by brands

Users sharing video on retail and brand sites chose Facebook 46 percent of the time, with email accounting for 40 percent and Twitter capturing 14 percent of shares. (Invodo)

 Mobile video ads that include social media buttons drive 36 percent higher engagement. (digiday).

And this little beauty:

Video is the most shared brand content on Facebook (Zuum)

Think about that – if you are a company and want to get your stuff voluntarily shared by people enthusiastic about your brand then video is the best medium!

The Future: Mostly Mobile.

Video is growing with no signs of slowing down in the short term.

Borrell Associates found that Online video production will account for more than one-third of all online advertising spending within the next five years.

And it seems that like internet searches – it’s all heading toward mobile devices.

Bytemobile Analtytics disclosed that video constitutes 50% of mobile wireless network traffic and is expected to rise to 66% by 2017

YouTube reports that some 40% of YouTube’s traffic now comes from mobile.
Compare that to just 25% last year and a paltry 6% only two years ago.

And to put that into some perspective, YouTube accounts for nearly one-fifth of all mobile data traffic.

Mobile and tablet shoppers are three times as likely to view a video as laptop or desktop users. (NPD)

It comes back to how people consume media, in fact Cisco discovered that;
“63% of digital video screening on mobiles does not happen on-the-go, but rather at home”

In the U.S there are now 50 million people who watch video on the mobile phones.

Online Music Video Platform VEVO’s audience on its mobile and TV app grew by 184% this year. Now half its viewers are doing so via mobile.
And not to be out done (ever) online retail giant Amazon has no fewer than 16.7 million Prime subscribers that get unlimited video streaming on Kindle devices and via Amazon’s mobile apps.

It also seems that it pays to make content specifically for the internet instead of simply recycling short ads made for TV and cinema.

Digiday Reports..
“Most of the short videos utilized in mobile ads are reused traditional TV commercials. Unsurprisingly, consumers are not too keen to watch them again. Hence, the lower than average performance.

Longer videos, on the other hand, tend to be either more premium or created specifically for mobile. Video presentations explaining promoted mobile apps or similar products are remarkably popular and generally any original video content performs notably well.”

Consumers increasingly use mobile as a primary medium of content consumption and expect premium, originally produced material. Advertising shouldn’t be an exception, and when reusing video for mobile ads, it should at least be carefully selected and appropriately edited.”

And a word of caution, If you are going to publish video make sure it’s on mobile friendly sites and make sure the videos are encoded to work on mobiles!

Conclusions: What are the Take Aways From All This ?

Video rocks!

The Video Statistics don’t lie – Seriously – Video is a winner across the board when it comes to getting your message across, getting it remembered, getting it shared and using it to get people to take further actions including buy stuff!

But it’s not simply a matter of stick any old video up and bam! – instant engagement.
(Heck – you just have to spend some time on YouTube to know that there is a heck a lot of crap out there with view counts under 100).
Like any form of marketing, or branding – it should always reflect the quality and standards to which your brand stands for.

Which is why you should carefully choose not only what you say, and how you say it but where you say it.

In part 7 we go further into some strategies to get your videos out there and look at how to choose the right platform for them.

With the growth of video at the moment – Businesses are in a unique position of being able to get videos produced for relatively low cost – especially compared to what content used to cost.

Once created the videos can then get hundreds, thousands and quite often millions of people to see it and discuss it for a very reasonable budget.

And the kicker is because we’ve been brought up thinking that Branded content IS expensive – it gives your Brand the added bonus of Lifting it up.

I don’t know about you – but we think that is an amazing opportunity for almost any business!

Don’t Miss Part 2 !

In Part Two of video production for clients we’re going to look at the most common different types of Video’s available so you can choose the right format that matches the purpose of your videos.

Take me to Part 2!

Click here for part Two Choosing the Right Video Production Type for Your Business.

Video Production for Clients Guide Table of Contents:

Here’s An Index Of Every Chapter:
So you can get the content that interests you the most!