Content marketing helps you move your consumers through the marketing funnel from awareness, to consideration, to making a decision. By targeting an audience and a specific point in their decision-making process, you can generate more qualified leads that help the target audience move smoothly through the funnel, and keep them coming back for more.
Video content marketing specifically is the newest way to grab your leads’ attention. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then video might be worth 10,000 words, or even 100,000 words. With the rise of augmented reality, video calls, and the boom of Tik Tok, video now trumps images and words in the content sphere. Here’s what we know:
- People watch an average of 16 hours of online video content per week
- 70% of YouTube viewers watch videos for “help with a problem” they’re having in their hobby, studies, or job
- 54% of people want to see more video content from marketers
- 49% of marketers rate visual marketing as Very Important to their marketing strategy, and 22% consider it Important, and 19% say that their strategy is nothing without visual content
With that in mind, you may be considering adding video content to your marketing strategy. If you haven’t already decided, here are five surprising benefits of video content marketing that you haven’t thought of.
Benefits of Video Content Marketing
- Metrics are easy to track.
The metrics of video are not complicated. You can easily start tracking the reach of your video with views. A view is counted as 30 seconds on YouTube, and only 3 seconds on Instagram and Facebook.
Shares are another easy metric to track (and improve if you include an invitation to share at the end of your video). Other engagements, including comments, likes, and even dislikes can be tracked to better understand what your audience is looking for.
- Higher rankings in search engines.
A factor in Google’s ranking for search engine response pages (SERPs) is how long people are viewing your site before leaving. This is called dwell time. Having a video on your landing page increases dwell time, which then improves your ranking. Users are also more likely to click on a video in a search engine when paired with the information they are looking for.
- People prefer learning with video.
Video offers meaningful, bite-sized content that can appeal to shorter attention spans. Wordstream notes that 59% of company executives agree that if given the choice between written or video information, they would choose to watch a video.
Consumers also want to see brands share more video content rather than emails, images, blogs, and content in PDFs according to Hubspot. Videos that explain complicated information are understood faster and with more clarity. This means that if you can put your information in a video, it’s likely it will gain more traffic than the same information as text.
- You already have the content
It’s easy to transition many types of content into video content. In B2C marketing, sharing a video about the person behind the product is a great way to connect with consumers personally. Many artists and creators are now sharing their behind-the-scenes in small videos to share their creative process. If this sounds like you, all you have to do is set up a camera to record your regular activities to share.
Other types of content that can be turned into video includes FAQs about your product, customer support, and email newsletters. Consider shortening a webinar into a smaller video series. You can also add prompts to share or another call to action at the end of your video to increase engagement. This makes it even easier to send people to your website or landing page.
- You will be remembered
People retain information better when it’s paired with relevant visuals. With more than half the population being visual learners, the video makes your brand more memorable. If choosing between a brand that shares video and a brand that doesn’t, the one with striking visual cues will come faster to the front of your consumer’s mind.