Video is Still a Strong Investment
Video needs to be a part of your PR strategy. With 96% of consumers increasing their online video consumption, you need to give your potential clients and customers something to watch. The format can range from informal to highly produced, scripted to improv, short to long. But regardless of form and format, here are three reasons why you can’t skip out on video.
Video Builds a Deeper Connection
Video can build trust and a relationship in a deeper way than text alone. Because so many of our buying decisions are informed by subconscious emotions, it's important to create content that will elicit an emotional response by the viewer. Think about what kind of emotional response you want your viewer to feel. Then carefully choose images, dialogue, and music that will enhance your message and help viewers connect emotionally with your content. There’s no recipe for the perfect video, but it does need to be high quality, hit your key messages, and be aligned with work being done in other channels. Video for video's sake will not net results. The emotional connection created with video also explains why viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it compared to 10% when reading it in text. The award-winning video we produced for Appalachian Mountain Club captured the hearts and minds of viewers inspiring them
SEO Loves Video
It feels like we will never stop chasing the elusive search engine optimization (SEO) algorithm to increase our rankings and improve our chances of being noticed in organic search. Content and lots of it is one of the primary keys to increasing SEO and that used to take the form of text-rich websites and long form blog articles. Now, SEO is trawling the web for MP4 and MOV files. One of the ways that SEO determines the worthiness of a web page is by analyzing how long users stay on it. Video can dramatically enhance user experience and 83% of video marketers say that video increased the average time their visitors stayed. To keep users from navigating away from your website to play the video, make sure it is hosted natively in your website or that you have embedded a video player.
Video is Versatile
Video provides a great platform for simplifying complex material into something easy for viewers to understand. Because users are unlikely to watch long videos, create short videos that cover one specific topic, feature, or advantage of your product and service. Videos created specifically for social media should be on average 90 seconds or less and videos that you post to your website can be anywhere from 2-5 minutes long. In a series of videos we produced for Hinckley Allen, viewers get an engaging introduction to the complex legal work their attorneys routinely handle.
When our team was nominated for (and subsequently won) an Emmy Award last year, we had the opportunity to review the work of all of the other entrants across fields and topics. What they all had in common was a strong narrative that was enhanced by the visual images. Like any great book or movie, you could watch them again and again without losing interest. The average person is watching over 100 minutes of online video per day, and most of those are less than memorable. Making high quality, compelling video content and distributing it where your audience exists is the best way to make sure your message makes the cut.
Need help figuring out the next step? Take a few minutes to speak with one of our award-winning producers, and we’ll get you on the right path.