To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
Content marketing is now dominated by video. It’s one of the most impactful ways to grab viewers’ attention (and keep it) while telling your story and increasing the amount of time spent on your website. It’s no secret that using video to increase engagement is an important part of modern marketing strategies, but how does it all work?
What is Engagement?
The engagement rate of a video is a measurement that helps marketers understand how long viewers actually spend watching videos. This number is calculated by counting the total number of plays and multiplying it by the length of the video. If everyone who watched your video, watched the entire thing, your engagement rate would be 100%.
How Videos Improve Engagement
- Videos break up text-heavy pages
- Videos keep visitors on your site longer
- Videos attract a younger, tech-savvy generation
Keeping the type of viewer in mind when creating your videos will also help increase your engagement. Videos targeting repeat customers will have a different set of requirements and targets than videos created to increase awareness of your brand or product.
Create Short, Bite-Sized Videos
It’s no secret that our collective human attention span has shortened in recent years. The constant deluge of information online has been a great boon to human civilization but has also served to make us struggle to stay focused. That means that keeping your videos short and sweet is one of the best ways to increase views and engagement with your content.
When creating new videos, make sure to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think about how they might react to what they’re watching. People don’t respond well to generic marketing slogans and faceless companies. It’s a good idea to include lots of images of smiling, happy people in your videos — using background video to develop continuity in an explainer or how-to video.
In your videos, it’s also important to ask your viewers to do something or take action in some way. This is a call to action (CTA) that will help your audience understand your intentions and the goals of the video.
Make Sure to Add Video Thumbnails
The thumbnail image on a video is the first impression your audience will see, even before they click on the video. Adding a thumbnail image lends professionalism to the video as well as gives the audience an idea of what information the video will cover.
When creating video thumbnails you need to consider the users. Who is the target audience and what are they looking for? Leaving the thumbnail set to the default mode is a surefire way to lose out on traffic, so always ensure you have an eye-catching and relevant image for your users.
Keep Videos Above the Fold
Placing video content early on in the page will help gain your audience’s attention right away. The old newspaper adage of placing the most important information at the top of the page (or above the fold) is still relevant today.
Although we know that search engines have no discernable preference regarding the placement of video, we do know that video content should be the star of the page. Having your videos prominently displayed lets you immediately control the message you’re trying to convey to your audience.
Add Videos to Emails & Landing Pages
Even adding the word “video” to your email subject lines has shown to increase open rates by 19%, click-through rates by 65%, and reduce unsubscribes by 26%, according to Animoto. Consumers are simply more inclined to watch a video instead of reading through a large wall of text.
Creating individual landing pages for these are also excellent ways to not only measure your traffic and engagement rates but to create sales funnels to retain customers by targeting their needs directly.
Quality Videos, For the Win
However you choose to incorporate video into your marketing strategy, the most important aspects to focus on are the quality of the finished product, the feelings your video evokes from your audience, and what benefits the video offers to your customers.
By keeping videos short, concise, and compelling, using video on your website will unquestionably increase engagement rates, while helping your customers get to know your brand, products, and company culture.
