Video marketing was and still is an incredibly popular online marketing strategy for businesses big and small. Obviously, larger companies have the budget and means to spend all their money on commercials for TV and, nowadays, YouTube, so it may feel like making videos yourself is a waste of time.
Here’s the thing though: it’s really not a waste. You can run a smaller business and still make videos that offer something great to your customers, both your current ones and would-be customers too. You just need to ask yourself: is video marketing the best thing my business needs? To help you out, we’re going to go over the pros and cons of it.
Pro: People Engage with Them
If you were given the choice between reading an instruction manual for 30 minutes versus a 3 minute video, which would you pick? Many would go with the latter. According to one study, audiences are 10 times more likely to become engaged with and share a video than any other forms of content. In addition to several other statistics involving video marketing, it’s not too hard to see why video is such a desired feature for businesses to have.
Con: It’s Expensive
Whether you decide to produce a video yourself or you want to hire a team of professionals, cost is and always will be a downside to creating videos. The best and most high-quality videos that have garnered success have had a lot of money poured into making them, while the cheaper cost ones look, well, cheaply made. All too often the costs are viewed as too large to handle, dissuading many business owners from their decision to include video in their next marketing campaign.
Pro: Great for Social Media
One thing we can confirm is that video is extremely popular on social media. According to research, a social video tends to create 1200% more shares than images and text combined! Another study has revealed that 82% of people watch videos on Twitter, and yet another study has discovered that 500 million people watch videos on Facebook every day.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of staggering statistics we’ve come across while writing this post. So, if you find your business’s social media has been looking quiet, try adding a video and see what happens—it could be the boost in social media engagement you’ve been looking for.
Con: Not so Evergreen
The thing that makes blog posts such an amazing content strategy is the fact that they can be evergreen. You can update and re-purpose a blog post into other forms of media such as infographics, for example, all in ways that you can’t do with a video.
Once a video has been produced and gets posted, there are certain things such as the setting, the topic, the appearance of the people in the video, and so on that can solidify a specific date or time period to the video, making it impossible to refresh the way a blog post can. This means if you want to offer customers evergreen content, video is less likely going to be your best choice.
Pro: Videos are Popular
The reason videos are more popular than blog posts in most cases is because they are the closest thing to a full-sensory experience that most can offer. It’s one thing to read about a product for sale; it’s another to see its results in action. If you want to appeal to as many of a customer’s senses all at once as possible, a video will have a better effect as it uses both sound and sight to help viewers process the message being spread.
If your business is more B2B, the best pages to add videos are the about page and your customer testimonials page. Why? Because it’ll be the closest thing for your visitors to meet you face to face, without it actually being that way. For reviews, it helps to get a person’s face behind their glowing positive comments about you and your business, so videos can boost a customer’s trust in your business as well.
Con: Video May Not Work on Your Website
Not every website is built the same, nor do they all possess the software needed to host, support, and load videos properly and without interrupting the website’s own loading time and its responsiveness. The latter two things are more important to feature on a website than anything else (see our tips on how to make your website load faster if that’s what you need right now). Don’t waste your customers’ time by slowing your website down with a video, especially if it doesn’t work in the first place!
One solution to this problem is to feature a YouTube channel amongst your social media account lineup in the header and footer of your website. That way, people can check out the videos without risking slow loading in the process. If you absolutely insist on featuring videos on your site, but the site needs to be updated and it’s been a while, a new site built from scratch is easiest; there’s less work involved and less cost to you as well.
Overall, if you love video marketing to the point where you want it featured on your website, make it a great site, not just a good one. If this is what you need, let our professional team at V3 Media know and give them a call. If you’d like, we offer one-on-one consultations as well to help you figure out if video is what your business really needs…or maybe it needs a website in the first place? You’ll never know unless you ask!