Video is one of the most talked-about marketing platforms in recent memory, and with good reason. Adding video to your marketing mix is a highly effective method of increasing audience reach as well as boosting the overall impact of your branded messages. What’s more, video provides more opportunities for improving your page rankings in the search engine results.

In short – if you’re running marketing campaigns without video, you’re clearly short-changing your business, and handing the high ground to your competitors who are already using video.

How Your Business can Benefit from Adding Video to Your Marketing Strategy

• Consumers are more likely to remember your message when they see it in a video format, according to Social Media Today. Because the majority of information transmitted to the brain is visually-oriented, it’s processed an estimated 60,000 times faster than text – resulting in retention rates for visual content that are typically 65 percent greater than for text information.
• An estimated 90 percent of online shoppers use videos to help make shopping and buying decisions. As a result, retailers report that products showcased in online videos are outselling products not receiving video support.
• Visitors to your website are 64 percent more likely to make a purchase after watching a video. What’s more, those visitors tend to stay on your site two minutes longer than those consumers who don’t watch a video. That’s a big plus for your search rankings: the better your visitor engagement, the better Google likes it – and will reward your site accordingly.
• Your website is 53 percent more likely to be displayed on the first page of Google’s search results for relevant keyword terms if it includes video, and will attract two to three times the number of visitors.
• According to Forbes, 75 percent of executives view work-related videos at least once per week, and an estimated 65 percent will visit the advertiser’s website after watching a video.
• Adding video to your blog posts can generate three times the number of inbound links to your website than posts without video.
• Including a marketing or explainer video in your emails can increase your website referral click-through rate by 200 to 300 percent, according to Forrester Marketing. Equally impressive is the fact that adding video to introductory emails can reduce subscriber drop-outs by 75 percent, based on a study by email marketing services provider Eloqua.

Is Video Right for my Business?

Video has so much going for it that it simply doesn’t make sense not to incorporate it in your marketing campaigns. If you’re camera-shy, don’t worry – the majority of business videos are product-oriented in nature, and your video wouldn’t require your on-camera presence to effectively promote your products and services.

The other major stumbling block for many businesses, especially smaller local marketers, is the cost of producing video content. While a handful of the bigger players in the digital marketing arena have the budget to create lavish “Hollywood-style epics,” the truth of the matter is that practically any local business can get an effective, hard-hitting video produced for about the cost of a local newspaper or radio ad campaign.

One company that has been simply crushing it with video marketing is the Dollar Shave Club, an online retailer of affordable shaving products. The 8 videos on their YouTube channel have generated more than 15 million views to date and counting.

No matter what industry or niche your company is in, including video in your marketing mix can help you reach a wider audience, drive more traffic to your website, improve consumer engagement with your brand, and boost your rate of conversions.