No matter what the business or the industry, the consensus is the same. We live in a visual society and the only way to stand out among your business peers is to be visually exciting.
Use Visuals to Engage Your Audience
Visual stimulus is more than a nice little add-on. It is essential to bringing customers to your website and keeping them there. More and more businesses are finding that making video a central part of their homepage is an essential step to building and maintaining an online customer base.
Video Can be Affordable
Many businesses forgo using video on their websites because they think it is too expensive. However, the cost of making a professional-looking video has reached the point of accessibility for even the smallest of startups. High definition cameras are routinely purchased by new businesses looking to create video for their websites. Because customers are less and less impressed by movie quality special effects, it is not necessary to hold a film degree to hold the attention of your customer base. However, if you wanted to include special effects in your video, that actually is less expensive than you would think as well. Commercial video editing programs now have the capacity for a great deal of high-level effects processing. However, this is hardly essential. Many customers actually like the more raw form of consumer level video production that still dominates YouTube listings. These are the types of videos that go viral, and these are the types of videos that should be on your homepage.
Place Video on Your Homepage
Though it is okay to start your website without video, you should think about it when it comes time to redesign. Followers of your website will expect it to be bigger and better in some way. That “bigger and better” could be the inclusion of video. Videos have been shown to keep the attention of web visitors longer than any other form of online media. If you have the slightest sense of humor to go along with your business video, your audience will pick up on it and be much more open to any message that you have to give to them. It has also been shown that the longer a potential customer spends on a website, the more comfortable they become to that website. Their click-through rate and their conversion rate goes up drastically after 5 minutes of time spent on any website. This means that your online marketing strategy should include any and all means necessary to keep new customers on your website for at least 5 minutes, if not longer. Video will definitely be an essential part of this strategy, as will the overall organization of your website.
Other Uses of Web Video
Video will also give you a definite edge in search engine optimization. There are many more sites without video than there are with video. When someone looks up your keywords, you will be much further ahead of the business that does not have any video to list in the search engine results of the major engines.
Some Good Examples of Videos Integrated in Websites
Ok, so are you convinced that video can help you reach your audience? Well, the next step is to probably take a look at some good examples. Here are some websites that you may not have seen before that effectively use video to tell a story. In most cases, you’ll see the video content right on the homepage or accessible through the main navigation or other callouts.
- Things for iPad
- Airbnb, Inc.
- The Soap Dispensary
- Booktrack
- Evernote Peak
About the author: Tristan Pelligrino is one of the co-founders of 522 Productions, a leading video production company in the Washington, DC area. Tristan also helps clients develop online strategies as a co-owner of 522 Digital, LLC (522d), a major digital media company.