For B2B marketers, there’s a growing imperative to make video part of their overall marketing strategy. As video continues to account for a larger and larger percentage of all web traffic, and as mobile content continues to grow in popularity, it’s simply a no-brainer these days to create the kind of content that will do well on mobile — and that usually means video content.
Improved search results
The more online video content you produce, the higher you are likely to appear in search results. There are actually two ways of thinking about this. The first is the most obvious – you will rank higher in Google search results if there is video content on your home page. According to Comscore, the very act of adding a video to your website will make it 53 times more likely that you will appear on the first page of Google search results. That’s right, you’re exponentially increasing your chances of being found online just by adding video content.
And, don’t forget – YouTube is now the second-largest search engine on the web. If you’re regularly seeding YouTube with new video clips on topics that people care about, then you’re likely to be found near the top of YouTube search results. That’s what led to so many B2B marketing video trends – such as the “How To” video. These types of videos grew out of what people were naturally searching for online: solutions to their problems.
Higher engagement and conversion rates
You’re not just getting more visibility with video content, you’re also getting higher engagement rates from your followers. In layman’s terms, people are much more likely to share, like or re-post video content than any other type of content. And it isn’t even close. Video is far and away the star when it comes to boosting share and like rates.
The good news is that it’s becoming easier and easier to measure all the metrics that matter for video – like click-through rates, drop-off points, total views, partial views, and conversion rates. Right now, 71% of marketers say that video conversion rates outperform those of any other type of content. Simply stated, people are more likely to buy from you if they watch a video about your products.
Greater reach
More B2B decision-makers are consuming content on their phones than ever before, and a growing share of that content is video. If you want to be seen by people, you need to have the type of content that’s going to show up on their phones. Facebook’s embrace of video has only accelerated that trend, because Facebook’s algorithm makes it more likely that video content will pop up in someone’s news feed. And so it goes with just about every other social media platform – whether it’s Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat, all of the action and innovation is happening around video.
As a B2B marketer, it’s important to be able to spot inflection points. One of them was the shift from the desktop to the laptop, and then from the laptop to the mobile device. Now we’re seeing the shift from written text to visual content and video content. Combined, these two factors should be a powerful stimulus to make online video part of your content marketing strategy.
Image: Designed by Freepik
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.