With the advent of digitalisation in the last couple of years, video (Visuals) has itself become a large market in the content-driven industry. As India and other developing countries saw unprecedented ramifications of the digitalisation with the support of 5G and 4G, watching videos/reels have become a habit of people. The video consumption is on rise as people feel more comfortable to watch contents on mobile Apps, including social media platforms- YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. So, now the question arises should all focus should go to making videos? But, the real question is does a video play a role of conversion ignitor or a conversion killer?
Let’s have an examine. Several case studies and plenty of data suggest that using a video on a landing page is a great idea for boosting conversion. Reports claim that viewers tend to remember 95% of a message after watching a video, and only 10% after reading it. Also, videos boost conversions by 10-20% (The numbers can be higher). Studies suggest consumers tend to watch a video about a product rather than to read about it. Forbes Insights concludes that 83% of viewers prefer watching video to reading content.
Which kind of videos work most?
According to Google, ‘How-to’ videos is the most popular among all categories. They are even more popular than music or gaming.
The Animoto survey says, nearly all the respondents (96%) found videos useful when it comes to make a online purchasing decisions.
Some key factors
1. The video must be as short as you can make to convey the message. The fact is the longer a video, the lower its engagement. The content makers have just about 10 seconds to grab the attention of viewers with a video marketing clip.
According to Meta (Facebook), consumers who watch the first 3 seconds of a video will watch for at least 10 more seconds, so there’s a narrow window to hold the viewers till end.
The report also said that once the video manages to grab a viewer’s attention, they are likely to engage for two more minutes, but the engagement sharply declines after two minutes.
It is obvious, the more interesting a video is, the more people will watch. But, here we are discussing the engagement on landing, not about long narrative videos (movies or documentaries) that are able to hold viewers’ attention for longer time. So, it is important to focus on the first 10 seconds to grab attention. Then the second suggestion is make it no longer than two minutes to ensure your page visitors will perform a desired action on the page, if you fail to do so, the visitor will feel bored or vice versa too engaged with your video.
2. Studies say a call-to-action (CTAs) within a video may drive as much as 380% more clicks to a landing page, still, unfortunately, lots of landing page were noticed missing in-video CTAs.
Another important factor is the direction of the video as the whole purpose of a video on a landing page is to drive conversions. Therefore the visual content creator must make a video that leads into the sales funnel and gives detailed instructions on what to do next.
What can be the instruction?
The CTAs can be in the form of verbal messages (i.e. the narrator encourages users to follow certain steps) and graphic end screens (an end screen with a call-to-action). Creator must keep in mind that hus video may also be a traffic driver (i.e. people from Youtube clicking a link in the description to get to your landing page) as well as the discovery channel (people watch that video elsewhere and become aware of your product).
So make sure those CTAs can be followed directly without visiting your site.
3. The video on the landing page will give desired results if it is placed rightly. The video placement is very important and there’s no uniform rule for all sites as no product or page is the same.
The placement of a video is crucial from an SEO perspective as Google recommends using a video prominently on a page for it to index it. The exercise potentially generates video rich snippets.
The studies tells relevant videos can boost engagement by 50%. Also, repeating a video in the product image carousel and then lower on the page can boosts performance of a page.
4. But, one thing also important to keep in mind that videos can slow down your page. Embedding any third-party content, including videos, will slow down the page. They can lower your Core Web Vitals score. Core Web Vitals are official ranking signals. So, it may hurt your page rankings.
5. Use keywords in the most prominent places (title, description, file name, etc.) when you are hosting your video (Youtube, Wistia, or else).
Videos rank incredibly helps boost conversions. Video page optimization is not much different from any content optimization process, all that you need is relevant and useful content surrounding your video.