Let me tell you a simple truth. The longer visitors stay on your website, the more relevant it becomes and the higher it will rank in Google Search. So, what’s a better tool to keep your audience hooked in than explainer videos?
People love watching videos. A survey by Hubspot finds that 45% of their respondents watch an hour or more of video content every day on YouTube and Facebook. So, what about explainer videos? What are they and why do they matter in digital marketing?
An explainer video is a short animated video used to explain business ideas, products, services, or values in a simple and engaging way. And in this article, we’ll examine 10 reasons why explainer videos do matter in the world of digital marketing.
The Audience Prefer Video Over Text
If you want to learn about lions, would you rather read pages of a biology book or watch an hour of video on the NatGeo? Most people would watch the video because it’s easier to understand and visualization lasts longer in our memory.
That’s also the case in digital marketing. Here are several surveys that indicate people’s preference to video over text:
- 59% of senior executives prefer video over text if both versions are available on the same topic.
- If a web page has both video and text, 69% of users prefer watching the video over reading the text about a product or service.
Create Brand Awareness
Video is all about storytelling, and everyone loves a good story. If you manage to create a short video about your company values, struggles, and visions that touches the audience’s emotions, then you’re off to a good start in building a strong relationship with your future customers.
Sure, it’s far easier to just write a blog post than to create an animated video. However, with millions of brands floating around the internet, you need to be different to successfully capture the audience’s attention.
Make Visitors Stay Longer
As mentioned before, having a video on your website has a purpose to keep the average time spent by users on your site higher. Higher average time spent means a lower bounce rate, which will result in better Google Search rankings.
However, if the video is too long, most visitors will likely go away. A study by Animoto suggests that most consumers prefer videos under 60 seconds long.
A different conclusion is proposed by Wistia, who finds that the best length for a video is 2 minutes, then there’s a dip in the audience’s attention before it picks up again between 6 and 12 minutes long.
Easy To Share
You can’t share your well-written blog post on social media, but you can share a short explainer video almost anywhere.
Upload the full-length version on your website and YouTube, then create the shorter version and promote it on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook.
The advantage of sharing it on social media is that those platforms are mobile compatible, and in today’s era where people spend most of their time on smartphones, your content has a higher chance to be found.
Build Customer Engagement
One of the strong points of social media that a website lacks is customer engagement. People spend a huge chunk of their life to comment, like, retweet, and share posts on social media.
A study by Wyzowl reveals that 97% of consumers are willing to share video content that they think is good to their friends.
In short, to build engagement with your audience, build your social media presence first with high-quality video posts. The bigger the influence you have on social media, the easier to turn your followers into your site traffic. If you have a budget you may want to use a marketing agency like BuzzVoice to boost your engagement on social media.
The Popularity Of Youtube
In the past decade, YouTube has transformed into the biggest video sharing site and the second largest search engine behind Google. Billions of people put watching YouTube videos as one of their daily routines.
Yes, it may take a lot of time and effort to build a YouTube channel, nothing good ever comes easy. But once you’ve conquered it, your brand will be exposed to millions of people, and then it’s up to you how to nurture them into your loyal buyers.
Enhance Your Email Marketing
Email marketing is still one of the best and proven ways to deliver content to your audience and cold prospects. But when you include video as your email content, the results are much better. Don’t believe it? Here’s the proof:
- Only by having the word ‘video’ in your subject line, your email open rate will increase by 19%.
- If you put a video thumbnail in your email body, your click-through-rate will be multiplied by 2.
- 50% of consumers said that they are more likely to read an email newsletter that provides a link to a video.
Increase Site Ranking
Ever since Google purchased YouTube, it seems that they value video content more than before. In fact, your website is 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google Search results if your site has a video in it.
Moreover, your traffic from social media, email, and YouTube will give a signal to Google that your website is active, relevant, and has a healthy traffic flow. Google would probably even offer to put advertising on your site for side income.
Explain New Products Or Service Efficiently
What do you think is more effective in explaining your company products or services, a 1000 word article or a 2 minutes explainer video? You know the answer. People only remember 10% of what they read, yet they retain 95% of what they see on a video.
There are some things that need detail explanation that text alone can’t provide. Things like how your product works, how it solves your customers’ problems, or why your service is better than your competitors.
With explainer videos, your explanation will stick in the audience’s mind, making them more likely to make a purchase in the future.
Boost Conversion Rate
Whatever your marketing campaign is, the end goal of every marketer remains to boost conversion rates. To turn those traffic into paying customers. And the statistic numbers for video marketing seem promising:
- 85% of consumers are more likely to purchase something online after watching the explainer video.
- Having a video on a landing page could increase conversion by 80%.
- Marketers who use video in their digital marketing campaign grow revenue 49% faster than those who don’t.
Explainer Videos – Takeaway
Like everything else in this world, digital marketing keeps changing. And looking at the past decade, the trend seems to go in the direction of video marketing.
But, why now? Why wasn’t video marketing overly popular 5 or 10 years ago? There are several factors that lead to this, here are some of them:
- The invention of smartphones and tablets. Ever since the first iPhone was released in 2007, the mobile device industry keeps growing and inventing new technology. They make it easier for us to watch videos on a phone or a tablet, something that wasn’t nearly as easy before, due to lack of technology.
- The rising popularity of YouTube. Who knows that 10 years ago when YouTube was founded, it will become the second most popular website in the world. YouTube changed the way we watch and create videos. Suddenly, becoming a YouTuber was a thing, and people then realize the impact videos can make.
- The improvement of internet speed. Now, people can enjoy watching videos without buffering.
Changes are inevitable, something that we have to embrace rather than dismiss. Granted, creating an explainer video is not easy, especially when you do it on your own.
Luckily, Breadnbeyond recently compiled a list containing 100+ video-making tools and platforms that will help you learn and practice the craft of video making.
The list contains various type of video tools, such as:
- DIY Animation Tools
- Video Marketing Platforms
- Live Streaming Platforms
- Video Editing Tools
- Interactive Videos
- Sound Effects Library
- Stock Video Library
- Sound Recording Tools
- Scriptwriting Utilities
Click to check out the complete list of video marketing tools.
Matt Crawford
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Awesome stuff on explainer videos! This was helpful