There are more than 1.8 billion websites on the internet, and therefore it can prove difficult to make your website stand out. The point of having a website is to attract your target audience to let them know more about your business and who you are. It's almost like when you go to a meeting, you need to make a good first impression. The thing that separates you from the many is your personality, creativity, initiative, etc. In some ways, a website could be seen as similar to that meeting. You want to make sure you attract the attention of your audience, and you need to keep hold of them to help increase conversions. Your bounce rate measures users entering your website and seeing the time spent before exiting. Visual content can reduce the bounce rate of your website.
Why use video content on your website
Studies have proven that the majority of people are visual learners, and therefore high-quality videos and relevant images are very important. According to a HubSpot survey in 2017, 76% of respondents mentioned ease of use as the most important characteristic of a website. There are various ways of making your website more accessible and easy to use, and one of those is watching video content. It is one of the most used media formats across the world, with 500 million hours of videos being watched on Youtube every day according to Business Insider, 2016. As of 2018, YouTube revenue was estimated at between $9.5 billion and $14 billion. This just goes to show the power of using video.
What types of videos can you use?
There are different types of videos that can be used on your website. This can range from a short looping animation to a full-screen banner video that shows an overview of your businesses. Moving content is used to stimulate the user, and also to navigate them through the website, and this is where, for example, a looping animation could work very well as they are quick and repetitive, so it's difficult not to notice it when you land on a website. According to Forbes in 2018 “The average user spends 88% more time on a website with video”. This shows that video is one of the key elements that will keep your potential customers on your website.
Where should you place your video on your website?
The placement of your video content is very important, and you must be aware that the wrong placement could result in the content being a waste, and therefore making your investment a waste of time. The placement of the video should be decided in the earliest stages of designing and implementing your website. Planning is absolutely key in all aspects of a business, and it is the same when building and optimizing your website.
Explainer animations usually range from 1 minute to 3 minutes in duration. Due to this length of time, the video could be placed onto a specific inner page within your website that relates to a particular product or service. This will inform them in a way that will speak to them directly about the product or service. It brings it to life, and this in turn helps to increase your conversion rates. You want to keep your audience interested, and therefore you need to make an interesting video, even if your product/service might be very complex and hard to understand. This is where video can be used to strip all the complexities, and leave the audience with the basic need to know the information of the business.
Overview videos that appear as you land on a website will increase the amount of time the audience spends discovering the rest of your website. If your business is quite complicated, this is where an overview can be used to strip all the complexities, and leave the audience with the visuals that represent what your business does. Placing this type of video on the first page of your website can increase the average visit time by two minutes. This in turn will indirectly boost your rankings on any search engine. Another tip would be to make sure that a landing page video plays automatically as the audience enters the website. This takes away the need for them to click on a play button. The easier you make the website to navigate, the more time that user will spend on it and find out more about what your business offers.
Types of video
Testimonial videos are a great way of building up your reputation, and it gives your audience an insight into your values and more about exactly what you do for your customers. You could place these videos on your inner pages of the website, where it is relevant to what you do. By having them on your site, it creates trust for the potential customer. They can feel safe in their decision to buy your products/services through seeing these testimonials.
Looping animations creates intrigue on your website, and it draws the eye of the audience. You can use them to your advantage so you can direct them on the website in a very easy way. When creating one, it is important to show your personality, as this will help it stand out even more and keep people on your website.
Placing your video content across your website, it will help to increase the amount of time people spend looking through it. This will help a lot as it will give you an idea of how many people are clicking on these videos on your inner pages. Armed with all the data you acquire, it will help you to better understand what the audience looks at, and for how long will be available in the analytics.
How to measure the impact that video has on your website
There are a few ways of measuring the performance of the video that you have uploaded onto your website. The amount of plays is also one metric you can examine to help you see the performance of the video, but really it all depends on how long the video is being watched for on average. Your video wants to be short, clear, and engaging.
Site metrics like bounce rate, time on page, and conversion rates are all indicators of how the video is doing, and you can compare pages with video on, compared to pages with no video on. If you see a big difference in the results, that will show that the video is performing as it should do.
In summary, populating your website with engaging and stimulating visual content can have a direct effect on how your website performs. Saying that your video needs to stand out, and not everyone does this. Some businesses are hesitant to spend their marketing budget on a video and decide they can go without it when they have launched their website.
