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Visual content is taking over the web. First it was photos and GIFs, and now it’s video. According to some estimates, video will account for as much as 80% of all web traffic by 2019. As if that wasn’t enough of an incentive to start producing more video content as part of your content marketing strategy, here are three more good reasons.
#1: Video content will boost your search results
The more 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 – no matter how good or bad – to your website will increase your chances of a first page Google search result by a factor of 53. That’s right, you’re exponentially increasing your chances of being found online just by adding video.
Also, 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. Say, for example, you’re a software company. Simply making a “how to” video about how to do something very simple with this software – like getting your photos off your iPhone and freeing up storage space – can be the secret to racking up tens of thousands of views (if not more).
#2: Video content leads to higher engagement and conversion rates
You’re not just getting more visibility with video content, you’re also getting higher engagement rates from your fans. 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.
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.
#3: Video makes it easier to adopt a mobile-first marketing strategy
Today’s digital reality is that people are consuming more and more content on their phones, and the lion’s 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.
Thus, if someone is walking around, head down, scrolling through their Facebook updates, it’s much more likely that you’ll capture their attention if your videos are popping up in their 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.
There’s an old adage in the marketing industry – “Go where the customers are.” Right now, the customers are on mobile, and they’re consuming mobile video content at a prodigious rate. If you want to be relevant, you simply need to make videos part of your content marketing strategy.
