Lead Generation with Video Marketing can increase conversion rates up to 65%
The three dominant factors determining ranking positions on YouTube today are:
- Video viewing time
- Video engagement
- Stage of buyer’s journey
Interestingly enough Hubspot did not allocate any video to the Awareness Stage in the graphic above. Since you want to attract potential customers to your website as early as possible in a buyer’s journey, you also want to offer a video in the Awareness Stage. Some people just prefer watching a video first, sipping a cup of cup of coffee before reading through a text document.
- Video viewing time means the longer a video gets played, the greater the chance that it will rank highly on YouTube.
- Video engagement means that the more interaction (likes, shares, etc.) with the video take place, the better the chances to rank highly on YouTube. On average the highest engagement levels can be found up until 2 minutes of any video.
- Stage of buyer’s journey: Using video in your marketing can increase conversion rates up to 65% — which is why we are seeing a rapid rise in video use for landing pages, case studies, product demos and social media.
By creating and utilizing different types of videos for each stage of the buyer’s journey, videos will get more engagement along each stage, better brand activation, more trust, thought leadership, and ultimately, customers that stick to your brand!
Examples for stages in a buyer’s journey are:
- Awareness stage
- Consideration stage
- Decision stage
Interestingly enough Hubspot did not allocate any video to the Awareness Stage in the graphic above. Since you want to attract potential customers to your website as early as possible in a buyer’s journey, you also want to offer a video in the Awareness Stage.
Some people just prefer watching a video first, sipping a cup of cup of coffee before reading through a text document. And make no mistake, you do want to attract your potential buyer’s attention as early as possible.
The earlier You can connect to them, the higher the likelihood that they will become YOUR customers. If you think you can come in at the decision stage, when they are ready to make a move, it usually is too late. Competitors, who know what they are doing, will, at that point, have connected with them and built a relationship with them.
If there are no huge differences in what you offer and what your competition offers, you most probably won’t get the sale. So, you definitely want to use videos, too, in the Awareness Stage.
One more reason to use videos is that you can attract potential buyers from a Google search page to your website if your listing shows a video. You know that the first entries | listings on any Google search page get the bulk of the clicks.
As you can see in the graph above, the first listing gets 35% to 45% of all clicks alone!
And you probably know how difficult and hence expensive it can be to get listed in position one on any Google search page with decent traffic numbers. Unless you use a video in your listing!
Ranking on the Google’s first page is an SEO’s top priority, so it is difficult to ignore this Forrester study that says “pages with video are 53x more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results.” And an aimClear study shows that search results with video have a “41% higher click-through rate than plain text.”
As you can imagine, a lot of your potential customers will click the listing on the Google search results page, even if it appears further down the page.
This is one one the channels, we get free, resp. organic traffic and you can, too.
With videos over conventional, text and image SEO, it is easier to get a video to rank on page 1 than it is to get a website to rank.
What that means is you can compete for rankings with well-established sites, if you have optimized your videos correctly, giving you an equal or often better footing over the competition.
Google’s algorithm to find and index videos will definitely get better over time and the competition for search engine positions will get stronger, which means first-page rankings will get tougher.
So, if you haven’t created a video yet, you’d better hurry up. Don’t forget: sometimes one great video is all you need, one ‘hit’ video to use for generating a great number of quality leads.
YouTube and Google do understand this very well and this is the reason they are placing so much emphasis on factors engagement and viewing time, that is determined by the ‘art’ of the video, by how well the video is done not so much how well the video has been optimized.
We are able to do a lot with AI (Artificial Intelligence) these days and one might wonder what kind of jobs will be left at ‘the end of the day’ since robots will be able to do many, many jobs better, faster, more secure and cheaper than humans in the not so distant future. However creating a film, a video that resonates well with the target audience might be one of those areas where human artists, video creators can still produce slightly more appealing videos than machines can.
However creating a film, a video that resonates well with the target audience might be one of those areas where human artists, video creators can still produce slightly more appealing videos than machines can.
So, what does this mean for Video SEO in Video Marketing today?
Video Optimization for search engines did work well for a couple of years but since a lot of video marketers use video optimization factors such as keyword in title, subtitle, text, tags etc., nowadays, these factors play a much smaller role in how a video ranks on YouTube and Google today.
Hence video optimization for search engine rankings and lead generation became more difficult.
A further consequence of the diminishing importance of video SEO is that the effects of video optimization for marketing campaigns don’t last as long anymore.
Video marketing campaigns will probably not produce the same returns for as long as we were used to see.
As the video marketing space becomes more crowded, ranking videos that aren’t of outstanding quality will attract attention and engagement only until well-made videos, videos telling stories will take over the rankings.
This also means that time to market will become even more important since the period of time you will be able to hold your rank on the search engines becomes shorter. Businesses today need to watch recent events in their market, even more, they and they need to produce optimized videos fast because the effect of that optimization will not last as long anymore.
Additionally SMB businesses should probably not target main search terms only but try to occupy more niches for search terms outside the mainstream.
Use of Search-Terms, Keywords
Since these smaller niches draw less attention, video campaigns for those search terms, so called ‘long-tail’ keywords, have a greater chance to stay ranked on Google for that search term.
Due to the video marketing space becoming more crowded, even smaller niches eventually will become more competitive. Therefore the earlier you have started in those niches that greater your advantage is.
After all, everyone producing a video later than you will need to accumulate as much or more video viewing time and engagement as your video already enjoys.
And if you got a head start and did a good job to keep your position, you will be able to reap the rewards, the traffic, and click-throughs longer.
Yes, these long-tail keywords in smaller niches have less traffic to show for than the big, mainstream ones search terms.
However those niches are not to be snubbed: first of all, according to Google when you add up the traffic coming to so called long-tail keywords, these traffic numbers in sum usually are greater than the traffic numbers for the main keywords in any niche. (I’ll put a link to the Google research here once I retrieved it.)
Targeted Traffic
And there is another reason not to snub these long-tail keywords or search terms: these search terms usually draw less traffic since they are more specific and appeal to a lesser crowd. That’s the downside.
However, the upside is that because these search terms are more specific, they are more relevant to what the searchers needs and wants when they use these search terms. Thus, longer video view times are usually easier to achieve plus videos that are relevant for these more specific terms usually enjoy
Thus, longer video view times are usually easier to achieve plus videos that are relevant for these more specific terms usually enjoy higher click-through rates. If you test search terms ‘organically’ first, finding the terms that convert at a higher rate before scaling up with video ads, you will see that your video ads will enjoy a greater ROI. The reason is that if your video ads convert better, getting more click-throughs, you also will get a more
If you test search terms ‘organically’ first, finding the terms that convert at a higher rate before scaling up with video ads, you will see that your video ads will enjoy a greater ROI.
The reason is that if your video ads convert better, getting more click-throughs, you also will get a more favourable advertising rate.
At A-M-I we have therefore shifted our focus to be able to set up (video) marketing campaigns fast for recent events and we are occupying more (long-tail) search-term niches.
I hope this helps in thinking through your (video) marketing strategy.
If you have any questions, just let me know.
Karl zu Ortenburg A-M-I
