As an SME owner, you might think spending money on a corporate video is an option reserved for the big hitters with massive marketing budgets. But that’s not entirely true. If you’re looking to grow your business and extend the reach of your company, investing in a corporate video is actually a really cost effective way of doing so. Here are five reasons why:
It helps you stay ahead of the competition
To put it bluntly, Google loves video and despite its ever-changing algorithm, it will look more favourably on a website containing professional, high quality video content than one that does not. In fact, according to statistics from Forrester, a website is 53 times more likely to appear on Google’s first page if it contains a video.
In that sense investing in a corporate video will help you stay one step ahead of the competition by appearing higher up those all important search rankings. Of course a video alone can’t guarantee you’ll reach the number one spot on Google, but combined with a highly targeted onsite and offsite SEO campaign, you’ll soon see your website creep up those rankings.
It’s free to market online
Once the initial investment is made in creating a corporate video, it’s then free to market and distribute online, meaning you won’t even have to think about advertising costs.
YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine; the site gets over 6 billion unique visits, with over 6 million hours of YouTube watched every month. And it’s completely free. Upload your video to your company YouTube channel and you’ve got yourself a global audience, 24/7.
You can also distribute your video via your company Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages – all of which are also completely free.
It will widen your reach
Social media has become a vital marketing function for any business. When you consider there are over one billion Facebook users worldwide, 150 million people on Twitter and 100 million LinkedIn members, it’s easy to see why that is. If you don’t have an online presence then you’re missing out on a massive potential target audience.
So where does video come into this? Video is highly sharable content. In fact, online video sharing is increasing all the time (700 million YouTube videos are shared on Twitter every minute). The potential to increase your customer base using these social media platforms with video is vast.
It will increase engagement
Viewers are more likely to engage with your brand through a video (90 per cent of information transmitted to the brain is visual). It delivers 10 times the response rate of written text. According to research from Forrester, just 20 per cent of website visitors read through website content, but 80 per cent will watch videos. This same applies to social media channels: Facebook posts containing an image or a video receive a 39 per cent higher interaction rate than text-only posts.
Online video also encourages viewers to spend more time on a website, thereby decreasing the bounce rate and increasing the chances of clicking through to another page on the site. And the longer someone spends on a site, the more likely they are to complete a call to action. Whether that is to sign up to a company newsletter or blog, make a purchase or make an enquiry.
They are multi functional
We’ve already covered the fact that a video will improve your SEO, enhance your social media presence, increase your reach and help you better engage with your customers. But they can also be very useful for in-house purposes. While this may not be your primary reason for commissioning a video, they can be really useful for recruiting and onborading purposes. What might take you 30 minutes to explain to a new employee in emails or training handbooks can be conveyed in a matter of minutes via video. This will also save you time and resources in the long run.
Commissioning a corporate video might seem like a big investment, but it’s a worthwhile one in the long run. A high quality, well planned and well produced video will massively increase your reach, better engage your target audience, help drive traffic to your website, keep people on-site for longer and help you stay ahead of the competition.
