A Couple Studies About The Benefits of Visual Media for Business Websites
As some of you may well know by now, my wife and I had our first child – Addison – on February 9th of this year. From the pregnancy, to the labor, to the transition to raising our new little bundle of joy, words can’t properly describe exactly the plethora of emotions we’ve been feeling on a minute-to-minute basis. There’s so much happiness and love, and so much frustration and craziness.
Not unlike the experience of owning and running a business.
I find this funny because we had never really had “raising a child” super high up on our list of things we felt we had to do. Don’t get me wrong – we’re ecstatic to have Addie with us! Neither one of us would change things for the universe. But we had always taken a bit of a “hey, if it happens, it happens” approach. Because of this, we had always joked that we treated our business like our baby. Joint Custody Productions was (and still is in many ways) the child we have been raising.
But I’ve already noticed something about having a new baby (and you’ve probably had this experience, too): with the internet close by, and with raising a child being such a new concept to us, we’ve put quite a bit of time into looking up studies that have to do with our little newborn. I’m talking about things like “How long do you wait to take the baby out into public?” or “Should our newborn be crying this much?” or “Should my wife be crying this much?” or “If I subject the newborn to U2 too early, will she hate them?” I can’t possibly have my little girl hating U2 – that just wouldn’t work for me.
In any event, given the above, and considering that we’ve been looking at our business as our baby, it’s dawned on me that probably nearly every other business owner out there considers their business as their baby as well – even if they already have real children running around. Well, if that’s the case, and if “studies” are a big deal for real newborns, shouldn’t we as business owners always be checking studies on how to help our business grow into a healthy, mature company?
Of course we should! And you likely already have been. But even though I have no idea what studies you have been looking at, perhaps I can point you to some that I know quite a good deal about – stuff you’ve probably never even considered before:
The importance of video for your website.
Now, I realize you’ve heard or seen me going on and on about this before, but I thought this time it would be a good idea to show you some actual data and studies that can give you a clearer picture of how important video content is, especially when it comes to finding your business online (and beyond that – learning about what it truly does and how it can benefit someone).
First, a little blurb I found at Shuttershot:
According to a study by the (University of Pennsylvania) Wharton school of Business, prospects are 72% more likely to purchase a product or service when video is used and they make their buying decisions faster. After seeing a video, most prospects will have a greater understanding of the subject or product. 89 percent of consumers will review a video the same day it is received, and about 94 percent of those people will share it with a friend or relative. Industry reports suggest the response rates for video promotions are six times greater than those for printed direct mail pieces.
They coupled this with another interesting piece of information, though they didn’t provide specifics on where they found it:
Currently approximately 37% of Internet usage is made up of video streaming.
If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out this page as they have some really great advice on the varying benefits of videos for your business, including:
- Video can show your product or service in action, something brochures can’t do. You could have one or more actual customers being filmed using your product or even stage a re-creation. In either case you want to show the real benefits of using your product.
- Video can help a relatively small company look like a much larger national or international firm. You could film some of your suppliers or customer’s businesses. You could show your products (or services) being manufactured and used.
- Video is an ideal way to give “virtual tours” of your organization.
Here’s a case study from a website called SEOhog, explaining how they were able to get a video from a personal injury attorney out of Austin to the top of the Google search results for the keywords they were targeting. In fact, here’s a snippet:
This project included 5 similar videos, each targeted to a specific set of keywords for that city. This campaign took 3 months to rank above the fold for 15 keywords for our Austin search terms. After we achieved first page rankings for personal injury, the law firm wanted to create a other videos and optimize them for other areas of law in the Austin area.
Of note, they also state this:
With the rankings SEOhog was able to secure for the video, the client was able to gain the same exposure as an expensive PPC campaign at a fraction of the price. To gain similar rankings through Google Adwords, you would need to run a campaign for roughly $30,000 per month.
But why is all that important? Well, primarily because of what you can find in studies like this from a website called Receptional. They found this:
The latest report released by Compete.com suggests that the top organic search position in Google receives 53% of clicks from search users, followed by 15% for position 2 and 9% for position 3.
But also noted:
…77% of search users clicking on the top 3 search listings (87% on top 5 listings)…
Needless to say, if video is beginning to really dominate the web, and it’s important to be within at least the first 5 search results for any given keyword, then a combination of great video with great SEO-targeted keywords is the best way to get your business seen and clicked.
There are practically a million other studies out there that can show you how important video is to your business, how to properly utilize it, and how to ensure it’s truly engaging your audience and growing your customer base. The above are a tiny fraction that can get you started in the right direction. The most important thing to consider is that pictures and text alone are no longer enough to really interact with your potential audience – you need video to make your company come alive and to really show your potential clients and customers what you’re all about.
So if your business hasn’t gotten up to speed and started looking into video, now is the time. All you have to do is decide what it is you think would best showcase what your business does (be it a tour, a testimonial, an “infomercial” type ad, or any number of other styles) and go from there.
And if you need help, let us know!
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