November 30, 2015

About 8 years ago, I had a company ask me to make a video for their website.

They wanted to be on camera explaining who they are and what they do as a company.

I liked the idea because it was something a lot of people were not doing at the time (plus I needed as much work as possible).

On shoot day, I went to their offices to set up my camera and lights.

When we started filming, the CEO got in front of the camera and simply talked about his business for 30 minutes.

After the shoot was over, I edited the footage down to a short 3-minute video.

Here’s the funny part…

The client was expecting me to send him the full 30 minutes that we shot.

Of course, nobody would want to watch a CEO or anyone else talk for 30 minutes about how wonderful his company is.

But still, the client wanted 30 minutes.

As a compromise, I cut his part down to 3 minutes and added some B-roll footage around his interview.

B-roll footage is the extra footage captured to enrich the story you’re telling in your video. It also allows for greater flexibility when editing.

The final version of the video told a nice story about the company without being boring.

Almost every business today, big or small, has a website.

But not every business has a video on their website.

Why is this?

Why People Are Watching More Videos Online

In today’s world people expect every webpage to have a video.

With more and more text information clogging the Internet, and with more and more people being in a hurry, no one has time to read about your business.

In fact, people are watching more videos online than they watch TV at home.

According to Time Business, people are watching more videos on their computer, smart TVs and multimedia devices than ever before.

At the same time, viewers watch 12 less minutes of TV a day than they did a year ago.

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, having a video on your website is a must.

Here are the 3 biggest reasons why you should shoot a video for your business’s website…

3 Reasons Why Your Business Needs A Website Video

Too many business owners falsely assume that a video on their website would not be effective.

Yet, these same people spend thousands or even millions shooting TV commercials and social media videos that they hope would go viral.

The numbers don’t lie.

One of the best uses of your marketing budget is financing the creation of a strong video for your website.

Here are three reasons why your business website needs a video…

1. People are more willing to watch than read.

Very few people read anymore.

This is especially true when it comes to online content.

According to Forbes, 59% of executives would rather watch video than read text.

People would rather watch a 5-minute video than read an article that takes them 20 minutes to get through.

For example, early in my career I used to do videos for a big law firm.

The lawyer I worked with was a personal injury attorney and needed me to do settlement videos for his personal injury claims.

No one else was doing this at the time.

As a result of this forward thinking, he settled his cases faster than anyone else in the business and, of course, made much more money.

When we first started working together, he showed me an entire book that he made for his first personal injury case.

In the book, he listed every single piece of information about the case.

It took me 3 days to read the book.

I didn’t understand anything in the book and kept falling asleep reading it.

Next, he showed me a video he did on a very similar case.

It took about 15 minutes to watch the video and instead of putting me to sleep, I stayed very engaged.

The video content was compelling and I understood everything.

People connect with videos.

The best part is you can still get ahead of the curve by creating a video for your business website.

There are more videos than ever online but most business to this day do not have videos on their websites.

 

2. Video content is more shareable than written content.

If you have been on Facebook lately you know that sharing a video is very easy.

As you scroll down your newsfeed, videos that have been posted will automatically start playing (no clicks needed).

After a while, your eyes start scanning for the videos and the written content becomes secondary.

Facebook is the most popular social media company in the world, so it’s only a matter of time before other large social media companies start copying their model.

In a few years, it will be normal for videos to start playing automatically on every website.

According to Cisco, videos will account for 69% of all consumer Internet traffic by 2017.

With video content growing this rapidly, it only makes sense for your company to produce video content.

Your goal should be to produce as much video content as possible to promote your business on, not only your website, but on YouTube and other social media platforms.

Once you start doing this, Google will increase your business’s website ranking, especially if you use YouTube to embed your videos because Google owns YouTube.

3. Videos drive more measurable traffic to your website.

The fastest way to get someone to visit your website is through a video.

Businesses post videos on YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and other platforms because they want to drive traffic to their website.

These business then post videos to their website directly so they can further feed information to their clients and potential clients.

Videos drive more measurable traffic to your website for two reasons.

First, video content is being consumed at a rate that’s growing much faster than other forms of media.

Second, you can now embed Calls-To-Action, including hyperlinks to your website or sales pages, into videos.

Companies will sometimes create a fun viral video for their company just to get customers excited about their product.

Apple is one successful company that does this frequently.

When the new Apple Watch came out, Apple launched a series of videos that were fun, entertaining, and got people excited to buy one.

These videos were all over YouTube and Facebook and would link the viewer to Apple’s homepage where they could purchase their own Apple Watch.

By creating videos for your website and for social media platforms you are providing free content to your customers.

In return, this will get them excited to buy the products or services you are trying to sell them.

In summary, we discussed 3 reasons why your business needs a video for your website.

People are much more willing to watch a video than read an article, video content is much more shareable than written content and videos can drive much more measurable traffic to your website.

This is happening more every day and businesses everywhere are starting to take advantage of videos on their website and social media accounts.

If you don’t use videos on your website or social media accounts I think the evidence is very compelling that now is a good time to start.