We’ve all been there: an intriguing title catches our attention, we click on it and come across a promising opener, only to be bored to tears because all we’re given are chunks of text. Important as written content is for marketing, ask any marketing agency and they’ll tell you your Provo business can benefit from visual storytelling, particularly by using videos.
According to Cisco’s latest annual Visual Networking Index, video traffic will account for 82 percent of all internet traffic by 2022. This much traffic bodes well for businesses who want to utilize visual storytelling through video content. This means that instead of listing a product’s or service’s features, it can instead be promoted through engaging narratives that hook consumers better than any amount of text ever will.
Here’s how video marketing helps businesses grow:
Educate the audience
Video is the perfect tool to help your current and prospective customers visualize and better understand how a product or service works while showing them how it adds value to their lives. This is better than forcing them to read through instructional manuals with illustrations they cannot decipher.
Remember, information from videos is much easier to retain than those from plain text. This is backed by data from several studies. In 2018, Pew Research surveyed 4,594 Americans about their YouTube usage and found that 51 percent of them rely on videos on the site to figure out how to do new things.
Build a connection with your audience
Videos aren’t only useful for teaching your audience what to do with what you offer. It’s also a tool that helps build an emotional connection between your brand and them.
Take Dove, for example. The body care giant has video marketing down pat, often using emotional narratives to hook their audience in. In their Project #ShowUs, for example, they tackled the issue of women’s representation in the media. So, Dove partnered with Getty Images to create a stock photo gallery that shatters beauty stereotypes by including women of different shapes, sizes, skin color, and gender.
Because this is such a personal issue for many women around the world, the video was able to tug at the emotions of its audience and helped create a connection between them and the brand.
Generate authentic engagement
When people connect with your video content, you won’t have to tell them to do anything. Chances are they will rewatch, like, and share these videos. From there, your brand’s videos can reach a wider audience, creating a spiderweb of people who interacted with your content.
This results in authentic engagements that you didn’t have to pay for to advertise and reach your intended market. In the end, a single, well-made video that connects with your audience can lead to more people engaging with your brand and purchasing your products or services.
Once you have audiences engaging with your video content, you can lead them to your website and point to more pieces of content that encourage them to stay longer. This increases not just your website traffic but also your chances of converting browsers into paying customers.
Utilized properly, video content can be your most powerful marketing tool. Through these, you can craft stories that connect with people while promoting your brand at the same time.
