By Patrick Boberg
Messaging is one of the hardest parts of a business’ job. You’ve established your means of production and internally defined what sets you apart from the competition; now all that’s left is selling it to your coveted customer base. You chalk up potential logos, slave for weeks (maybe months) over branding and take several swings at drafting the perfect brochures and accompanying website. Despite strong website traffic, you somehow are still not seeing the sales you had hoped for. What could possibly be missing from your messaging arsenal?
It seems crazy to say, but after 70 years of history, businesses are still overlooking the power of video. Call it a TV advertisement, a corporate profile or a video testimonial; few things work like video to inform and recruit customers. Website banner ads are often cheap and get your company in front of a wide variety of consumers, but only video actively grabs a web patron’s attention.
The Internet age has conditioned our brains to fall into what is commonly referred to as the “F-pattern.” Due to oversaturation of advertisements and online images, the F-pattern sees readers focusing the majority of their attention on the top few lines of text and scanning the left spine of a text body for standout words and phrases. Moving images have proven the only content to break the F-pattern habit and if engaging enough (and this is critical), video viewers tend to spend nearly 500 percent more time on a website than sites populated with just photos and text. Still, the real success of video is consumers who engage with embedded video are six times as likely to respond to a video call to action than text.
So if video means greater customer engagement and the potential for increased sales, the downside might be the cost. Video production is not necessarily cheap. Producing a short 3-minute product video requires hiring a videographer for at least one day’s work, and a competent videographer generally demands a $500 day rate. While it could get costly for businesses both large and small, the benefit is the shelf life of a video advertisement or product profile is years.
High quality, engaging and informative videos are the viral currency of the Internet and most shared content on social media. That means if your customer base responds to a video and falls in love with your product, your clientele could turn into your defacto-social sales department. n
Patrick Boberg is a central Iowa creative media specialist. Follow him on Twitter @PatBoBomb.
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