Please welcome guest blogger Helen Nurse from Capture 1 and the 60 Second Pitch! Helen lets us know how online video can help you!!
When I think about what I spend most time doing online, it is engaging with people – through social networking, Linked In, email conversations, You tube videos. Other than shopping, most of my activity is connecting and interaction. Which makes me think, why aren’t more people who are selling, trying to connect on a more personal level too?
Our DNA is programmed to recognize people and faces more than anything else. So in our virtual world we need to be even more personable than ever before. There is so much ‘noise’ on the internet, the competition for us to grab peoples attention span has never been greater and so we need to cut through this and engage people in who we are again.
In my opinion, no amount of sophisticated technology will take the place of a live person – where you can see their energy, make real eye contact, read their body language, shake their hand. So when you are online and wanting to engage with someone, surely the next best way to do it is with a video – you can look into camera and still connect and make contact with that person.
Video is fast becoming the crown jewel of content marketing because people can both see and hear your message and they can be moved and called to action in ways rarely possible with other forms of content. Essentially video is all the other forms of content rolled into one.
So, it is a proven way to engage people faster. How does video help you improve your visibility on the web and peoples ability to find you in the first place?
One of the ways that Google and other search engines rank your site is how rich your content is – therefore video will always rank high as it is considered a very ‘rich content’ medium. Therefore if you have video on your site then you will have more chance of being on the first page of the search than a text based site.
“Whoever has the right kind of content, good for them. If you don’t have the right content, bad for you. If your competition has a video and you don’t, the competition wins. So I think we’re going to see video on almost every site that at least wants to rank.”
Source: Video Changed Search Results & Became Must-Have Content: Bruce Clay http://www.reelseo.com/video-changed-search-results/#ixzz1QfheYW00
©2008-2011 ReelSEO Video Marketing
A recent survey published on www.reelseo.com revealed that videos in universal search results have a 41% higher click through rate than their plain text counterparts. Yikes. Most of us knew those high places were coveted spots, but I’m not sure we knew exactly how much attention they command from the average search user.
One thing to realise is that in order for your video to rank highly in a universal search, it will most likely have to rank well on its own video platform first. i.e. If your video is on YouTube, it will need to come up high for your search within the You Tube platform before it will come up on the universal search for the same term. In other words if it doesn’t rank on your own platform it is unlikely to rank on Google, Bing or other general search engines.
When trying to rank well consider what you write as your keywords. A survey done in 2011 by aimClear found that videos optimised for transactional keywords ( those including words like “cheap”, “free”, “sale”, “buy”) perform poorly as a search term on Google and other universal search engines. Informational keywords do perform well however. So this would be phrases that comprise instructional (“learn” or “how to”), educational (“what is or “history of”) or comparative (this versus that).
Video online is no longer being dismissed by businesses as something for personal entertainment on You Tube. Nor is it confined to a ‘stuffy ‘corporate’ video, which is only pulled out and played once a year for an event, presentation or meeting. Improvements in technology as well as audience participation and familiarity have made it a true platform for business which easily integrates with websites and blogs and across major social networkings.
For this reason, even something as simple as having your 60 Second Pitch about how you help people can be hugely effective and a cost effective way of taking advantage of all these huge benefits that video can give. Not just that but this gives you a way of engaging personally through a virtual platform. Imagine if, when looking at your website, Facebook page or Linked In profile, people could see a 60 second video clip of you talking to them about how you can help. You are conveying your personality, your skills, your experience and most importantly your credibility. Why have a black and white profile when you can be in colour?
What if when people searched online for your products or service, your 60 second pitch video came up and they were immediately able to see how you can be he right person for them to connect with.
Ultimately this is what it is all about – connecting and engaging with people. People don’t buy from a company logo, they buy from a person.
So with greater engagement, more profile and visibility, better search results and the fact that by 2014 90% of all global internet traffic will be video (source Discover Magazine) shouldn’t you be discovering the power of online video for your business?
Helen Nurse
Co-founder of Capture 1 Video, video producer and director
