The more human your website is, the more it represents you – when users see an authentic and human face of your company they get to know you and, more importantly, get to see the difference between you and your competitors. Your time to shine is only as long as your visitor’s attention span and, in case you are still reading this… that is not very long!
A FEW 2012 STATISTICS ABOUT ONLINE MOVIE CONTENT, IN CASE YOU ARE STILL WONDERING WHETHER YOU NEED IT:
- Websites with videos are 53x more likely to appear on the first page of Google.
- By 2013 – 90% of video traffic will be video based.
- The average website visit is 42 seconds long – the figure for sites with video content is 5 minutes 50 seconds.
- People who view a web video are 64% more likely to go through and purchase than any other site visitor.
- Forbes insight found that 59% of senior executives prefer to watch videos rather than reading text.
- Videos in email marketing have been shown to increase click-through rates by over 95%.
LET YOUR CLIENTS SAY IT FOR YOU
Ever wondered why we don’t ask people’s mothers to provide references for them as a part of our recruitment process? We have this hunch that they might not provide the most objective opinion of our prospective employee. It’s easy to blow your own trumpet, but the gold dust is in demonstrating that you really made a difference to your clients. This is, after all, an exercise in building trust.
TAKE THE RISK – IF YOU DON’T ASK YOU DON’T GET!
We are lucky enough to have really strong ties with our clients, as the most important part of our business and we work hard to maintain these relationships. At first we were unsure of asking them to participate, we thought they might be too busy or perhaps reluctant to give up a whole afternoon to tell us about themselves and their business. The response in fact was one of enthusiasm and curiosity, and the experience was a really positive one as we learned more about each other.
PLAN EVERY DETAIL… THEN LET IT ALL GO
Movies look so simple that it can be easy to imagine ad-libbing would generate the most natural responses; we find that actually the planning process enables us to get the best out of everyone involved. Some people are indeed comfortably spontaneous, what they said was relevant and succinct first time around. For others however, this was a new and uncomfortable experience, so they needed guidance, time to prepare and lots of prompts! Get my attention and keep me engaged Web users are spoilt for choice and our attention spans are short. Take the time to work on your message and how to convey it; you need to be totally clear on your story to be able to get it across in your 2 minute slot! Keep your content simple, short and back it up with visuals. More than anything, tell the truth, be yourself and show us what you are passionate about! Take a look at some of our own client story videos and let us know what you think. How could we improve on them next time around? What are your experiences or questions about creating video content for your website? Please comment below, we’d love to hear from you. Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/tracyhunter/
