Looking for some innovative ways to spice up your website? Give video content a go!

Online video hosting services are leading businesses in a new era where they are able to express themselves freely online. It is a great way to send your message to a global audience, without depending on traditional advertising outlets, such as print or television. You do not have to run up huge budgets to create and promote these videos. If you have something to say to the world, you should just create a video. If the video is good enough to grab the public’s attention, it will go viral in a matter of a few days, if not hours. Examples of online videos that successfully went viral, intentionally or not, are the Old Spice ‘Look at Your Man’ videos starring Isaiah Mustafa, and more recently, the Dove ‘Real Beauty Sketch’ ad campaigns.

Online video hosting services such as Youtube, Vimeo, SproutVideo, etc, are the reason anyone has the opportunity to make video advertisements on an even playing field with the big boys. They allow users to come forward and do something awesome that will grab people’s attention on a global level without having to spend a lot of money.

So, we all know that video content is great for lead generation, but should you just haphazardly make that viral video, post it, and hope for the best? Isn’t it worth asking if you should even be making videos? While it’s true that some video go viral without much effort or marketing behind them, this does not happen every time. Going back to our above examples, the Old Spice and Dove videos seem to have been manufactured to go viral, but when you compare it to the bigger number of videos advertisers make every day and don’t become as famous, you see that these videos have an intangible quality about them that most other ads will simply not replicate. Assuming your video won’t go as viral as theirs will, you have to justify making your video another way. Creating a great video is not enough; your focus should be on getting ROI.

Here are a few reasons why you need to invest time when creating online video content for your website:

SEO Benefits

First and foremost, you need to learn the SEO benefits of video content. Multimedia objects such as videos add value to your site. To be specific, they do so in three different and apparent ways:

First, it improves your landing page quality score. Google reads the video as another relevant element in your landing page, adding to your score.

Second, it adds value to your page. Outside of Google’s own algorithms, having videos on your page helps communicate your message to your audience easier (more on this below). As your audience enjoys watching your videos, it makes it easier for them to absorb that message.

and last but certainly not least,  it has a positive effect on your keyword relevance. When you use your most important keywords in the title and “about” section of your video, it associates that video with those keywords. Whether people find your video on YouTube or on your site, each view raises that keyword’s relevance to your brand.

People are also more likely to spend more time on your website when there is video content available on it.

Communication

The reason businesses spend thousands of dollars on marketing and advertising is to communicate with the users,. You want to send them a certain message that helps them connect with your brand. Online videos, when conceived and executed correctly, are an awesome way to achieve this goal, and it’s also been proven to be highly effective.

As an example of this, let’s go back to the Dove Real Beauty Sketch campaign. This campaign did not try to convince women they will be more beautiful if they bought Dove products. More dramatically, it taps into the conversation of beauty issues, and is actively helping women feel beautiful irregardless of how they are now. The video went viral because, as Dove’s advertisers Ogilvy found out, this was a common untapped sentiment among Dove’s market. Not only does the Dove campaign generate a halo effect around their products, it also highlights the fortrightness of Dove products, and so now they seem natural and genunine.

Tapping Into Creativity

Online video hosting gives you a chance to think outside the box, to be creative beyond your capabilities. You give the audience something novel to watch, maybe something they haven’t see before.

 The Dove Real Beauty Sketch certainly was creative, however, a better example for this is the ongoing Old Spice ‘Look at your man’ campaign. Old Spice understood the half-life of a meme like “Look at your man’ is relatively short, and so they have constantly kept reinventing their campaign to keep grabbing attention. Even when they took that perceived misstep and the internet complained that they had hired Fabio, they turned it around into an online poll and won their old fans back. Old Spice’s latest campaign revolves around a fictional new marketing director, Mr. Wolfdog. As their captive audience stays enthralled, it translates IRL to a popular brand.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPQmhlbxP-4
Conclusions

Before creating a video, think, how are you different from your competitors? What sets you apart from them? What is the best way to communicate your message to the world in a loud and clear way? Once you have the answer to all these questions, creating video content to generate leads will be easy as pie.