Snake oil salesmen peddle video as if it is some sort of magical tonic. You have probably seen some of these video marketing statistics:
Before reading any text, 60% of site visitors will watch a video if available. (Diode Digital)
One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. (Forrester Research)
56% of consumers believe if a company has a website, it should have video content. (Animoto)
The Average user spends 16 minutes and 49 seconds a month watching online video ads. (ComScore)
80% of consumers say a video showing how a product or service works is important when learning about the company. (Animoto)
Youtube has become the 2nd largest search engine – bigger than Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL combined. (Etail Insights)
Video search results have a 41% higher click-through than plain text results. (Animoto)
50% of marketers consider customer testimonials, explainer tutorial videos, and demonstration videos the most effective types of video content used. (Asend2)
4 out of 5 consumers day demo videos are helpful. (Animoto)
Your website is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of a search engines results page if it includes video. (Forrester Research)
Online video accounts for 50% of mobile traffic, and is predicted to become 75% by 2016. (Cisco)
63% on consumers say companies who use video know how to reach their consumers. (Animoto)
People stay 2 minutes longer on your site if you have video content. (ComScore)
All of this is true. Video is a powerful tool which should be part of every marketing strategy. But as a TV journalist, I always like to dig a little deeper and there are some important statistics I still can’t seem to find anywhere online. How impactful or not is poorly produced video content? How impactful or not is video which fails to tell a great story? My instincts tell me simply posting video without building a story first is just as ineffective as any other poorly produced content. Ask yourself this question- when on a website, will you click on any video for the sake of watching it? Or does the content need to be compelling enough to push play? I know I fall into the second category. I don’t click on any video for the sake of watching a video.
So what ensures a better chance of a view? I like to use the tenets of journalism to create video content for my clients:
Interesting
Is the content interesting to watch and explore in more detail?
Important
Is the content so important that it demands your attention?
Unusual
Some stories are so unusual and unique that it demands your attention.
Proximity
Some stories literally hit close to home, and that it makes it highly watchable.
Controversial
Controversy can be played to your advantage, with the right story-telling.
Timeliness
Based on what is happening in the world at a given time can play into effective story-telling.
You don’t need to meet all of the criteria above to create great video content. Just one. But simply slapping random video content will not deliver the results you are looking for.
THE DNA of great video content is a great story.