You’ve heard that video is paramount to a winning marketing strategy, but you don’t know exactly why it’s so important. According to Cisco, 87% of internet traffic will be made up of video by 2018. That’s a staggering number! 70% of business to business content marketers already use video in their marketing strategy, and almost 60% of those marketers rate video as the best way to market content. There are plenty of other reasons to using videos in your marketing strategy: they increase a website’s SEO, they drive traffic to a website, they introduce potential clients to products and services and they increase conversion rates. But today we’re going to zero in on how video influences buying decisions.
As humans, we are wired to prefer video over text or pictures.
Our minds like to be engaged in a variety of ways, and unlike text or pictures, video entertains many of our senses at once. While watching a video, viewers can see, hear, even begin to feel and taste what’s going on in the video as they become more emotionally involved in the story. Video engages viewers through movement, colors, intonation of voices, body language and verbal communication, all of which help to create emotional bonds. Video is the closest we can get the human touch online.
People like to feel understood and admired, so it’s important that your videos mimics real life situations that your audience can relate to, and addresses their common questions and concerns in a natural way. Nobody wants to feel sold to, so interact with your viewers as equals. More on that in a future blog entry on mirror neurons.
First we trust, then we buy.
Online retailer Stacksandstacks.com found that website visitors who watched a product video were 144% more likely to purchase that product than visitors who did not watch the video. But why? The answer is trust.
Susan Weinschenk, a behavioral psychologist in the field of user experience, has noted that we rely on the fusiform area of our brain tells us to read faces to decide whether or not someone can be trusted. This is why people love to see live action in videos (as opposed to animated videos). When we believe the presenter, when we can see ourselves in their shoes, we’re swayed by their explanations or experiences with the products they’re reviewing or selling. This is why testimonial videos are so popular. People don’t want to hear a sales guy talk about a product–they want to see, hear and feel how a product has benefitted the lives of people like them.
Video is the best medium to convey quality.
According to HubSpot, product quality is the most important factor that drives purchasing decisions. So how do we as humans decide whether or not a product, service or company is of high quality? We like to see it from different angles, see how it functions, see other people using or experiencing the product. We also tend to want to know everything about a product before we buy it. Certainly we want our main questions about the product or service answered before pulling the trigger.
Humans tend to spend as little time as possible reading when we can watch video because it’s easier and more efficient. That’s great for marketers, because people absorb and retain much more information in videos than by reading text and/or looking at static images. By educating people all about the specifications and key differences of a product or service in a beautiful, even entertaining way, people will be be more likely to purchase the product than if they had just read about the product for that short amount of time. Text just doesn’t leave the same impression as video.
Internet Retailer has reported that when a video includes a lot of different information, viewers will actually watch the video multiple times to absorb all of the information, which translates into them spending more time on your website! Score!
We hope this blog post helped you understand how our purchasing decisions are influenced by watching videos. Stay tuned for more information that will help you become a better marketer, business owner, or corporate video producer.
