Video online is one of the most effective ways of building a brand online. One of the greatest challenges when building a website is bringing a brand to life; the presentation of your product or service online is often the first point of contact for a consumer and therefore is important you make a great first impression. From the offset, you need to differentiate yourself and really ‘pop’ off the proverbial shelf to stand out within your market and give a positive and engaging user experience online; we believe video can really boost that engagement and best showcase your product.
There’s a number of reasons that the use of video is becoming increasingly popular, and as we keep up with website trends, it’s important we understand the reasoning behind them.
So, why video?
On a website, communicating your product or service online is key; showcasing it via a video rather than paragraphs of copy is much more engaging. For the user, being able to see the product or service is beneficial rather than just reading about it. High quality photography does a similar job to a certain degree but there’s little more engaging than seeing a product/ service in a video; it often gives an online user the best idea of an offline product.
An effective video on your website will be kept short to ensure it retains users attention, be high quality and well shot to communicate with the user through aesthetic means whilst saving them valuable time of having to search through website pages to receive the same level of information and understanding of your brand and proposition.
As mentioned in our branding blog, your brand encompasses far more than just your logo. It’s all about your brand voice, personality and how you present yourself online. Video is an amazing way to convey your personality to users that can feel slightly forced and stale in blocks of content – instead of telling the user you’re a young and fun business, show them.
For many products, perhaps especially those with higher price points or pioneers in their market where the user might not be sure what the product is or does, video is an incredible demonstration. Our client NaughtOne for example, sells high quality furniture, designed and manufactured in Britain – what better way to show their quality and craftsmanship than with a video that shows the process each item of furniture goes through. Rotating on the homepage banner, it’s attention grabbing and allows NaughtOne to stand out in the market from their competition.
The fact that video is more engaging keeps users on the site for a longer period; in terms of your website ranking this is beneficial. Not only are you more likely to receive an enquiry or sale from a user if they’re more invested in your product but in terms of your ranking in search engines, statistics such as your bounce rate are all taken into account. A website that’s seen as engaging and therefore valuable by search engines such as Google will be seen more favourably in terms of their ranking.
It’s important before a video shoot to consider what you want to achieve with your video and how you would like your brand to be portrayed. We work with you throughout this process; taking the time to understand your brand and then storyboarding ideas of how we best think video could represent you and your product or service. With your brand persona, do you want to be funny, relatable, educational, innovative, a market leader; the list goes on! Once this has been decided and we’ve discussed different options of how we will present your brand online through video, we work with you on shoots to produce high quality and engaging videos.
Our client Ripley Castle is an amazing example of this; with such a grand castle and expansive grounds, it’s a challenge to show every offering of the castle in an image. We therefore presented the idea of video and used a drone to produce the best view of the castle – the aspirational element of the castle for brides and grooms looking to marry at the castle, for events planners to see the grounds, visitors to see where they can explore; as the list of prospective audiences for the castle and website increases, so does the number the video caters for.
Vale of Mowbray have been baking pork pies in Yorkshire for the past 90 years; we were tasked with showcasing the pies, their heritage and what could be eaten with them – bringing the brand to life and ensuring they stay current as a staple in everyone’s diets in 2018. We’ve produced multiple videos and cinemagraphs to fit this brief; seasonal videos to be rotated year round to keep the website fresh and cinemagraphs to really set Vale apart from any other pork pie producer. Along with videos of the pies, we gave them a lifestyle spin; enjoyed as part of a get together with friends and family.
A website can be viewed at any time, day or night, this means for those in the B2B sector, video is an incredible tool; the video proposition can be viewed as a marketing campaign whenever is convenient for them – without you having to be available for a sales pitch. Not only convenient and engaging for the user, but also hugely beneficial for you to stand out from the market and be another step towards a conversion of an enquiry. Whenever we’re planning a video shoot, we always keep this in mind; what metric are we trying to achieve? Are we planning to just engage with the user for when they see the product on the shelf, make a sale on an ecommerce store, convince them to place an enquiry or to make a visit to your location?
Being easily accessible and understood by the user is important. Having a visible presence online and building your brand online is beneficial to building your brand offline as in the digital age, the two support each other. Adding video to your website will really make it that much more engaging and really bring your brand to life; if you’d be interested in discussing your proposition, we’d love to hear from you and get planning your video!
