Engaging and bringing visitors back to your website is crucial to the success of your business.  If you want to get noticed and stand out from the competition, custom videos are a great option. Below are ten benefits, in no particular order, of adding custom video to your website.

1. If a picture is worth 1,000 Words?

Video can focus your audience’s attention and direct them to more information than text and images alone. Reading is a chore. Most viewers do not take the time to do more than glance at copy seeking information relative to their needs. A large amount of text can clutter your web-page and make it difficult to navigate and convey your message or product and the user gets frustrated and leaves.  Unless your website visitors have crazy speed-reading skills, it is a safe bet that they digest information they see and hear faster than information they read.  Because of this, a custom video is a great way to get your message across in a format visitors will quickly and easily digest.  We’re not saying video should completely replace written content, but it is a great complement to your copy and will strengthen your message overall.

2. Engage Your Website Visitors

Informative and interesting custom video are a great way to bring visitors to your website through improved search engine rankings, get them to focus on your message in multiple ways (visually, audibly, etc) and get them to spend more time on your website. This means they are spending more time exposed to your message or product!.

Custom video offers the unique advantage over other forms of content because it does not just tell visitors about your company, product, or service – it SHOWS them. This is the difference between passive and active engagement. As a rule, people learn and remember information better if they are actively engaged. Custom video accomplishes the goal of your website actively engaging visitors

3. Drive Traffic to Your Website

Search engines LOVE new content, whether it is fresh copy, a new blog post, a press release, or a custom video.  Every time you add content, your search engine rankings will see an uptick. So, why not go the extra mile and make that fresh content a custom video?  You can even multiply the search engine bump by using targeted keywords (limit to 1-2) in the video title, tags and description.  Don’t just add the video to your website, create a channel on YouTube to really maximize the SEO benefit as the result of your video (make sure you use key words to promote on YouTube) being on multiple locations, with none of the duplicate content issues.

Plus, you can maximize the benefit of improved SEO by sharing the video through your social media networks.  Check out the “increase your reach” benefit below to learn more.

4. Keep them Entertained

Don’t be boring.  Your video can informative, it can also so be entertaining.  A little humor never hurt!  In fact, unless the video is of a technical or legal nature, you should make an effort to keep your audience entertained while being informative.  After all, that is how viewers will remember it, share it and maybe even make it go viral.  Wouldn’t that be sweet!

5. Give Your Company a Personality

You can claim to be a hip, cool, fun company that is dedicated to solving its customers’ problems and delivering on their needs until you are blue in the face (or would that be blue on the webpage?). But why not use a video to drive home that message?

Sure, those “get to know us” profiles where your employees talk about their cat or underwater basket-weaving hobby are great, but what better way to accurately present your company culture and personality than through a custom video of your team in action.

6. Strengthen the Bond with Your Visitors

A great way to strengthen the bond with your website visitors is to publish custom videos featuring your employees.  People like to buy from people they know, or at least that they feel they know. So, why not introduce visitors to your team through custom video?  Whether the video are employee profiles, product demonstrations or a live delivery of your company mission statement and values, video is a great way to get visitors closer to you and your company.

7. Increase Your Reach

Just as you can increase your reach by integrating your blog with social media networks, you can do the same with custom videos.  By both sharing your video through your own social media networks and allowing visitors to share do the same through theirs, you create the opportunity for your video to go viral.  Remember, post that video to your YouTube channel (Google loves YouTube videos) so you have an additional place to promote, and to get promoted.

Social Media is how you can really maximize your reach and how your video will get seen by consumers or businesses that might not have otherwise.  If they video is truly engaging and has strong calls to action, that is going to result in an increase in new visitors to your website.

8. Stand Out from Your Competition

In a world of “me too” companies, custom video is a great way to differentiate yourself from your competition.  The simple truth is, not many companies have the vision, the creativity, or the guts to put a living, breathing representation of their company and product/service on their website.  Those that do will have a major advantage over their competition.  Whether your industry is highly commoditized or highly specialized, utilizing custom videos on your website will make you stand out.

9. Encourage Regular Visits to Your Website

Getting someone to visit your website once is a good thing, getting them to come back over and over again is the best thing.  Every time someone comes back to your website, it is an opportunity to expose them to your value propositions and encourage them to take specific buying actions.  A great way to get people to regularly visit your website is to add exciting, engaging and useful videos that deliver your targeted message and provide value to viewers.

This benefit is especially true if you are using video to educate your website visitors about an issue, topic, or other area of concern.  Want to teach your website visitors how to use your product in their home?  Here’s a great custom video one of our clients created to educate seniors about Medicare.

Or, rather than one long video, break it up into segments for each use and promote when the next video will be released at the end of each video. Have a list of benefits your clients will receive from using your service?  Create a short video for each benefit and release the videos one at a time, letting viewers know when they can come back to your website and see the next video.

10. Be Remembered

Perhaps we saved this benefit for last because it is the embodiment of all of the prior benefits rolled into one. Think about the goals you established (or should have) when you went about creating your website and even the ones you have now.  All of your KPIs (unique visits, contact requests, sales, etc) are tied to the benefits we’ve previously discussed.