How to Attract Customers with Video Content

Creating an advertisement for your brand is easy, but making an ad that appeals to the right audience is an entirely different challenge. Marketers from all over the world have tried various types of content like infographics, blog posts, webinars, videos, and ebooks to bring in new customers.

Videos, in particular, have been proven to be outstanding when it comes to attracting the eyes of new potential customers. Let’s talk statistics.

According to Statista, the video advertising industry is expected to experience an annual revenue growth rate of 13.4 percent. It indicates that brands from all over the world are spending more on video ads.

This increase is possibly caused by the steadily increasing demand for video content in most countries in the world. Another Statista report shows that online videos penetrate up to 95 percent and 85 percent in Saudi Arabia and the United States.

YouTube practically owns the market for online video with billions of monthly active users — and guess where YouTube earns its money from? Video advertising.

Advertising is one thing, but what about generating organic leads using videos as your main attention grabbers?

Even without any paid ads, customer service videos are an excellent way to attract more customers.

An Ipsos survey showed that 62 percent of Facebook users were more intrigued to check out a brand or product after seeing it in a Facebook Story. More than half of those Facebook users said that they made more online purchases due to seeing Stories from brands or products.

That’s enough statistics for now. But how can you attract more potential customers using videos? That’s what we’re going to talk about in this article.

Choose the Video Format You Want to Use

No, we’re not talking about whether or not you should use a .mp4 or .mkv format. We’re talking about the design in which your brand or product is presented within a video.

Before we go any further, let’s get this out of the way: video is a work of art and creativity. What you can do with it is virtually limitless, given the right technology and equipment.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about several different video formats that have been known to grab the online audience’s attention.

Animated Explainer Videos

The flow of information on the internet often causes a phenomenon known as information overflow. Information overflow happens when the amount of information we receive is more significant than our brains handle.

This bottlenecking of information is what animated explainer videos try to combat.

Animated explainer videos introduce your product using bite-sized information about what drives the creation of the product, what it does, how it works, and why it’s a better alternative to your competitor’s product.

What’s cool about the animated explainer video is the fact that it’s animated.

When you’re filming with cameras, let’s say a customer testimonial or short skits, you are dealing with reality. You can’t do things because of reasons like budgets, physics, laws, and other external factors that limit your creativity.

With animated explainer videos, the limit is your imagination. You can create characters with melons for a head who is also capable of flight and teleportation. Even better, you can visualize any product, whether it’s physical or digital.

On top of that, explainer videos are better at introducing ground-breaking and niche products. 

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360° Videos

The advances in technology have brought around a positive impact to the scene of the 360-degree video. In the last couple of years, the technology surrounding the immersive video format has surged forward.

In only a couple of years, various devices to support 360 video playbacks have been released, from PC-required headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to mobile VR headsets like Oculus Go and Xiaomi Mi VR.

The rapid development of consumer-level cameras and platforms like YouTube catering for the medium are also significant accelerants to the popularity of 360 videos.

Brands (at least the good ones) are always keen to get on board with a new medium for their marketing campaigns.

Brands who are brave enough to make 360 videos for their campaigns usually gain success from them because viewers love the immersive experience and uniqueness of this format — even if it’s a branded video.

Every 360 ̊ videos immerse the viewers in a unique environment — that means each time they watch it, they aren’t simply watching a 2D campaign passively.

Instead of being shown a predetermined field of view, viewers control the 360-degree space they are looking at. It’s why the engagement rate for 360 ̊ videos is higher than the traditional video format.

Branded Short Films

When you’re in for product showcase videos and know you’re going to go big, branded short movies are your best bet of generating the most return on investment.

The idea behind branded short films is to make good films that double as a promotional piece for your products.

Often, branded short films require you to hire professional crew members like you would Hollywood films. The difference is that you don’t always have to allocate millions of dollars.

Kate Spade has been making short movies tagged with #missadventure starring Anna Kendrick to showcase their latest catalogs. Using YouTube as their main publication channel, their clips have generated millions of views.

Breakthrough the Stereotypes: Use Videos in Emails

There are negative stereotypes of email marketing being spammy and dull. Use videos to break this stereotype and make emails that will suck the life out of your email subscribers.

Using “video” in emails doesn’t mean that you embed a video into the email. That would damage the user experience with slow-loading emails. Plus, Gmail — an email platform that owns 40% of the market, doesn’t support native video playback yet.

Instead of embedding videos into your emails, we recommend you do a workaround using animated GIFs. Using this type of email will help your email stand out among hundreds of other promotional emails in your subscribers’ inboxes.

Optimize Your Videos for Online Visibility

If your goal is to attract new potential customers with videos, the first step you need to take is getting people to watch your videos.

There are several methods that you could do to help your videos become more visible to your audience.

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Finding High Intent Keywords on YouTube

Optimizing your videos for high-intent keywords is the first step to establishing high-quality traffic that is more likely to convert to customers. YouTube is a core extension of Google as a search engine. The search results that you see for specific queries are the results of crawler bots scouring the entire visible internet — including but not limited to YouTube.

Not only that, YouTube is a search engine on its own — and people are looking up videos about stuff they want to buy there. To find out what search queries that people are using, try this nifty method:

1. Let’s assume you are a professional landscaper. Your target market is new homeowners looking to beautify their gardens.
2. Head to YouTube and type a term related to your expertise. In this case, let’s use “vegetable gardening.”
3. The suggestions you see above are the terms that people are searching for.
4. Pick one that you find most suitable and add more details like location, the type of vegetables, etc.
5. Use the terms for your video’s title.
6. Sprinkle some more keywords into your video’s description to add some juice.

Check out Brian Dean’s guide to video SEO to learn in-depth and detailed techniques on optimizing your videos for search engines.

Embed Your Videos on Websites

Assuming you have a running website before making videos to attract more customers, your website should be your main conversion channel. It means your website should have more established traffic compared to your newly published videos.

Utilize Social Media Channels to Reach New Customers

Cisco predicts that by 2020, online videos will account for 80 percent of all consumer-level internet traffic.

If you’re actively using social media platforms, there’s a good chance that you’ve noticed that videos are taking over your newsfeed. We’re not talking about YouTube — it’s a video platform. What else would you see on your newsfeed other than videos?

Facebook and Instagram are shifting their attention towards developing features surrounding videos, especially with Stories and IGTV increasing in terms of popularity.

Even platforms used to non-video content like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are developing an interest in embracing video content — because their users expect and want to receive more of it.

Social Media Video Marketing Statistics

These stats should convince you that videos are taking over social media:

• ⅓ of people’s online sessions are spent watching videos (Social Media Today).
• Forty-five percent of internet users watch Facebook and YouTube videos at least one hour per week (HubSpot).
• A big chunk of Twitter users (82 percent) says that they watch videos on Twitter (Twitter).

Not only consumers, but the changes are also affecting businesses:

• Sixty percent of social media users are watching branded videos daily (Animoto).
• Sixty-four percent of consumers say that branded videos on Facebook have influenced their purchasing decisions in the past month (BigCommerce).
• Companies that use social media for video marketing receive 27 percent more click-through rate and 34 percent more conversion than those that don’t (Buffer).

The one thing that can take away from these statistics is that more people are using social media at an increasing rate.

Pushing your existing videos to your social media channels might be a fool-proof way to reach a new group of customers who didn’t even know about your brand before.

Attract New Customers with Trust-building Videos

Reaching as many potential customers as possible is suitable for exposure. But they’ve just heard about your brand. Why should they trust you?

While you can opt to spend all of your budgets on expanding your reach, you should consider the brand trust aspect of your video campaigns.

The first step to building brand credibility is, of course, the quality of your product. You’re probably familiar with Xiaomi — they started shipping their smartphones in 2011, and by 2018 they are the fourth largest smartphone manufacturers in the world.

How did they do it? They deliver qualities on par with big brands like Samsung and Apple for a fraction of the price.

That example probably has little to do with videos, but the message is clear: be willing to step out of your way to please your customers. There are several methods to implement that moral value into videos:

Customer and Influencer (Honest) Reviews

Having an unpaid and honest review from your past users and influencers is one of the most effective ways to build brand trust.

With unbiased reviews, you are willing to expose the plus and minus of your products — which shows that you want to know how to improve them in the future.

Partnership with Content Creators

The swarm of independent content creators and reviewers on platforms like YouTube could also be your goldmine (assuming your products are good).

This point is how a partnership between brands and independent creators work:

• Brands announce they are launching a new product.
• Early production samples are sent to creators and influencers.
• They give their opinion and feedback.
• If there is enough time and public approval of the feedback, brands adjust the product.
• The product was released with better quality.

Videos Highlighting Company Culture

A company is only as good as its work ethic.

Creating videos that highlight the behind-the-scenes of your company shows that you are confident enough to show the world that everything you do, you do it properly.

With the correct execution, this could increase brand trust and attract more customers at the same time.

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