On January 23rd, AdWeek 2012 kicked off the week by hosting advertising talks and events throughout Toronto, including the Search & Social Rank Symposium in the Distillery District.
The Search & Social night invited entrepreneurs and partnerships of corporations to inform the audience of various SEO and social media storytelling techniques.
One topic in particular that caught my interest was a presentation by Craig Backman from the McLellan Group who spoke about the importance of incorporating video onto one’s branding and SEO plan.
Backman provided five key takeaways for incorporating video in your marketing strategy:
Video is the preferred medium by most site visitors. According to Cisco Systems, 90% of web traffic will be from video by the time we reach 2013.
Video is relevant to all demographics. It is not just youth that are broadcasting their talents through online video, but people 55 and older are also finding a space to share their stories.
Video is more persuasive. According to Nielson data, product users are 85% more likely to buy from video content than from text.
Video is more memorable. Videos are sensational and require more than just one sense to understand a message. They thus attract better site traffic and higher quality content than text does
Video enhances SEO results. Forrester found that video is 53 times more than text content to rank within the top search engine results. Google looks at the description, title and tags for indexing a video.
Video will not only help gain site traffic, but it offers another route for Google to find content, by crawling keywords within description, the tags assigned to the video and its title.
Moreover, video requires less effort to participate in. Because our technology-driven society has socialized citizens into becoming instantly-gratified beings, videos deliver information at a faster rate than reading a lot of text. Thus you are more likely to attract customers and have a higher retention and recall rate.
Utilizing video on your site also helps to captivate audience interest and provide a more engaging experience than text: it offers unrivalled ways for companies to interact with their customers and provides a unique experience altogether.
If you would like more information on using video to enhance search traffic to your website, we would be happy to help.