One of the most powerful ways to reach mass audiences and engage them online is with video.

Video allows you to not only see and hear the message being promoted but also lets you see and hear the person doing the promoting. Video allows you to get caught-up in their enthusiasm and emotion, to see their passion & sincerity, to judge their honesty. Video lets you more fully share in the experience better than any other medium, second only to being there live and in-person.

Video also has a number of powerful advantages when used in online marketing efforts. Here are my top 5 reasons why you should be using video NOW.

1. Video provides “stickiness” to your website. This means visitors to your website will stay longer and look at more pages when you give good, value-laden video content. Not sure what content makes good video? I tell my clients to video everything… your trade show appearances, client testimonials, product demonstrations, your manufacturing processes, quality testing & control processes (hint: people love to see things get destroyed during product testing… especially in slow-motion). It’s all good for video and gives your prospect or customer more opportunity to get to know you and your product or service.
2. Search engines love video content. Properly titling, tagging and describing your videos with your chosen keywords will significantly improve your search rankings. I used a simple Flip video cam and recorded my 16 year old son’s high school science experiment then uploaded the video to the web at 8:00 am. By 11:00 am that same morning the video had the top 4 positions on page one of Google. By that afternoon the video had also picked up positions #6 and #8.
3. Video can be contagious. That is… it can go viral faster and easier than other forms of online content because of built-in video sharing tools common in most video hosting sites. For example: many of the YouTube videos produced by BlendTek promoting their blenders have more than a million downloads.
   Take a look at Matt Harding’s video called “Where The Hell Is Matt?”  Matt traveled the globe and spent 14 months to produce the video. It has pulled over 22 million downloads in just the first few months of its release.

   It’s no coincidence that the music industry has adopted the use of online video to promote their artists’ records. People share what they like and video sharing tools make it easy.

4. Video is interactive and social. Today, most video hosting sites allow people to comment on videos. Viewers are no longer merely watchers but can post their own thoughts about your video right there on the video page and engage you and other viewers in a conversation. Savvy marketers like you encourage & respond to these comments to build relationships with your audience. YouTube even allows you to post video responses to videos and comments… which takes the conversation and interaction to an even higher level.
5. Hotlinks can be embedded in the video. Some of the top video hosting sites today allow hot links to be embedded directly into the video so that viewers can click the link and jump to your landing page. Nonprofits like CharityWater.org use this very effectively to raise money for their cause by taking viewers to a “Donate Now” page as soon as the video ends while the donor prospect is still emotionally engaged and most ready to give. YouTube is monetizing video by embedding clickable ad overlays onto videos. These ads pop up at a specified point during the video.

There are more reasons that video is so powerful but these are my top five with embedded links being my favorite.

If you aren’t using video for your web marketing efforts then you need to start right now.

Fast is better than good. Don’t get bogged down in producing perfection, just get your videos recorded. You can worry about editing and polishing the videos later. I recommend that your start with client testimonials… even if all you do is read the letter on camera and show a close-up of the letter. Better yet, schedule a time to meet with some of your local clients and get their testimonials on camera. People want to know what others think of you and getting those comments in your clients’ own words is more powerful than any marketing you could write for yourself.