In a 2018 survey, 54 percent of people said they wanted more video content. Now is the time to add features consumers want to your site. Simply adding videos allows you to stand out from the competition. Here are nine ways that embedding videos will lead to better conversions and some ideas for how to get the most traction from them:
1. Use YouTube
About 83 percent of consumers around the globe prefer YouTube for video delivery. If you’re just getting started creating videos or adding them to your pages, there is no reason to invent the cart. In fact, hosting videos on your own websites eats up your bandwidth and could slow down page load speed. Simply use YouTube to easily embed videos on your site. You can either use videos you’ve shot and uploaded to YouTube or seek related videos from noncompeting sources.
SoCal Honda Dealers is known for its random acts of kindness in the local community. It only makes sense that it highlights this through embedded videos that link to its YouTube channel. There, you’ll find a collection of videos that include helping local sports teams, recognizing teachers during teacher appreciation week and profiling award winners.
2. Brag in emails
Simply mentioning the word video increases email open rate by 19 percent. If you embed videos on your site, you can mention this in your subject line. Let’s say you wrote an article on how to save a rose bush from Japanese beetles and you embedded a video showing the process to mix up the solution you put on your roses. You would simply use a subject line such as “How to Save Your Roses From Japanese Beetles Video.” Track your results and see how your open rate rises.
3. Highlight your team
Do your people make the difference because of excellent customer service or attention to detail? One way to showcase this on your site is to embed a video that highlights your team. Either showcase individual experts and let the consumer get to know them better or show your workers in action so that the potential customer can see how well they’ll meet the needs of those who hire them.
New City Moving does a good job of highlighting its teams of movers by showing “how we work” in a YouTube video it has embedded on its website. It clearly explains how the company solves a problem and makes life easier for those who hire it.
4. Limit HTTP requests
You don’t want embedded videos to slow down your site’s load times. Users are impatient and most won’t wait around if your site freezes. One way around this is by using thumbnails rather than the full-size video. This allows your page to load fast but still lets you embed videos from online providers. If the reader wants to view the video and clicks on it, it will enlarge on their screen.
5. Use social media
Social media videos are growing in popularity. More than 500 million people watch videos on Facebook every day. Uploading videos to the social media site where your demographic spends its time is a smart move. You can still upload those videos to YouTube, but adding them to Facebook and even creating livestreams are smart business moves that may drive more leads to your site.
Scary Mommy posts humorous videos and snarky articles on Facebook and its online blog. Because its audience is made up of parents, Facebook is a smart place to put these videos. They’re shared thousands of times, helping reach people who might not already be followers. Note how it has embedded its Facebook video on its website in the screenshot above. The highlight is all on the video.
6. Attract Google
Google is rather fickle. It may love your site one day and send you tons of traffic and despise your site the next day. However, one thing Google does like is rich media. Adding videos and photos to your website, when done correctly, helps your ranking and pulls you up in the search engines. They key here is to make sure any videos aren’t a drag on your page speeds and that they are highly relevant to the topic at hand.
7. Highlight custom videos
If you regularly create videos as content for your readers, you should highlight them throughout your site. Make it easy for your users to find your new videos, either with a link or by showing your most recent ones within your content or in the sidebar. Another option is to highlight related videos within the content.
Her View from Home features a section in the middle of its posts that shows its most recent videos. The embed is small, so you can play it right on the page, or you can enlarge it to view in full-screen mode. Another interesting feature is that if the video is playing and you scroll past it, it will move over to the right sidebar as a tiny thumbnail, so you can still view the video as you read the text.
8. Stay mobile responsive
Studies show 90 percent of videos on Twitter are viewed via a mobile device. It stands to reason that your videos will be shared on social media. You’ll also get significant mobile traffic on your website. Keep this in mind when designing your site and make sure the size of the thumbnails is responsive to smaller screen sizes. If the user’s entire screen is taken up with one corner of an embedded video, the entire website experience is ruined.
9. Add videos often
The average business publishes 18 videos per month. Users need to know they can count on you for frequent rich content. You don’t have to create hour-long videos every time you release one. Instead, look for short topics you can cover in a fun way in a few minutes. People are busy, and they like shorter videos they can digest between appointments or over their lunch hour.
Videos in the future
Videos are likely to remain popular into the foreseeable future. Investing in adding videos to your website now will pay off for years to come. Embedding videos allow you to host them off your site, save precious resources and reduce load time for visitors.
This is a guest article by Lexie Lu. Lexie is a web designer and UX strategist. She writes for Marketo, Creative Bloq, Manta, Website Magazine and Cats Who Code. Check out her design blog, Design Roast, and follow her on Twitter @lexieludesigner.