So you’re a UXD professional tasked with building a website for a client that will not only draw people in, but keep them clicking around on the digital property for as long as possible. You’re aware that the Internet has caused people to consume vast amounts of information simultaneously, and a byproduct of this is that your site visitors have extremely short attention spans.
With so much competition for attention on the Internet, there is a very small window of time that a website has to make a positive impression on its visitors. If a site doesn’t satisfy whatever the immediate need is at the moment, an individual will quickly leave and navigate elsewhere until they find what it is they’re looking for. There are several ways to mitigate this, but they all revolve around the kind of content that is hosted on a particular site.
Video is a great way to increase page views while significantly lowering bounce rates. However, this doesn’t suggest that posting videos on a website just for the sake of adding content is an effective strategy. The visual content must resonate with the viewer. An individual’s decision to visit a particular site is driven by the content they engage with, and that content also encourages him or her to share and become a repeat visitor.
According to The Guardian, citing research conducted by Cisco, 69 percent of all consumer Internet traffic will be driven by consumption of video in 2017. Because of this, the importance of video as a promotional, marketing and advertising tool can’t be understated. Sleepless Media lists several helpful suggestions on how to properly leverage video to deliver positive outcomes:
- Keywords are critical: Tagging your video with relevant keywords related to the content being displayed is a great way to impact search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, increasing the potential audience for your website.
- Make videos easily shareable: When people view a video that they find valuable, they often share it with others across their social networks. Using social media tagging and other direct methods, videos can be easily distributable, which improves organic growth.
- Crosslinking: As someone clicks around to other pages on a website, proper crosslinking ensures that an individual can easily get back to a video they enjoyed watching without a lot of hassle. This is usually accomplished by linking to a word or phrase that, when clicked, takes the viewer back to the video they viewed previously. However, the most important part of this process is using language that captures the viewer’s attention, as opposed to something generic or non-descript, which they could easily ignore or not notice. These are just a few tactics that can make your video strategy more impactful. Properly leveraging this medium can have an overall positive impact on marketing and advertising initiatives.
