The growth of viewers watching online video and TV is constantly setting new records, rising 43 percent year-over-year to reach an unprecedented 38.2 billion videos watched in the second quarter of 2014, Adobe reports. Video marketing expenditure is accelerating to keep pace, with Forrester projecting that video will propel online display advertising spending from $19.8 billion in 2014 to $37.6 billion by 2019, accounting for 55 percent of all desktop-generated revenue. Rapt Media CEO Erika Trautman predicted on Forbes.com that interactive video will soon become the most powerful tool in today’s marketing arsenal. Now is the time to start looking into ways you can use video to enhance your company’s home page and increase your return on your marketing investment.
Use Background Video
Take a look at two sites using background video right:
• When you land on the home page for the Academy Award-winning movie “The Life of Pi,” you see a spectacular background video depicting visual highlights from the film. Creative Market uses this to illustrate a trend toward greater use of background videos over the past few years.
• PayPal’s home page provides an example of how this technique has been adapted to business use.
SitePoint.com offers some tips for using background videos effectively, recommending to mute the audio, limit video length between 20 to 25 seconds and design for viewing on a range of devices. Shutterstock features a library of videos that are suitable for background use.
Make a Welcome Video
Celebrity chef Paula Deen appears personally in a video to welcome visitors to the home page for her subscription-based interactive online cooking network. A welcome video puts a face on your brand and gives you an opportunity to personally connect with your site visitors.
AFP Marketing recommends that a welcome video should include three essential elements: The first few seconds of the video should quickly draw attention to the solutions, results and benefits you can deliver to your viewer. Follow up by explaining what’s on your site that can help them right now. Conclude with a call to action such as an opt-in invitation.
Demo Videos
Website building provider Squarespace won a Webby Award for its home page design where you can click to see a humorous video of Jeff Bridges demonstrating the site-building tool in action. The video exemplifies three guidelines recommended by Intel senior marketing manager Neda Stoll for effective video design:
• The video should educate audiences about a theme or topic or product
• It should solve a problem
• To avoid sounding overtly like an ad, it should be fun and engaging (a fun video stands more chance of getting shared socially, too)
Featured Videos
YouTube’s home page displays a constantly-updated menu of featured videos suggesting what visitors can watch. YouTube similarly allows you to select a featured video to appear across your brand’s channel, and Facebook recently added a similar capability.
As this illustrates, your home page video doesn’t necessarily have to stay static. A rotating featured video or set of videos keeps your home page fresh and gives visitors a reason to return for updates. You can adapt this technique to a WordPress site by using a plug-in such as Featured Video Plus, which enables you to use the platform’s Featured Images option to display videos. ElegantThemes.com provides examples of other plug-ins you can use to add a video gallery to your WordPress site.
