Why You Should Use Videos in WordPress

Videos tell a story using images, music, and words. According to Simply Measured, “Facebook photos and videos received the greatest share growth and greatest engagement generally”, and KissMetrics tells us that “viewers are anywhere from 64-85% more likely to buy after watching a product video”. So, yeah, it looks like videos are pretty cool if you want to increase your conversion rates!

Unfortunately, just a few marketers use videos regularly, probably because of the complexity entailed in their production. There’s a lot of things you have to keep in mind before doing anything, such as looking for the interviewees, or preparing a script for your tutorial and searching a voice-over actor, or contacting your customers and ask them for a testimonial… And once you have the video, you need to post-process it, upload it somewhere, internationalize it with subtitles… Yes, I know that creating videos is time-consuming and it can be quite complicated, especially if it’s your first time. But believe me when I tell you that, in the end, it really pays off.

If you’ve seen our blog lately, you’ve probably noticed that we also started to create and share video content! For instance, a few days ago we showed how to test WooCommerce products in Nelio, and before that we discussed how to install our plugin. These videos are part of our marketing strategy, which is aimed to create engaging content that both teaches how to use Nelio and gives our customers ideas for their own tests. What about yours? Would you like to use videos in your WordPress site? Then keep reading!

Before You Start…

Video production is not easy and it usually entails a pretty high upfront cost. That’s why so many marketers focus on copywriting only. They simply don’t want to leave their comfort zone—it’s much, much easier to write several blog posts per week talking about different topics each time than it is to produce a video. Compare that to the creation of audiovisual content. The latter does not only require a topic, some research, and a script (as blog posts do), but also recording a session, post producing the video, uploading it somewhere, and then maybe promoting the video in its own post (thus requiring you to end up writing a blog post anyway!).

But let’s say you’re really interested in promoting your products or services using this awesome channel, because you do believe that videos can boost your business. Where do you start? What kind of video should you use? How should you create those videos? Do you need anything special? Well, lucky for you, I have a few ideas to inspire you.

Promotional videos

This is a classic. A simple video that describes a problem and presents your product as a (probably the) solution, highlighting its benefits and its awesomeness. For instance, take a look at my attempt at creating one of these videos:

I know it’s not super professional… but, hey, at least I tried! 😉

A better-looking example would be this other video promoting Adobe’s EchoSign service:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlUOVFr8rFQ

These videos are very useful for explaining to your visitors some complex ideas of your business, but in a way that is super nice to watch.

For producing this visually-outstanding videos, I recommend you get in touch with a professional video maker. For example, the guys at Room214 are pretty good at visual storytelling.

Interviews and Testimonials

Interviews are great for building strong relationships with the A-players of your sector, and they help you become thought leader in your area (because, you know, you’re interviewing the already-existing thought leaders!). Of course, you can interview people by e-mail, phone, chat… and then reproduce it in a written blog post (as we did in one of our blogs, WPrincipiante—a WordPress-centered blog for the Spanish community), but there’s nothing like having the interviewee in a video, right?

Similar to interviews are testimonials. In this particular case, though, you’re not interested in reproducing some guru’s opinions, but your customers’ thoughts on your product. How to get your customers in front of a camera can be very tricky, but being able to do so and having their testimonials on a video is awesome. Just think about it: your product’s so good that your customers are willing to talk about it on camera!

Then again, how can you convince your customers? Well, you may want to throw an office event (which you’ll record, of course) to attract them, and once they’re there, simply ask a few questions to get the feedback you need. Or offer a discount on your service for any customer willing to talk to you via Google Hangouts or Skype. Be creative!

Educational Videos: Tutorials and Webinars

Finally, tutorials and webinars are fantastic for educating your customers. It doesn’t matter how “easy to use” you think your product is—(some of) your customers will need help at some point. Webinars are high-value, low-cost events where you can host Q&A sessions with clients or product demos with prospects.

Tutorials are similar to webinars, but they’re meant to be offline. Describe how to perform certain actions on your product, explain how to overcome common issues, or share ideas that your customers can implement with your product, and you’ve got yourself a series of useful videos! Want to see an example? Here you have it:

Hosting and Using Your Videos

Before we discuss how you may insert videos in your pages and posts, it’s important to understand where your videos are stored. Basically, there are two options:

• Self-Hosted Videos. If you upload the video to your WordPress Media Library, then it’s saved in your server and, therefore, it’s self-hosted.
• Hosted Videos. You upload the video elsewhere (such as YouTube, Vimeo, and so on) and then link or embed the video in your WordPress copies.

Using one option or the other depends entirely on your specific requirements and your WordPress setup. In my opinion, however, hosted videos are the best option. On the one hand, self-hosted videos have a strong dependency on your hosting provider. If your server doesn’t have a lot of storage space, speed, and bandwidth, you’ll have plenty of issues. On the other hand, services like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia will automatically take care of your media encoding, so that your videos can be reproduced on all type of devices (thus reaching a broader audience).

Inserting videos in your blog posts and pages is super easy. If you uploaded the video into your media library, you can follow the usual approach (Add Media » Select the appropriate video » Insert Into Post). If, on the other hand, you decided to use an external service, you can easily embed them by simply pasting their URL in your page or post:

Check out this cool video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5coSKKimDo

That was a cool video.

WordPress supports YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, Vine, and many, many more! You can read more about Video Embeds in the Codex.

How to Split Test a Video

One of the first things I said today was: “believe me when I tell you that…”. Wrong! You should not believe anything a “guru” tells you. In marketing, there’s no such thing as universal truths, just ideas that worked for somebody and may also work for you.

Since this is an A/B Testing blog, I want you to follow a systematic approach and actually test whether videos improve your conversion rates or not. Here’s what I recommend you do before diving into the world of video production:

• Talk to some of your customers. Ask them if they’d like to have some video tutorials, explaining the ins and outs of your product.
• Take a look at your competitors. Do they use videos to promote and describe their services and products? Then you should probably give it a shot too!
• Think, think, think. A/B Tests always start with a hypothesis; that is, a belief you have that might be true. Why do you think a video might be helpful? What should it describe?

Once you feel confident about the usefulness of using videos in your website, it’s time to create the first one and test it:

• To use or not to use a video? Focus on a relevant page in your website (your landing page, your pricing page, the page where you detail your product’s features…), and test whether embedding the video somewhere (instead of, for instance, using an image) increases your conversion rate.
• Which video should I use? If you have several videos, you can test which one is better at converting your customers. For instance, in our landing page, should we use the video where we describe what A/B testing is? Or should we use one quick tutorial showing our customers how easy to use Nelio A/B Testing is?

In Summary

Videos are one of the best ways to engage with your customers. They tell a story using images, music, and words. There’s plenty of things you can communicate with a video, and there’s a lot of formats you can use depending on the message you want to send—tutorials, interviews, testimonials… each of which serves a different purpose. Use videos for improving your conversion rate optimization!

Featured Image by Jonathan Kos-Read.