Video is a hugely valuable and often overlooked element of a complete marketing strategy, particularly when it comes to financial services companies.
Long dead are the days of video being a shiny add-on sold in by digital agencies to prise more media spend out of clients, hiding behind vanity metrics with only tenuous links to ROI.
Video, if done right, can have a significant ROI attached to it. Here are just some of the business benefits that make video essential to financial services companies.
How video marketing can positively impact CRO + IDD
Product content helps increase conversions and this is even more applicable when the product itself is a little more difficult to understand.
People need products explained to them, especially if they are either high value or more complex products.
This is also becoming a necessity for insurance products with the intervention of Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD).
Anyone associated with the financial services industry will be aware of IDD (if not, then please, start panicking) but for those that don’t IDD in a nutshell is an FCA directive that has been put in place to effectively level the playing field when buying insurance, to ensure customers are fully informed so they can choose the right product for them when buying insurance.
Videos is a quick workaround to satisfy IDD criteria that offers you the chance to explain what product best suits your consumers and why, in an engaging way.
If your information isn’t fulfilling a prospect’s needs or engaging enough to hold their attention in a clear and concise manner, you run the risk of your prospect bouncing back to the SERPs to find their answer, or searching a specific term in a new tab and potentially landing on a competitor’s site.
These bounces will not only affect your conversions, but could also impact your keyword rankings – which moves us nicely onto SEO.
Traffic and SEO benefits of video marketing
The Cisco VNI forecast predicts three key stats for video marketing by 2020
- Internet video will account for 79% of global Internet traffic by 2020 – up from 63% in 2015
- Video traffic will be 82% of consumer Internet traffic by 2020 – up from 68% in 2015
- Business Internet video traffic will be 66% of business Internet traffic by 2020 – up from 44% in 2015
These figures speak for themselves in terms of the importance of shifting your content strategy to more heavily include video as a medium, to capitalise on organic traffic.
User demand for video is growing exponentially and financial services (FS) need to ensure they aren’t left behind by ignoring what audiences are clearly demanding.
FS search terms are hugely competitive so – providing you can implement video without impacting page speed – video can be a key differentiator in the SERPS against your competitors, working to increase your click through rate and dwell time – both important ranking factors.
I’m a huge fan of Rand Fishkin’s 10x ethos and video should be a huge part of your 10x strategy.
With this approach you can use video to help create content to rank for your chosen keyword that is 10 times better than what’s already ranking, you can run split tests and monitor rankings pre and post inclusion to see if video has increased traffic for certain keywords and led to more revenue – to justify your ROI.
Another bonus video benefit for SEO is: strong video content gives you another weapon in your link building arsenal.
These links combined with strong engagement stats, will help your site be seen as more of an authority on a particular topic (a topic that is ideally closely related to a competitive commercial keyword you are tracking).
This will help fulfil the requirements from Google’s latest YMYL core algorithm change.
Ways video marketing complements social media
I may fall out of favour with some of the financial services industry for saying this but, more often than not financial services products and the content that goes with them are boring!
A well worked social media campaign that incorporates video is the perfect remedy to help a stuffy financial services brand connect with a new audience in an engaging way.
Furthermore with FS businesses often trying to engage audiences with complicated products over social media, video gives you the best chance of interrupting someone from their feed.
I have also read that:
“Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text” (but I have only seen this stat mentioned in many blogs, and haven’t yet found an actual study to substantiate it).
Social media monitoring tools can further help you measure your ROI for video marketing over social channels.
Summary
These are just a few of the benefits of a solid video marketing strategy that specifically (but not exclusively) apply to the FS industry.
Video, like any piece of content marketing doesn’t have a one-size-fits all approach.
Each piece of content needs a tailored KPI against it, video can:
- Improve brand awareness and engagement measured through metrics like time spent on page and social shares – this will help you increase your share of voice
- Improve key commercial rankings by increasing CTR from the SERPs, measured in increased organic visits to commercial pages
- Improve your backlink profile to increase brand and site authority, measured through domain authority (if your a Moz fan) or domain rating (if you’re Ahrefs)
- Increase conversions when added to commercial journeys, measured in conversion rate and revenue
So now, more than ever, is the time to adopt video as a cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy.
For expert content tips read our blog about What The Daily Mail Can Teach Us About Good Content.
