Using Video To Drive Traffic to Your Website

Marketing Experiments did a cool study to explore whether a video could increase targeted traffic to your site and guess what they found? Yup, it works amazing well.

Here is what they did:

They put entertaining (not promotional) videos on YouTube and Google video and then measured the times they were viewed, how many people clicked to the website (mentioned in the video), and how many site visitors converted to subscribers.

They concluded that it was well worth the effort and came up with these suggestions for using video:

1. Keep your video clips short, preferable under 5 minutes. Most people browse through a number of videos when visiting sites like YouTube and Google Video, and may be unwilling to give any one video too much of their time
2. Ensure that your video has interesting, entertaining or provocative content. If it doesn't "wow" people, they will have little incentive to share it with other people they know, or across their social networks.
3. Be cautious about including commercial or promotional content. The most powerful short videos are those which are purely entertaining. It's when people click through to your site that the time is right to add your sales message.
4. Don't plan on creating just one video. It is hard, if not impossible, to accurately predict which videos will enjoy wide, viral distribution. Our own testing demonstrated that some videos were shared more than ten times as much as others. So plan on creating a series of clips, and learn from the one which performs the best.
5. Optimize your video clips to maximize distribution across social network sites, use tags and bookmarking links to help people find, save and share your videos.
6. Create videos that multiple people (possibly some of your customers) appear in. The best team of viral marketers you can hire are people who appear in your video and pass the video to their friends and family.

You can read more about their research here and watch one of the videos they used in the study here.