Long story short: More blog content is being produced than ever before, but engagement levels are dropping. In fact, more than half of all content gets no shares, comments or links.
One client that provides corporate education courses and training needed a visual element to enhance their blog, which initially only featured news articles and whitepapers. At the recommendation of Brafton’s marketing consultants, they added video blogging to their strategy.
At Brafton, we define video blogs as: 1- to 3-minute videos that complement a written post. They’re short, bite-sized amounts of information that support the overall theme of the accompanying text article.
Brafton Account Director Tiffany Schreiber said when clients first sign on to Brafton’s services, she recommends this content format because video blogs provide faster return on investment than traditional written content.
“Written content strategies that feature blogs and news articles typically start to generate results like increased traffic, lower bounce rates, etc. over the first three to four months. With video blogs, however, my clients see faster results – closer to the two-month mark in their strategies.”
The same was true for this education firm. Here are five results our client saw with video blogs:
1. Longer session durations: Video users are spending almost 3 minutes more per page than the site-wide average.
2. Lower bounce rates: 20 percent lower bounce rate among video users.
3. Stickier pages: Video users are clicking through 3.3 pages on the site compared to 1.6 pages for users who did not interact with video pages. Fewer video users bounced than site wide users who did not view a video page (58 percent vs 80 percent).
4. More returning visitors: Video users account for more returning users than the site-wide average.
5. More referral traffic to videos: Email refers the most traffic to video blog pages.
What makes video blogs successful?
Video blogs are designed to be easy to develop, produce, share and watch: overall, a straightforward way to jumpstart a content strategy. Expanding the type of content on a site not only adds depth, but attracts a more diverse audience. With video blogs, this can be accomplished quickly with palpable results.
Watching a video requires a different type of attention than reading a blog, which carries with it its own appeal. Some people may prefer them when they are multitasking, something that can’t be done as easily when it requires reading. Even if they’re not watching, they can still listen.
Here’s a few different approaches you can take for video blogging, with examples from our clients and Brafton.com:
