Is video right for your website?
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Posted under: Marketing
Video has certainly gained popularity since most internet service providers have been able to offer high-bandwidth connections. After all, most people would rather watch a movie than read a book.
A powerful image can move you to tears. So can beautiful words. Music can affect you emotionally. Combine all these things into video, and obviously you have a medium with great force - and great potential for entertainment, education and advertising.
If a client’s product or service can be sold with a website that features or video pieces that are entertaining, engaging, humorous, informative or in some way enhance their message—video is great. Or, if a clients’ business is in comedy, movies, news, politics, sports or user generated content - anything in which users are coming to the site looking for video content—then yes, their website should have video on it.
Many businesses, however, do not need, or cannot afford to shoot proper video. Instead, they might have a video in the bag already, like a low budget TV commercial, or a link from You Tube that they want to use. Basically, anything so that they can say they have video on their site. After all, video always beats text and images, right?
Two of the most popular, ground-breaking sites ever made—Wikipedia and Flickr—feature no video. Their main method of displaying content is text and images respectively. And they’re awesome. The reason they’re awesome is because the content is plentiful, it’s user generated, and it’s interesting to its audience. My point is, video in itself will not make your site interesting. Good content always will.
I don’t object to the idea of using more video - however I think there’s a tendency with this mindset to put the cart before the horse, and place more emphasis on the method of content than the content itself. After-all, content is king. That’s what people are coming to your website for.
