Video for on-line lead generation.

As bandwith continues its inexorable downward cost video will become more and more predominant on websites, but is it as effective and engaging as people (such as myself) would have you believe?

According to Avelyn Austin at Search Marketing Sage it is.

They conducted a landing page test with Video and a White Paper and found that, “by offering searchers a free 3-minute video describing the company and its offerings in exchange  for their contact information there were 373% more leads obtained than there were when we offered searchers a free whitepaper in exchange for their contact information”.

Avelyn also went on to report that, surprisingly to me, the “cost per conversion for each lead obtained from the video offer was 35% less expensive than the cost per conversion for each lead obtained from the whitepaper offer“.

The idea of video being highly engaging has been an intuitive call based on empirical observation of my own net use (how long I dawdle on videos versus read), so it was interesting to see someone do some more rigorous testing and put some numbers around it. I think over the next eighteen months there will be a greater move toward a larger range of organisations generating video content for on-line use, which will in turn increase the quality threshold, not in the videos themselves but in the standards of what is required to gain viewers. Quality content will rise to the top.

(Photo by: Steve Rhodes)