What's your opinion on this? More and more people are using videos as way to generate sales, and this is evident in the launches that a lot of the 'gurus' are doing. Some are lead to believe that video marketing is the way of the future, whether it is sales letter or format of the product. Do you feel like this is the case? Do you think videos are going to take over text more and more?
As someone who writes product copy for a living, I think that video (or Flash animation that shows the features of a product) definitely has a place in advertising. It shows products more thoroughly than text can. That being said, I don't think it's replacing text, at least on-line (I can't speak for other media). I think that people will still read text descriptions and still write text reviews for a long time. Partly because it's just cheaper and easier.
It certainly seems like a trend. I don't know where it will go... but I personally like more when I get to read materials. I think videos can support text (think about newsletters for example), but who knows what the situation will be in couple of years.
The company that I work for has seen a definite rise in sales because of our videos. It's not a huge increase, but we are selling items that we had previously never sold before and our sales associates have said that customers are mentioning that they saw the videos.
It is difficult to say if video is more than text. I am now working a lot of with video. On some of my pages I am replacing videos from my blogs to my own video library. There is also true, that I am more times using youtube and other video servers, to look for necessary info. But text is still important. Web with video content and minimum text has no future, because web is place, where I am looking for information. And many info it is not possible to present by video. And of course also from SEO view it is necessary use text.
Video won't help you with SEO, as the engines still like to see words. Personally, I hate videos on sales pages. I can skim text, but there's no good way to skim a ten minute video. I was recently asked to promote a product that had a sales page that consisted only of a 39 minute video. You had to sit through the whole thing to find out the price and see the "buy" link. Worse - there were no controls on the video player and no indication as to the length of the video. You just had to sit through it. According to the product's creator, the thing sold like crazy. I made one sale of this very expensive product, but got a TON of complaints from my mailing list. Charlie
Camtasia has become popular to make sales videos and then upload them to youtube and other high traffic video sites.Video seems to convert better when there is no reading involved.
The only stipulation is that not everyone can view videos for some reason. Text is always a good thing to have, so in my opinion it will always have a spot and won't be replaced completely.
Videos are good only if your customers have broadband connections. But I think, more and more people are using mobile phones to access net now, and these phones have very slow connection speed. So, if your site has only videos, then you are asking for low sales. I personally, prefer to reader the relevant portions of the website, before committing my time for videos.
Videos are a force to be dealt with. They may never replace text, but videos are an important factor to blogs and websites. Go take a look at the professional sites like CNN, yahoo news and the British broadcasting company. There are a lot of videos that stream from those sites. If videos are good enough for the big players of the internet, why cant bloggers and small website owners use them as well? If you are not making your own videos, your competition might be passing you up. The time to make your own videos is not "on the way" its already here.
For me I like videos because I can't spell or write... but I can show you what I'm talking about with a video. I'm making new video all the time.... I'm up all hours of the night and when I have something to say... I click on the webcam and away I go. I'm planning on starting a video blog for each day... I'm working on MLM company again and looking for the long hall... I'm going to post one of my video here... All I ask is you to video it and leave some comments... I can take the good with the bad... youtube.com/watch?v=acZHgqbofZQ&feature=channel I've got more ideas for videos coming in the next week...