Published: January 9, 2012
by David Barrow
This Sunday morning on MSNBC’s Your Business, web video was cited as one of the top five trends for small business in 2012. That’s no surprise, considering the benefits web video can bring to your business. Videos are classically “sticky” marketing pieces, meaning that potential customers tend to click on video links more often than other types of links and tend more often to view the entire message once the video has started rather than surf on before the message has been viewed.
Why? Part of the reason is human nature. A page of text is a little like a gift that has to be assembled by the recipient before there’s a payoff. A video is more like a plug-and-play game that offers immediate gratification. Interest increases as the game continues, and curiosity about “where it will all end” keeps us engaged until we come to some kind of stopping point.
There also seems to be a cultural component. Since at least the mid-fifties, we’ve been a society trained to respond to moving images on a screen. If you’re reading this, you know that text still performs an informational function, but the more I write, the more I’m bucking the odds that you’ll get bored, distracted, or carried off by some other task.
So, I’m keeping this short. And I’m also sending you to a sample video. It’s a commercial we just completed featuring Rick Dale from the History Channel’s American Restoration. It’s short, fun, and it gets the point across.