Hi, Lauren Kaye, here. In this week’s Content and Coffee, let’s talk about making money. A LiveClicker study claims that consumers who watch videos spend more money online. Of the companies  surveyed, half said their average order values increased by 50 percent if people watched videos. Click play to watch the video below, or read on for the text version. 

Video is hot right now, but that doesn’t mean you’ll always see these kinds of results just by creating any old video. There are a lot of bad videos out there already. The marketers who are experiencing a lot of success also have smart SEO strategies.

Here are 5 tips to optimize videos for higher conversion rates:

1.Create short videos for high impact

You have about two minutes to deliver your message before people will stop watching. No one wants to spend five minutes watching a product video, even if it’s good – so keep it short and sweet.

Check out this related video for a detailed look at video drop off rates:  
The data you SHOULD be looking at to measure video success

2. Make your videos entertaining

Don’t make boring videos. Check out Dollar Shave Club’s viral video for an example of how brands are getting creative to capture customers’ attention. Just make sure the message is relevant.

Be sure to review Content Strategist Tiffany Schreiber’s advice about How to entertain people with your content

3. Build a video archive on your site (… & then YouTube)

If you want the biggest SEO bang for your buck, publish the videos on your site first and promote them from there. This gives Google some time to crawl them and attribute them to your site. After a few weeks, upload them to YouTube to get in front of a bigger audience.

If you want the biggest SEO bang for your buck, publish the videos on your site first and promote them from there.

4. Add a call to action

To get people to convert, give them an easy way to make the purchase. Add a CTA to the end of the video if you can, so people see it when they’re done. But if you don’t have that functionality, make sure there’s a path to purchase on the page.

5. Make your video mobile friendly

A LOT of smartphone users watch videos on their mobile devices every day – especially when they’re looking up product information in stores. Make sure your video shows up on mobile devices AND looks good.

Thanks for watching, and happy content marketing!

Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.