The Guide to Effective Landing Page Videos: 5 Rules you Don’t Want to Break

One of the most prolific and useful videos a business can create is a landing page video. If you are not familiar with the term, I’m sure you have seen them in your daily internet traveling.

What is a landing page video?

A landing page is a 90-second marketing video on a company’s homepage designed to describe their product or service offerings.

Having a landing page video provides you with a way to quickly and effectively deliver your elevator pitch to new website visitors. A homepage video can be your number one tool in battling website bounce rates because it offers a way to engage your audience immediately.

The five rules of a successful landing page video:

1. Tells a story that connects with your ideal customers
2. Pitch to your audience
3. Easy to call to action
4. Select a style to match your brand
5. Measure your results

Doing all of this in 90-120 seconds can be difficult but is far from impossible. A landing page video is often a well-planned, scripted, and executed piece of content. Think of the renowned Dollar Shave Club video that took the internet by storm years ago. They worked with a minimal budget and were able to make a powerful video with the right planning.

Tell a Story

A landing page video is a marketing video, but more importantly, it is a story. In this video, you want to tell a story that tells your customer’s story. Dive into the successes, failures, and everyday situations they experience in their business. Use these relatable situations as the building blocks for your video.

The first 5-10 seconds of your video are integral to keep your audience watching.

Start with a Hook

The first 5-10 seconds of your video are integral to keep your audience watching. If you start with a boring logo or bland intro, then you can say bye-bye to a percentage of your viewers. The introduction needs to hook your audience. This can be done with comedy, shock factor, or a disqualifying statement to hone in on your audience.

An example of a disqualifying statement would be, “As a business owner, you are already short on time…”. In this statement, we speak directly to business owners who are short on time. People who relate to that statement are going to feel hooked because the information speaks directly to them.

State the Problem

To sell your product or services, we want to reverse engineer your audience. We will do this by starting with a problem.

During or immediately after your hook, we want to illuminate a problem your viewer is facing. Don’t be afraid to really emphasize the problem and how it can snowball into other problems and issues for them.

Present a Solution

Once a problem has been established, we need to solve it. This is when your company comes to save the day.

Provide a clear solution on what they can do to solve these problems and the benefits of solving them. For more information on how to put together view our blog post ,Building a Video Strategy

Pitch to Your Audience

Just because you or CEO love the idea doesn’t mean it will resonate with your customers.

When creating your landing page video, remember who this video is for… Your Customers!

Just because you or CEO love the idea doesn’t mean it will resonate with your customers. Research what your ideal customer is. What are their likes/dislikes? What is the number one problem they are facing that your product or service solves?

The more specific you can be, the more you can expect to resonate with your ideal customer. Marketing to a more general audience will decrease the chances of your audience thinking, “This is it! Exactly what I’ve been looking for!”.

Not everyone will resonate with your video, and that is ok. Disqualifying people from your marketing gives your content more authenticity and doesn’t feel like such a gimmick.

Easy Call-To-Action

The primary function of your landing page video is to supercharge the top of your sales funnels. To do this, you need a straightforward and easy to take next step for your viewer. Adding any unnecessary steps or complicating information will reduce your conversion rate.

What you do for your call-to-action is up to you. If you are stuck, we came up with a few ideas to get you started.

Send to a Contact Form

The simplest way to convert viewers is with a contact form embedded next to your video. If a viewer is interested in more information to take the next step in your sales process, they can enter their information. The user can use the contact form for services such as scheduling a call, requesting a quote, or being added to your mailing list.

Receive a Guide or Video Course

Providing additional resources, such as a pdf guide or video training course, can boost your conversion rate and collect more email addresses. This method’s con is the additional work needed to create the guide or video course and build that into your sales funnel. This will prolong your sales funnel but may also provide more client nurturing than making them jump straight to a contact form.

Free Trial

For software as a service company, or SAAS, companies then offering a free trial is something to consider. Your landing page video will explain your product and its benefits so that a free trial will fit right into the natural progression of a sale.

While these are just a few options of what you could do with your call-to-action, you can do virtually anything! The most important thing is to make the next step as easy as possible. Any friction in your sales process will reduce your conversions and hurt your bottom line.

Select a Style to Match Your Brand

In this ever-important 90-second marketing video, you need to decide how you want to be perceived by your audience. Who is your brand? What is your style? Consider all facets of your video, such as the lighting, music, and actors you choose for your video. Every detail can affect how your audience perceives your brand.

Narration

The first step is to decide is how your video will be narrated. It is common in very corporate environments to use on-camera narration, such as an interview, to tell their story. Introduce your audience to the sales team or the CEO. This can be beneficial because it will personify the brand.

If your brand is working with complex ideas or software as a service, then voiceover narration is more common. This is because voiceovers are able to distill down complex ideas with a well-written script.

Animation or Live Video

Another big decision is deciding to film your video or animate your video. Each option presents pros and cons.

Live Video is excellent for businesses with a physical location and personable staff. If your customers are engaging with any staff or your office, then live video is your move. Live video will show customers what it is like to work with you and who they may be working with on the day-to-day.

Animated videos are a better option if your business doesn’t have a physical location or if you have a very complicated product or service. Much like voiceover narration, animated videos can make complicated topics very easy to understand. If you are running software as a service or don’t have a location to film your video, you should consider animation.

What is the Tone?

When writing the script of your video, you need to consider the tone. How do you want to be perceived by your audience? If you are a law firm, then you may want to go for a clean-cut video. However, if you are a marketing firm, you may want to go for a more creative approach.

Think about your audience and what tones they will resonate with. Creating a video without that in mind will leave your audience thinking you aren’t a good fit for the job. A plumber creating a video to promote their services can be lighthearted due to the lighter subject matter. A mortician, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t be making as many jokes. Not listening to your customers’ needs can leave you looking unprofessional or maybe even too professional and not a good fit for them.

Measure your Results

Creating a video is an investment in your business, financially, and most importantly, your time. Despite the video being rendered out and uploaded to your website, your job is not over yet. Video hosting platforms such as Wistia provide lots of ,data about your viewers that you should be watching.

Number of Views

This is the most straightforward metric. It doesn’t provide a lot of information, but it is worthwhile to check. For a landing page video, this metric isn’t as valuable as other metrics.

Video Engagement

Video Engagement is the percentage of the video that a viewer watches. This will tell you how long your viewer decided to watch your video, and at what point did they decide to drop out. After collecting numerous views, you will learn if certain parts of your video are causing viewers to drop off because they don’t like it or are rewatching it because they didn’t understand it.

Play Rate

For a landing page video, this is crucial! The play rate is the number of people who load your webpage and decide to click on your video. A low play rate can indicate poor video placement on the page, an unpleasant thumbnail image, or the web page isn’t making it clear why the website visitor should click the video.

Before and After

You are comparing your website’s performance before and after the video being embedded is very important. This will show you the immediate reaction to video by your website viewers. This can be demonstrated in your website’s bounce rate and time spent on the page. If your metrics have gone up, then you can tell your audience is enjoying your video.

Conversion Rate

A conversion rate is the percentage of people that take action after watching your video. You can monitor these results in Google Analytics or, in some cases, a video hosting platform such as Wistia. Tracking your conversion rate is crucial to keep track of your sales, new inquires, and conversions. Over time you will be able to see the return on investment your video is providing your business.

If you are struggling with conversion rates discover,Why Your Videos are Not Converting

Creating a landing page isn’t something that happens overnight. It can seem like a significant investment because, frankly, it is. Videos are a piece of marketing content that will work for your business around the clock. It is a vital marketing tool that can yield excellent results when done correctly.

At Chocolate Bar Studios, we understand that trying to create a video in addition to your everyday business activities can be stressful. To make life easier and more successful for marketers and business owners in the greater Philadelphia area, we provide a full-service video production solution. We specialize in working with businesses to create video marketing content to help your business engage your customers online and grow your business. If you would like to learn more about us and our services send us a message to talk further.