The Creative Alliance, Strategic Marketing, Interactive, Public Relations

Video on the Web

Seconds.

That’s often all you have to captivate a visitor to your website.

People subconsciously scan a page and make decisions about not only what they see, but what they expect to find if they stay and keep clicking.

Try it yourself. Pull up a site you’ve never seen before and pay attention to how your eyes scan the page and the conclusions you draw about the site and its content in the first three seconds.

This tendency to a quick scan and digestion of information hierarchy when visiting a website is why video is so useful in fast-tracking the visitor’s experience, especially a visitor disinclined to read long pages of text.

Seeing the opportunity to catch a video clip can stop many visitors long enough to click the video’s link. The video better cut to the chase pretty quickly, but at least the user is engaged at this point.

A big decision you’ll have to make is whether YouTube quality video is going to get the job done or if professional production will set your company apart from competitors.

We generally steer clients away from the overly informal YouTube approach, unless of course they want to appear informal for strategic reasons. Sure, YouTube thrives on informality. It’s fun. But it’s also why Google is losing money on it: serious companies with big ad spends have held back from investing in a medium that is so rife with amateurism.

Professional-quality video is bound to make a far better impression, and certainly communicates that an organization spent more than 200 bucks on a video camera.

High quality video suggests that a company believes in its own message enough to deliver it with precision and style, and has the financial resources that suggests staying power for the future.

It’s subtle, but it’s something people notice.