There is no doubt that online videos are attracting more than their share of attention. The popularity of online video websites such as YouTube are evidence of this. Given the dizzying speed with which technology moves it is inevitable that the conventional online methods of advertising are giving way to more innovative approaches as website owners compete for the top search results.

Although good, original content is still essential, visitors to your site are becoming more sophisticated and if you want to maintain or improve your conversion rates your promotional strategy has to meet their expectations.

Even in South Africa a growing number of people have broadband and high-speed access to the internet. At the same time, file compression has become more efficient. Faster internet speeds combined with smaller video files has made it much easier to download files and has increased the demand for online videos.

Because video appeals to both the auditory and visual senses, people respond to it more readily than to text alone and information is more easily absorbed. However, although obviously your motivation for producing a video for your website would be to promote your products or services, a purely promotional video is generally not the way to go.

While the information might be valued by those who are specifically looking for it, for a much wider appeal your video needs to be entertaining, whether humorous, unusual or highly original.

In other words, try to link your brand to a video which is going to attract a great deal of attention and hopefully become a talking point. The advertising potential of a video which is copied and re-copied over the internet is invaluable.

Another reason why video marketing is successful is that you can introduce yourself to your prospective customers as a ‘real’ human being. Someone they can both see and hear.

This makes it a lot easier for them to form a trust relationship with you which, of course, goes a long way towards clinching a sale! Websites such as YouTube and Google Video provide free video distribution – an added advantage – and, in addition, you can promote your own video through any one of the social networks to start the ball rolling.

This versatility in the placing of your videos is another reason why video marketing works so well. Besides the online video websites and the social networking sites you can also post it on your own website or blog and invite others to do the same.

Add to this the fact that search engines such as Google give a higher page ranking to sites which contain videos and it becomes obvious that video marketing is a very effective way of getting your message across to a huge audience.

If that is not enough to convince you that video marketing is worth the trouble it takes to produce a video, research undertaken by a leader in digital marketing technology (Double Click) has shown that video ads have a significantly higher click through rate than image ads and therefore generate a much higher interaction with viewers.

In other words, more users not only click on the ads but stay engaged with the content. A good indication that video marketing really works.