Simply defined, customer engagement is when a customer interacts with a brand through social media, mobile devices, or even direct communication. What makes customer engagement so important and necessary when it comes to marketing a clients’ business? Keeping in touch with your customers is critical and gives you insight on who your brand caters to and it’s a great tool for increasing your conversion rates. What’s a good way to have good customer engagement? First things first, you’d need to make them pay attention. Attention spans are dropping as time goes by. Although social media is one of the culprits for this, we can’t fully blame it on Instagram or Facebook. What we can do is accept that attention spans are growing smaller and find a way to adapt to the change. Videos are great at grabbing attention for many reasons. First of all, our eyes are attracted to movement, so videos naturally draw peoples’ attention. According to research, video ads interest people more than a static ad. People are 27 times more likely to click on a video ad than a static one. Secondly, videos do a great job of engaging viewers. So, not only do they attract attention, but they also retain it. Videos get 1200% more shares than text and images combined. Most of the time we’ve read an entire page and totally forgot what we just read. We end up going back to re-read it. This is called regression, and happens mostly when we read written text. Studies show that viewers are able to retain 95% of a message in a video compared to the 10% when reading written text. Videos make people want to share them on social media because they’re highly shareable and contain a lot of information minus the bulk. Also, our brains process visuals much quicker than text. Around 90% of the information transmitted to your brain is visual. Here are 5 ways video marketing can help you increase customer engagement:

1. Keeps Your Audience Entertained

Whether you want to admit it or not, video is an entertaining medium to convey information with. We talked about how our brains are attracted to movement than static images. It’s easier to follow a video than to read a whole book on a subject. When your audience is entertained, it means that customer engagement is in place. A good example would be this ad by Melbourne’s Transportation System, Metro. They wanted to raise awareness about train safety and this video was entertaining, retained people’s attention and was catchy as well:

2. Keeps it Simple

There are some concepts and ideas that are too complicated to explain so they require both visuals and written text to convey the message. With a video, a brand can use both moving images and text to communicate with their customers. It keeps the customers engaged and converts the complex message into something simple, digestible, and more interesting. Michael Dublin from Dollar Shave Club created this commercial with a minimal budget and a simple idea— to save people from wasting so much money on razors. The video was simple but extremely engaging:

3. A Broader Reach

With video, you can reach out to different kinds of audiences on different platforms. This works really well, especially if you use free video hosting sites such as Youtube of Vimeo. Youtube and Vimeo allow you to copy the embed code and share your video on a variety of platforms. You don’t have to worry about lagging or technical issues since these platforms are very reliable. By posting your video on different platforms, you can reach out to audiences that aren’t on certain platforms. For example, people on Instagram might not have Facebook and vice versa. So posting your video on these platforms allows maximum reach. Flossy Carter is an excellent example for this. He’s active on Instagram and shares snippets of his videos on his Instagram stories. He links them to his Youtube videos so his audience on Instagram also gets to see his newest videos:

4. Has Better Retention

We mentioned before that videos are great at keeping information retained. According to Hubspot, 80% of customers remember a video they viewed in the past month. Instead of a long textbook that’s boring and hard to remember, a video is a short narrative loaded with information. The narrative engages viewers and leaves a memorable impression, making video an excellent storyteller. People are more likely to remember a story than a long list of facts. Videos are also great learning aids for most people. Many people require visual aids to learn and 65% of people consider themselves visual learners. Videos accommodate this kind of learning style and help people retain information. Shane Dawson has transformed his Youtube channel with long-form videos. His videos run for at least 20 minutes to 40 minutes. Despite the long durations, his videos rake in 20 million views on average:

5. Increases Buyer Intent

A marketing campaign’s success depends on its conversions. This is when people have expressed their interest in your product or service. Videos are good at pushing customers to purchase. When customers watch a video of a product they are considering buying, it increases their buying intent by 97%. Also, 64% of customers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. Although, this doesn’t mean any video will do the job. You would need to create a video that meets the needs of your buyers. You can make videos that plug into the buyer’s pain points, answer their questions, or provide valuable information for them. Apple has been really good at displaying their products’ features by using the actual product to make videos. For example, they recently made Selena Gomez’s new music video with an iPhone: