Excerpted from Video Growth Hacking for Channel Chiefs (Business Success Press, 2016)
Channel marketers sometimes feel uncertain about escalating automated video to the top of their channel enablement priorities, or they’re concerned about convincing their Marcom colleagues to drop much of what they’re doing in favor of video.
Here are 8 reasons why channel partners need strategic video content more than any other type of marketing vehicle.
1) Video is the marketing trend for fast-growing B2B businesses. 96% of B2B companies plan to use video marketing in 2016. (Merchant Marketing Group)
2) Video gives your partners a major SEO advantage. Adding video to the Home page of a partner's website increases their chance of a front-page Google result by 53X. (Nate Elliot/Forrester Research)
3) Video helps your partners build rockstar brands and grow beyond their local markets. YouTube is now the #2 global search engine. (YouTube) That means your partners must be “findable” on YouTube with professional, high-value videos or you’ll miss out on a sizable chunk of sales growth.
4) Video forces your partners to grow. It makes their email marketing almost twice as effective, because an introductory email that includes a video link typically posts a 96% increase in Click-Through-Rate (CTR). (Implix) Couple this CTR increase with tracking that notifies partner reps about who clicked-through and when. Now you have a huge strategic growth advantage.
5) Video makes each channel partner's social media promotions far more effective. Instead of the low engagement most partners experience with their blogs or related social posts, their audience is projected to engage 10X more with video content. (Content Marketing Institute)
6) Video builds relationships and earns the trust of potential buyers. There are a number of reasons why this happens naturally, and some are physiological and some are psychological. For example, the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. (3M Corporation and Zabisco) And stories are 22x more memorable than facts alone. (Michelle Clayman, Stanford University)
And my personal favorite:
7) Video is sticky. Viewers recall 95% of what they see in a video, but only 10% of what they read. (Online Publishers Association)
Do you still doubt that video is the most important marketing and sales investment you can make and the best growth hack you can provide your partners? Here's one more reason:
8) Video converts better than anything else. 71% of marketers say conversion rates from video outperform all their other marketing content. (Vidyard) Nothing else comes close, and I’ll bet most of the remaining 29% haven’t tried video yet!
Beyond all the impressive statistics, there are other less measurable but equally potent reasons video is essential to you and your partners:
• Video engages the audience directly
• Video conveys your perfectly crafted message every time
• Video makes your brand, solutions and partners real, likeable and trustworthy, thereby lowering purchase barriers
• Video leverages time — you can reach unlimited prospects and customers with messages recorded only once