Simply put, a video article is a video that educates. They make use of graphics and storytelling to help your business engage with audience, get new subscribers and even build brand loyalty in customers.

However, they are not designed to sell your product. A video that sells your product is either a commercial ad or an explainer video, and such product videos are typically of 30-60 seconds long.

A video article, on the other hand, can be anywhere from 1 minute to 5 minutes or more, depending upon the topic explored and the budget allotted by the company.

Dr James McQuivey of Forrester Research says that the value of a 1 minute video is equal to 1.8 million words. In other words, a single video article would then be worth 1800 text articles of thousand words each.

A good example of a video article would be this piece from Ted-Ed, entitled “The Benefits of a Good Posture”. In 655 words and visuals that are worth million more words, Murat Dalkilinç talks about the science and muscles behind the need for a good posture, from sitting right to standing straight.

There are more of such video articles at Ted-Ed for you to engage with.

Likewise, here’s another great example of video article from Kurzgesagt.  This video article, entitled “The European Refugee Crisis and Syria Explained” addresses a complicated political issue. We all have heard bits of news regarding the situation in Syria from TV and newspapers. This 6 minute video article with a script that’s as long as 1125 words explains the conflict in Syria and the refugee crisis in a nutshell.

Ok, now that we have established video articles as a highly engaging content, let’s get straight to that question in your mind.

Why Should Your Company Invest On Producing Video Articles?

1. Consumers prefer videos over text.

Everyone loves videos. Yes, even the senior executives at Forbes, 59% of them, the study says, preferred to watch a video over reading text, if both were available on the same page.

New York Times puts you in a similar situation. If you open up this article page, you would be greeted by a nice article and its video counterpart. In the article and the video as well, the film critic A.O. Scott shares his thoughts on the Academy Award nominees competing for the best animated short film.

Test: Open up this New York Times page, and see which one you prefer: video or text?

Incidentally, here’s the video, entitled “Oscar Animated Shorts Roundup”.

I should also mention that The New York Times, in collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Biointeractive, has been developing a series of animated videos using paper-puppets. Do check out these cool videos of Animated Life, if you’re interested.

2. Video builds up emotional attachment & brand loyalty in customers.

Buying, for consumers, has become an emotional act. They are willing to spend money on companies and products that they feel good about or are emotionally attached to.

Video articles can make use of powerful storytelling and visuals to trigger emotion in the viewer, and thereby make them feel more connected with the company which produced such video. After you manage to connect with them emotionally, it would be easy to convert them into subscribers.

For instance, I myself subscribed to the mail list of This American Life (used to listen to their podcasts a lot) and The New Yorker after watching this warm, and delightful story of a, er, parenting mistake. Here’s Mirror for you.

The video is really well made, and you don’t even need to question about the quality of the storytelling. It’s top notch, as expected from The New Yorker and This American Life.

Anyways, the bottom line is that, through the use of powerful visuals and story targeted to the core audience, businesses can increase their subscriber list.

3. Video Article make users spend more time on your website.

The average internet user spends 88% more time on a website with video content. Another statistic tells us that viewers who view videos stay on web sites an average of 2 minutes longer than those who don’t view videos. So there you go, another reason to start uploading video articles on your website.

Here’s is a how-to video article right from Howcast, a website dedicated to how-to videos and instructive guides. Needless to say, how-to videos and articles as well are kind of famous among readers.

Of the many lifesaving Howcast video articles, I like this one quite a lot: “How to survive a shark attack?” You can dig into Howcast website for more of similar video content.

4. Video article delivers your message clearer than a text article.

Our human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. In addition, the makers of video articles use visual metaphors and storytelling to heighten the viewer’s understanding of the content.

For instance, you must have heard about bitcoins, the supposedly digital currency of the web. The concept of bitcoin, crypto-currency and mining was kind of confusing to me. This video, “Bitcoin made simple” from The Guardian helped me understand it a little better at that time.

Moving on, here’s another video article from The Guardian, entitled “The NSA and Surveillance”. It’s almost 3 minutes long.  (The Guardian also publishes similar explanatory videos that are of just 60 seconds in length.)

This video article gives you a clearer picture about the global surveillance system and how it works.

Edward Snowden, the ex-NSA contractor, helped disclosed the global surveillance system, and made us aware that we are all being monitored, that someone is watching our every move online, reading our personal messages and listening to our private phone calls. Watch the video to understand it a little better.

5. Videos will dominate the global internet traffic, which means the more videos you have the higher your website traffic would be.

Video is one of the easiest way to gain Google’s spotlight. Putting video articles on your website will make it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google. So says Forrester.

Likewise, Cisco too predicts that, by 2019, 80% of the world’s internet traffic would be video.  It suggests that an era of video is fast approaching. And, as a smart entrepreneur or marketer, you should prepare your business for it.

Start producing video content from today to adapt to the new generation of video-craving audience base.

If Cisco’s prediction were to come true, and there’s a high chance it will, then in the near future, your target audience would demand videos and, if you can’t provide them, then they may very well drift away to your competitor.

In short, the more videos you have the higher your chances of bringing traffic to your website.

And, if you were to add a call to action at the end of a well-orchestrated video then that would mean your visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate would increase as well.

After that it all comes down to converting those leads into customers, which you can crack with an explainer video.

Read Next: 8 Ways Explainer Video Boost My Sales!

By: Sadbhav Shah

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