Use video to increase engagement

Business Benefits

Increase site engagement, time-on-page, and conversions.


Make a spreadsheet listing all of your brand’s existing videos, including basic categorization data such as video topic, target stage in your sales funnel, and date.

To determine what videos you have to work with, look for brand, educational, testimonial, or product videos in your brand asset management system that are high-quality, provide value, and answer your audience’s questions and pain points. Consider trimming longer videos into digestible clips.

Create short video clips in-house or using an outsourcing platform based on insights from your web analytics.

Choose video topics to produce by looking through your web analytics with these questions in mind:

  • Are there certain high-trafficked keywords or search phrases that bring people to your site, but don’t have video content for those words?
  • Are there pages that get a lot of hits but don’t have any preexisting video content?

Optimize your videos by creating a custom thumbnail and making sure every video has a clear goal and audience.

Other video optimization strategies include:

  • Use a main keyword in the title and throughout the video.
  • Add time stamps to help viewers skip to the section they want to watch.
  • Add branded graphics to your video during the editing phase.
  • Include a call to action within the video and in the web copy near the video.
  • Compress the video to speed up page load times.
  • Add subtitles or closed captions to the video.

Embed videos on your website through your video host and customize the video player to fit your needs.

Compare video hosting options by considering your budget, goals for video, like lead generation or increasing brand awareness, and customization preferences. Some options are YouTube, Vimeo, Vidyard, and Wistia. Customize the video player to remove distractions, fit your website design, and resize for mobile. Change the color, size, privacy levels, add your logo, and more, to fit your branding and goals, if your video hosting site offers easy customization features.

Although YouTube’s video player does not have many customization features, you can manually add some customizations in the URL. For example, if you add ?rel=0, then the player will only show related videos from your channel after the video plays.

Include a brand video in a prominent position on your homepage or about us page to introduce your brand identity and mission.

This works particularly well if your brand has invested in creating an engaging, high-quality video that introduces your brand culture, tells your brand story, or explains the value proposition of your product. For example, Wistia includes an explainer video that introduces its product and brand in the hero section of its homepage, with supporting copy and a call to action next to it.

Place a product demo, tutorial, explainer, or other product video on your product page to answer your audience’s product questions.

For ecommerce product pages, consider putting the video in the image carousel with a play icon, like how REI includes product videos within the product page’s carousel with play icons. For businesses with only a few products, consider placing the video in a more prominent place, like the hero section on the product page or on your free trial landing page, like Moz Pro’s explainer video on the landing page that you’re directed to after clicking the pay-per-click ad.

Embed an educational or how-to video near the question or idea it answers.

Embed on a customer support page, FAQ, resource library, or in a blog post. For example, Airtable embedded a screencast tutorial at the top of one of its support pages that directly answers the page’s question, while also providing text instructions below the video.

Create a page on your website with all videos that fit within one theme, like testimonial, educational, resource, or support videos.

Consider creating the same video resource library on your YouTube, LinkedIn, or Facebook pages to increase engagement, like how Clorox has the same videos on a section of its resource page as it does in a YouTube playlist. Another option is to use your resource page as a lead generation tool, like Atlassian’s product demo page that includes registration for live Q&A videos and on-demand product demo videos that require submitting your email address and contact information to access the videos.

Break up large blocks of text in blog posts or text-heavy pages with a relevant video.

For example:

  • Create a blog post around one of your top-performing videos and embed the video at the top of the blog post.
  • Turn a top-performing blog post into a video and then embed the video on a relevant place on your website, like a text heavy resource page.
  • Embed a relevant video that was created by someone else, with credit, into a blog post to provide an example.

Add compelling supporting copy near each video to provide more context and a call to action.

For example, Tasty includes a vertical video on its homepage from Instagram stories about how to cut an onion, with a caption below it that says what the video is about and a call to action to follow them on Instagram. This example also shows how to cross-promote your social media channels on your website and increase engagement on multiple channels.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T15:15:38Z