The following article is a guest post by Kayleigh Alexandra of Microstartups.org.

Landing pages are a great opportunity to create a powerful first impression that your visitors will remember.

A strong landing page is a crucial part of converting those leads into sales. And one of the best ways you can optimize this is by incorporating video. 

Video is a hugely successful medium for marketing your brands and products — the statistics don’t lie.

In this post, we’ll be taking a closer look at the many reasons why your most profitable landing pages need to incorporate video. Read on for inspiration.  

Showing not telling works best for product demonstration

When it comes to sales, showing rather than telling is considerably more successful.

Visitors to your site don’t want to read a lengthy description of your product, including 97 essential features. They want to be grabbed by a visual, easy-to-watch, explainer video that tells them everything they need to know without wading through a river of written information. 

This is particularly true if you’ve got a more complex product that needs some explanation for how it works. 

If you want to increase sales easily, simply demonstrate how to use your product. For the people genuinely interested in purchasing, this demo is invaluable; it shows them exactly what to expect and answers any questions they have. And better-informed consumers are more likely to buy, and less likely to have inflated expectations about your product’s capabilities. 

Visual content is more memorable to visitors

Generally speaking, we’ve all become far more impatient and lazy as consumers in recent years. Our attention spans are becoming shorter, and we tend to be attracted to visual, vibrant content much more than long-form, written text. This means that video is way more likely to make a memorable impact on your visitors than anything you write.

Visitors would much rather watch something than read it — it’s more fun, it’s more digestible, and it can communicate more in a shorter space of time. 

Video gives you the chance to tap into this mentality; providing snippets of entertaining and informative visual content. Not only will visitors to your landing page automatically be more inclined to listen to what you’ve got to say if you’re sharing it in a video, but it will also stay in their heads for longer. Research shows that viewers retain an incredible 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to just 10% when reading it as text.

Long-term, this could be the difference between a visitor on the brink of converting either forgetting about your product or returning to your landing page at a later date to complete their purchase (after they couldn’t stop thinking about your awesome video).

Videos create emotional connections

Video isn’t just about being memorable — it’s about creating a meaningful, emotional connection with your visitor at a point in the customer journey where they are considering buying your product. 

The interest is already there, so at this point (on your landing page) you can use video to increase buying intent through an emotive narrative.

Whether it’s a new prospect or loyal customer, there are a few ways you can connect with the viewer in a video:

• Make your product more “real”: although there are many perks to E-commerce, it sometimes means that your consumers can be quite detached from your product. The right type of video can give consumers a feel for your product and makes it more tangible. Video can be used to evoke a feeling about your product — whether this is luxury, fun, sustainability or body positivity — which can inspire your customer to invest. 

• Create a customer testimonial video: customer testimonials are already extremely effective at convincing consumers to buy, and using a video format enhances this effectiveness. Use this type of video to highlight the impact your product or service can have on people’s lives, or reflect on positive customer experiences.

• Tell your story: draw customers towards your brand by telling your origin story, sharing your values or talking about how you came up with the concept for this product. You could also get members of your team to discuss their favorite aspects of the product, highlighting its perks but also building trust through introducing the faces behind it.

• Offer valuable information: using video to teach visitors about your product means you’re offering them valuable, educational content without seeming too aggressive or salesy. Consumers will feel more comfortable the more they know about a product, and more inclined to trust you. 

All of these messages can be communicated in a very short space of time, building emotional connections between your brand and your customers, and ultimately persuading them to buy from you.  

Video can boost your SEO 

All of the reasons above for adding video content to your landing pages — customers find them engaging, emotive and memorable — have a knock-on effect on how your online store performs in search. 

Video can positively contribute to your SEO efforts in a number of ways. 

For example, video tends to keep visitors on your landing page longer, increasing the length of time they stay on your website. Not only does this give them more time to familiarize themselves with your brand and for your product to make an impact, but it also indicates to search engines that you have high-quality, valuable content on your website — which boosts your SEO. 

And as consumers start to favor video search results over other formats, this ranking factor will continue to increase over time — making your video content exponentially more valuable.

As Jamie Salvatori revealed on the podcast Marketing Speak that “you got to try everything” to go viral. But even if you don’t have the resources to experiment for that level of peak interest, creating an engaging video for your landing pages can earn links, whether it’s on social channels or other people’s websites. In fact, link building via video simultaneously increases your SEO ranking and markets your brand, funneling more traffic to your website.

Video content promotes trust 

Video can also be a strong tool for encouraging trust in your brand — which is vital if you’re going to persuade consumers to part with their hard-earned cash. 

Loyal customers will already be familiar with your brand and your products, but first-time visitors to your landing page are only at the start of the customer journey. More often than not, they will know very little about your business or your product, and need to be convinced that you’re an online merchant to be trusted — and one that has a valuable offering. 

Video can increase trust levels for a few reasons: 

• By giving consumers more information about your product via your video, you’re showing them what to expect and proving the transparency of your site — an important factor in building trust as a seller.

• Customer testimonial videos, in particular, are worth far more than you boasting about how great your product is; a potential new customer will trust honest opinions from an existing customer rather than believing you (until you’ve earned that trust).

• A video that features you or one member of your team boosts trust signals because it humanizes your brand and makes the visitor’s experience more personal — showing them the real people behind the product. To stand out from your competition, you need to be distinguishable, and this is a great way to do it.

By boosting your trust signals with video, you can ensure that your most profitable landing pages don’t just engage but also convert. 

If you’re an E-commerce business owner, then incorporating video content into your most profitable landing pages is clearly a must.

Not only will video help to make your page and product more memorable, but it will also boost trust signals, engage visitors effectively and create meaningful connections — not to mention boosting your SEO. 

Ultimately, this will lead to increased engagement and drive sales. So if you want to bump your conversion rates, then it’s an obvious — and essential — addition to your landing pages.