I was asked again this week whether video really was all that important, or whether it was just window dressing. Surely text and images on the web site, with supporting documentation such as white papers, data sheets and CAD files does the job just as well. The independent research on the impact of web video suggests otherwise.

According to the latest research, 52% of product buyers says that watching product videos makes them more confident in their purchase decisions. And when a video is information-intensive, 66% of them will watch the video two or more times. Product videos play a key role in purchase decisions.

Visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not. And visitors to websites that contain video will stay on that site two minutes longer on average than on sites without, and are 64% more likely to make a purchase. More than three out of five buyers will spend at least two minutes watching a video that educates them about a product they plan to purchase.

Don't forget, also, that video results appear in about 70% of the top 100 listings (according to Marketingweek, 2011), and is the type of content most often displayed in universal or blended search results.

I firmly believe that every product or product group should have a video of some form associated with it, and looking at the above it's easy to see why. All the research suggests that people are more inclined to believe something they see than something they read, and that has massive implications from a marketing perspective.

I can tell you from my work on Industrial Technology magazine that enquiry habits have changed with the advent of the web. The internet provides a pre-filtering mechanism where buyers can narrow down their list of potential suppliers long before they ever make an enquiry. How many potential sales might you be missing because your web site wasn't doing quite as good a job as a competitor's? Video can play a massive role in keeping visitors on your site longer.

One final statistic for you, which is very interesting for people like me who offer video production services. According to 2012 research conducted by Comscore, professionally produced video optimised for eCommerce outperforms user-generated video by 30%, delivering a 24.7% lift in sales compared with an 18.7% lift for the user generated video.