There have been lots of questions following my post from last week. One of the questions that cropped up a lot was whether video was really worth the effort. Well, to highlight how important it is, let’s play the numbers game - the number of people visiting your website, and the number of minutes they spend there.

To help illustrate my point, have a look at this page on the ABB Robotics website, detailing one of the company’s six axis robots. All the basic information is there, but so are all the extra resources you could need - data sheets, brochure, CAD files, application information... and videos - five of them, all providing useful supplementary information. Now, for my money the implementation is a bit clunky, with four of the videos either opening in new windows or having to download to the desktop to play. I’d rather see the videos embedded on the page and ready to play right there, but let’s not quibble about the detail. The point is that the videos are there, in the right place, providing extra information.

The important statistic I want you to bear in mind is that, on average, the time a visitor spends on a text-only site is 60 seconds. On sites with video, it’s 12 minutes.

What about influencing traffic to the website, though. It’s important to note that Google is now featuring videos on the first page on its search results, and the stats tell us that over 40% of searches result in a video being viewed. There are numerous tutorials online about how to get your video into Google search results, with this being typical of them. Remember that people don’t just search for specific products: they are also looking for specification information, how-to information, maintenance information - all things that really lend themselves to video. So the more videos you have, the more likely you are to be found.

And how is ABB Robotics doing on that front? Well, take a look at the company’s YouTube page here, and you’ll see that the videos have had almost two million views. And that’s just from loading up one new video a month for the last few years.

You could be starting your own YouTube channel and embedding videos on your own website today for beer money. I’ll you’ll excuse the blatant self promotion of my own magazine, take a look at the video I’ve embedded on this page of the Industrial Technology website. This was a video that was extremely simple and straightforward to put together, but we could simplify things even further by basing the video just on still photographs, with a bit of computer generated panning and zooming to create motion. No cameras, no lighting, no daunting presentations. If you already have product photos and perhaps some images showing application areas - perhaps images that you’ve already used in a brochure or other product literature - then you have the basis of an excellent product or case study video.

Of course there’s a time input involved, and you need to know your way around your video editing software. You’ve also got to think about storyboarding you video and writing appropriate captions to create a logical flow of information. You might want a soundtrack and you might want to script and record a voiceover, so there’s a bit more to it. But even so, that’s something I’d look to be putting together for around £150 as a guide price. And that video could be working hard for you for many years to come.