5 Types of Video to Use on Your Website

Mikel Bruce
3/17/2020

Videos can be a powerful addition to any website. Your business can use videos to explain its product, feature happy customers, and show off the employees behind the business.

If you’re looking for marketing choices with a high ROI, increased conversion rates, and a broad appeal, try video marketing.

Video marketing is now an essential part of any business plan, and studies show that video consumption will account for 80% of all web traffic online.

Video can be used in powerful ways on a website, from creating an emotional connection with web visitors to increasing conversions. But if not done well, video can also distract web visitors and undermine a great web design.

Learn how you can use videos on your website.

5 Types of Videos to Use on Your Website

  • Home page background video
  • Video blogs
  • Testimonial videos
  • Process or service videos
  • Employee or team videos

1. Home Page Background Video

The website home page is the place for your brand to shine, and, not unsurprisingly, it is one of the most-visited pages on your site.

A background video in the top part of the home page — the hero section — is a great way to captivate your audience and create an immediate emotional connection. You need to be very careful when selecting a video for this part of the site, however. If the video has too much movement, it will distract web visitors and contribute to a poor user experience.

The hero video on the TLM Technologies website is an excellent example of a subtle yet engaging use of video in a website design.

TLM Technologies

 You’ll also need to consider the size of the video and make sure it can be optimized for the web. While other videos can be embedded on the site, the background video often needs to be uploaded directly to the site. In that case, if the video file size is too large, it may slow down the website and hurt the overall performance.

Finally, remember that the background video can’t have any sound playing. Even if you select a video with sound, web browsers will automatically block the audio from playing when a visitor comes to the site.

2. Video Blogs

Content marketing is a critical aspect of B2B and B2C strategies today, and according to recent studies, 51% of marketing professionals name video as the content with the best ROI in their content marketing campaigns.

If you’re looking to cash in on the benefits of video marketing, start by posting video blogs. Posting regular content on your website has big benefits in terms of SEO and lead generation.

If you have a WordPress website, you can easily embed a YouTube video into a blog post. Uploading the video on YouTube has the added benefit of sharing your content with the 1 billion YouTube users worldwide.

When posting videos to your blog, make sure to provide a transcript of the video. This is important for search engine optimization because search engines aren’t able to scan and index the content of videos yet.

Creating video content for your blog doesn’t need to be expensive. You can hire a video production company or get some quality video equipment and simply film your team members talking about different industry topics.

3. Testimonial Videos

Displaying testimonials and links to review websites can go a long way in establishing trust and credibility with web visitors, especially on a B2B website design. But case study or testimonial videos are even more powerful: They allow you to tell your customer’s story and carry even more credibility than a written review.

To make the most of these gems, showcase them in strategic places on the website. If the testimonial focuses on a specific product or service, consider embedding the video on your product or service page. You can also display the video on landing pages for paid advertising campaigns. Having video on key landing pages is capable of increasing conversion rates by 80%.

Finally, you can take the best client testimonial video and place it on your home page or the about page. These are typically the two most-visited pages of a site, so you may as well make the most of it.

4. Process or Service Videos

Video is also a great medium for explaining a complex process or product/service to potential customers. Rather than explaining something in a dense write-up, you can establish your brand and provide an engaging experience in a short, branded video.

An explainer video is a top way to engage customers. Explainer videos are typically animated videos that describe a business or its products/services in a short, memorable fashion. Because these videos are animated, they typically require a larger investment in order to get a high-quality product.

This type of video content is especially valuable for businesses or services that are difficult to understand. If a service or process video needs to be showcased on the home page, there are a couple of options for embedding the video. For example, you can display a nicely designed play button and then have the embedded video open in a pop-up window, as Shirts on Tap has done on its website home page.

Shirts on Tap

Process videos help people understand your product — which leads to happier customers.

5. Employee or Team Videos

As millennials make up a larger pool of the job market, businesses are striving to attract the tech-savvy talent with engaging videos about their business and culture. Videos of a company’s employees or team members are great additions to an about or team page.

If you are heavily focused on recruitment, you may want to embed this video on a dedicated career page where you can also describe your company’s benefits and job openings.

When creating an employee or team video, it’s important to make sure the video is authentic and high-quality. If you are trying to attract a younger generation of employees, remember that millennials and the next generation are very comfortable with consuming video content.

In light of that, their expectations of video quality can be much higher. Similar to any video on your site, if the video doesn’t add value or doesn’t adequately reflect your current branding, then it’s better to not place it on your site.

Videos Make Websites Better

Adding videos to your website create a connection with users and increase conversions on your site. Not to mention, videos also improve a website’s design.

author

Mikel Bruce

CEO, TinyFrog Technologies
Mikel Bruce is the CEO of TinyFrog Technologies, a San Diego web design agency specializing in WordPress web design & development and secured hosting & maintenance. Founded in 2003, TinyFrog Technologies offers a conversion-based approach to web design and has built over 1,100 websites.
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