Landing pages can have an undeniably powerful role in your marketing process. With the top landing pages seeing conversion rates of 11.45% or higher, it’s clear that a well-designed landing page can quickly become one of the best ways to get sales and leads.
Of course, optimizing your landing page to achieve these kinds of numbers isn’t an exact science. There are plenty of great examples of landing pages that you can draw inspiration from. Attractive imagery, compelling testimonials, and simple forms can all play a vital role in helping you get more conversions from your landing pages. But one of the most powerful tools of all is video.
30% of the top landing pages incorporate video, and embedding relevant video content on a landing page has been found to increase conversions by as much as 86%. By understanding the role video can and should play on your website’s landing pages, you can build better landing pages that truly convert your target audience.
How should you use video on your landing pages?
As with other elements of a successful landing page, there’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to incorporating video. Depending on your product or service, video content could be the primary focus of your page. Or it could be an extra element that helps supplement the rest of your copy.
It could even be something as simple as a background element that makes your landing page more visually interesting. A background video that shows your product in action fits the “picture is worth 1,000 words” mantra of quickly communicating essential information about your brand.
Generally speaking though, most landing page videos will fall under one of two basic categories:
Explainer videos
An explainer video gives an elevator pitch for your brand and its products or services. It provides a visual explainer (typically supplemented with voiceover work) to give an easily digestible version of who you are and why someone should do business with you.
Research has determined that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. A live-action video or animated explainer showing how someone solves a problem by using your business can convey your message much more effectively than a wall of text.
Testimonials
Social proof is a powerful tool for landing pages. Studies have found that simply adding three lines of testimonials can increase a landing page’s conversion rate by 34%. Of course, many testimonials require more than just a few lines to get their point across.
Once again, you don’t want to overwhelm audiences with a wall of text — but with a video testimonial, you can go more in-depth with a client’s experience. Seeing a client talk about their experience can also help create a stronger emotional connection that makes their experience far more compelling.
Turning Your Video Plans Into Reality (Even on a Budget)
It’s one thing to know that video can boost your landing pages. But what are you supposed to do if you don’t have an in-house video production crew? The good news is that you’re hardly out of luck. Smartphones with cutting-edge cameras and user-friendly editing tools have made it easier than ever to get quality video content for your landing pages.
One tool I’ve found especially helpful for quickly producing video content is Videoleap by Lightricks. This tool offers an all-in-one platform with a variety of editing features to help you quickly create professional-looking videos. You can cut and combine different clips, add sound effects and fonts, and use templates from other content creators to put together your own video content.
A lot of explainer videos rely on animation. This isn’t necessarily a negative in and of itself, but it’s important to remember that real images of real people tend to be more engaging for consumers. In addition, many companies (particularly smaller brands) don’t have someone in-house who is able to produce animated content.
Of course, animated content can often make it easier to get your point across than a live-action video, especially for tech and SaaS brands. Explainer video tools like Rawshorts offer a variety of templates, graphics, chart animations, and even AI text conversion features to help you produce simple animations in a user-friendly format.
Regardless of how you plan to create your video, a successful landing page video requires careful planning. You don’t want to “just wing it.” Think through the message you want your video to convey to viewers. What product features do you want to highlight? What have your services been able to accomplish for your clients?
This will help you develop a script — or at least an outline — that guides the creation of your video. You won’t waste time filming imagery that ends up on the cutting room floor. You’ll be able to use your time effectively so that video creation doesn’t become a major time drain.
Best Practices for Adding Video Content to Your Landing Pages
Simply adding a video to your landing page isn’t automatically going to improve your conversion rate. Remember, your goal is to improve the overall experience for people who visit your landing page — and video is just one part of the equation.
Give visitors a reason to click
Video content should generally be placed above the fold on your landing page to make it one of the first elements visitors will see. However, only a background video that doesn’t include any sound should never autoplay. Autoplaying an explainer video or testimonial is more likely to cause someone to click away — especially if they’re browsing at work without their headphones in.
So how do you motivate someone to click on your video? Use an engaging thumbnail image. Surround that video content with text that explains what they will see when they click. A headline that says “See what we did for X CLIENT” can help convince someone to give your video a look.
Keep it short and sweet
WordStream’s Dan Shewan recommends producing several versions of your videos (when possible) so you can test their effectiveness — while at the same time advising that you keep your videos around 90 seconds in length. Other sources recommend keeping landing page videos between 30 and 60 seconds. Go too long, and you’ll risk boring your viewers, rather than leaving them interested in learning more.
Even with a shorter video, you can’t count on everyone watching your video all the way through. Because of this, it’s a good idea to put the most important information at the beginning of the video. Want to show off how your service helped a client boost its profitability? Put those stats at the beginning of the vehicle, before taking a deeper dive in the rest of the client testimonial.
Optimize your video content
When it comes to optimizing a video for a landing page, there are a few things to keep in mind. First is the potential impact video content could have on your landing page’s loading time. While a website that loads within two seconds only has a 9% bounce rate, that number increases to 38% for pages that take five seconds to load.
To avoid this, it’s often better to host your video on a third-party site like YouTube that allows you to embed its videos on your site. Alternatively, you can compress the video so it has a smaller file size.
Then, of course, there’s SEO. The right titles, descriptions, and tags can tell search engines what your video is about, which can help improve your content’s search rankings. Captions or transcripts can be especially powerful because they provide added context about your video content that can be used by search engines. They also enhance accessibility and help people who don’t want to watch your content with audio.
Don’t forget the CTA
While you may have your call to action on other parts of your landing page, it should also be a part of your video content. You never know what parts of your landing page someone will or won’t interact with. Whether your CTA is permanently visible or is only shown at the end of the video, your landing page video should always leave viewers with a clear idea of what they should do next.
Take your landing page to the next level.
When done right, video can have a powerful effect on your landing pages. By presenting information about your brand in a concise and visually engaging manner, you can quickly deliver a compelling message about who you are, what you stand for, and what you can do. And best of all, you don’t necessarily have to hire a professional videographer to get it all done.
Take the time to seamlessly incorporate video into your landing page content, and you’ll be able to watch as your conversions grow.
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