Your website is the face of your online business. But if your site is struggling to convert visitors, then it might not be leaving a good first impression. How do you know for sure?
While there are many ways to analyze your website’s performance, the one metric that can confirm this is your bounce rate.
A high bounce rate (above 50%) means that visitors leave your site after viewing just one page, either because:
They weren’t interested in what you had to offer.
Your offer wasn’t presented in an engaging way.
Given that the average cost per lead in B2B can be as high as $370, it makes sense to do everything in your power to keep visitors on the page. And you’ve probably heard about how videos are a great way to capture people’s attention.
In this article, I’m going to show you how video landing pages can be used to reduce your bounce rate and get more of your visitors to take action.
What Are Video Landing Pages and Why Do They Work?
According to a study by Microsoft, the average human attention span is 8 seconds. For perspective, that’s 1 second lower than that of a goldfish. The takeaway here is that your site needs to captivate visitors the second they land on it or risk losing them forever.
Now we all know that humans have five sensory organs. And that by far, the one we rely on the most is our eyes. This is why videos are one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal for capturing attention. But how does this apply to building websites in particular? This is where the concept of video landing pages comes in.
A video landing page is a web page that uses video to introduce a product or service. The video is typically placed at the top of the landing page, where a hero image usually goes. Aside from this, all the other text and rich media below the fold can remain the same.
The goal of the video is to capture the visitor’s attention just long enough to give them a reason to convert. To do this, the video might rapid-fire through:
Who you are
What problem you solve
How your solution works
And why it’s different from everything else that’s out there.
You can think of this video as an elevator pitch since it needs to summarize your business in a way that’s both quick and exciting. If you’re a startup, you might want to check out our dedicated guide to video marketing right here.
Of course, once you’ve gotten their attention with the video, you can get them to further engage with you through a demo, sales call, or simply using your favorite email marketing software to get them on an email list to build a relationship.
Planning Your Landing Page Video
So, you’ve decided that you want to increase your site’s average time on page by at least 2 minutes. Here are a few things to keep in mind before you scream “Action!”.
What do you hope to achieve with your landing page? There is no one-size-fits-all video for every website. Each video will vary according to the landing page goal. And for optimal results, you should limit each landing page to a single goal.
The purpose of any landing page is to motivate a visitor to take the desired action. That action can be anything from direct purchase to signing up for a newsletter.
The landing page goal you end up choosing is ultimately driven by your business objective. For example, if your business objective is generating leads, then the landing page goal may be: motivating the visitor to enter their contact information into a form.
If the business objective is getting new users, then the landing page goal may be: prompting the visitor to start a free trial. In the next subsection, I’ll show you how to tie this landing page goal to a video type.
2. Choose Your Video Type
There are an endless amount of video types to choose from. But for any given landing page or offer, certain video types will work better than others. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the most common video types and their potential use cases.
Spots
This is the most well-known and time-tested video type of the bunch; the classic 15-30 second commercial. It will likely also be the most expensive to produce.
Spots have been around since the 1940s. But even though this video type is an oldie, its short runtime still makes it perfect for the digital age.
Spots often have high production value and make use of creative stories, influencers, humor, and popular music.
One of the biggest benefits of producing a spot is its reusability. In other words, you can distribute it on other channels like TV, Movie theaters, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram (not just your website).
Explainers
If visitors might struggle to immediately understand your product or service, then an explainer video could be the right choice for your landing page.
The name says it all. An explainer video illustrates how your business solves a problem for the audience.
As an example, this low code workflow software uses video to explain how their software works. This helps visitors understand their product faster, so they’re less likely to leave the page.
These videos feature voiceovers and are oftentimes animated, but they don’t have to be per se. It can also consist of still images and graphics, live-action footage, or a combination of each.
Explainer videos can incorporate whatever media you need to tell your story visually.
Product Demos
At first glance, product demo videos sound a lot like explainers. But the difference between these two can be summed up in the old adage: show, don’t tell.
While an explainer tells visitors how the product works, a product demo video shows them its features and benefits. This is especially useful for highly technical products/services. Take a look at how this data center infrastructure software does it, for instance.
The format of product demo videos also varies widely. Some are shot professionally while others are recorded from a live stream.
Speaking of live streams, you can also use these in blog posts to give readers more context on the topic at hand. This online tutoring company includes live streams and a few more video types inside of a blog post.
And some product demo videos are straight to the point, while others feature funny hosts and hyperbolic claims. The latter helps make your brand more memorable, especially to first-time visitors.
Testimonials
Instead of trying to convince new visitors of how great you are, why not have your existing customers do the selling for you?
Emotions are infectious. So when your visitors see how enthusiastic your existing customers are about your offer, the same feeling will carry over to them.
Aside from that, customer testimonial videos add social proof to your page. This means they’re especially crucial for products or services that require a lot of upfront trust, like a team-building event.
Testimonials can feature:
Customers gushing about the quality of your product or service.
Customers using the product or receiving the service.
Emotional first-hand stories about how your business solved an agonizing pain point.
Creating a testimonial has the added bonus of showing appreciation for your customers, which will positively impact retention. Take Luxury Presence as an example, a real estate SEO company that displays testimonial videos on their website, they have been generating more trust and credibility thanks to this kind of content.
Behind-the-Scenes
When you hear the term “behind-the-scenes”, your mind probably wanders to pictures of a movie set or a mini-documentary about the making of a movie.
But the same way that fans want to see how movie magic was created, your visitors want an inside look at your business. Scroll below to see a great example of a behind-the-scenes video on a landing page from a capsule fillers company.
Visually appealing planning, manufacturing, design, and distribution processes.
Passionate craftsmen that can explain the work that goes into the product or service delivery.
Behind-the-scenes videos are also a golden opportunity to share your values and introduce the people behind the brand. This creates a more intimate relationship with your audience, which encourages them to stick with you.
There are many other video types I haven’t mentioned in this section. Case in point: How-tos!
If you ever tried to learn a new skill, then you’d know how indispensable how-to videos are.
In a previous section, I explained that the video is typically placed at the top of the landing page. The keyword here is “typically” since it’s not your only option.
Rather than making your video the centerpiece of your landing page, you can also place it below the fold. But what purpose would that serve?
With below-the-fold videos, your copy is still front and center. But the videos are placed next to particular selling points in the copy, expanding on them.
For example, you can create a landing page section that’s dedicated to your glowing reviews. Somewhere immediately near these reviews, you can also place a testimonial video filled with passionate, real-life customers.
Tips for Engaging Landing Page Videos
It’s not enough to shoot any ol’ video and embed it on a landing page. To get your visitor to take the desired action, you’ll want to make sure that your video follows these best practices.
1. Keep Your Video Short
Remember, your video isn’t everything. There are also CTA buttons and other selling points that you’ll want visitors to scroll down to. Keep your video short so that the visitor can carry that newfound excitement to the rest of your page.
Aside from this, shorter videos have a higher likelihood of being watched all the way through. But not everybody is going to finish your video, no matter how engaging it is.
To this end, you should move the most convincing parts of your message to the beginning of the video. At least that way you can be sure that everyone sees it.
2. Give Your Video An Irresistible Thumbnail
Every business knows that videos are engaging. This means they’re all competing against you for potential customers’ attention.
In response to this, customers have become picky when it comes to choosing which videos they’ll watch. And your thumbnail is the first thing they’ll evaluate before clicking on it, or scrolling past it.
Here are a few tips for creating a scroll-stopping thumbnail:
Have 1 focal point in the design.
Add a face to the thumbnail.
Make sure the face expresses emotion. You can see some examples in the image below.
Remember how I said that you can choose where you’ll place the video? Well, there’s a reason most of them are placed at the top of the landing page.
It guarantees that every new visitor notices it. If reducing your bounce rate is mission-critical, then there’s no room to experiment with video placement. Do what you’re sure will work.
4. Disable Autoplay
In the second tip, I mentioned visitors have to choose to watch your video. But why not just autoplay the video so they have no choice but to watch?
Because it doesn’t work. In the same way that people hate pop-ups, it’s considered bad practice to autoplay videos.
Imagine this: A potential customer clicked onto your site but had to urgently step away from their computer for a minute.
If your video was set to autoplay, then they’d be forced to come back because of the blaring sound. And guess what? They’re not just going to mute it. They’re going to close your tab without a second thought.
Another reason to avoid autoplay is that it increases your page load time and uses up the visitor’s bandwidth. This would be particularly annoying for mobile users.
And remind me: what does a slow page + a high bounce rate result in? That’s right. Lowered SEO rankings.
High-Converting Videos for Your Website
A high bounce rate (50%+) means that your website isn’t engaging visitors right off the bat. It’s even worse if you’re using paid advertising to drive traffic to your site because that hard-earned money would be going to waste.
With a well-produced video, you can engage visitors from the first few seconds they land on your site. Hopefully, all that newfound engagement will cut your bounce rate down to an average level (20%), which has the added benefit of improving your SEO ranking.
If you follow the tips mentioned in this article, you’ll have viewers smashing the replay button on your landing page video in no time. Most of these tips also apply to creating a full-on video sales funnel.
Vikas Kalwani
Vikas Kalwani is a product-led growth hacker and B2B Marketing Specialist skilled in SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. He works at uSERP and is a mentor at 500 Startups.
Vikas Kalwani 
