Why Audience Retention?
Retaining an audience is perhaps the most crucial act any website can do to achieve their goals and conversions. If audiences are bouncing from your site there is very little chance they’ll come back again. This is where video comes in, not just to make websites “stickier”, but to retain those visitors in both the short and long term.
By retaining your website visitors your site stands a much better chance of climbing the search engine rankings, improving those important conversions and gaining valuable social shares and referrals from socially active users.
So how do you retain your audiences with video?
Quality Video Content
Shoot your videos in high definition, which is possible on many consumer cameras today. Shooting in anything less is setting you up to fail from the start. Be sure to make use of appropriate lighting and a decent microphone to capture great audio as well as great visuals. For editing, free kit such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker will be good enough for most needs, or more prosumer packages like the Adobe suite for any advanced videos.
Remember, the content of your video should speak to your audience, not just to you. Create video that is informative, entertaining or educational, share-worthy, unique or unexpected and it will benefit you a great deal if your video speaks to a social community.
Simple Video
The last thing you want to do is create content that is overly complicated. The simpler your video; the better.
Although there has been much debate over the ideal length of a video, the key aspect to simple video can be found in its messages rather than its length. As long as your video only tackles one overall topic you will find it much easier to retain audiences. By filling a video with numerous topics of discussion you may find that you lose the engagement you need to get the most value out of your viewers.
Call To Action
Audience retention online works the same as with any sales pitch in the physical world. Whilst your video may not be explicitly sales-based the longer you retain an audience the more likely they will convert and achieve one of your website’s goals.
The best way to make the most out of this retention is to provide a call to action at the end of your video. This CTA will encourage viewers to carry out a valuable action on your site, which will no doubt contribute to achieving a key goal. By using a call to action rather than letting users click off your video content and leave your site you will know for certain that you are getting the most benefit out of every viewer and visitor.
Maintain Audience
Retaining the attention of your audience throughout their video view and their time on site is one thing, but maintaining that audience retention over time can be the most powerful thing of all.
Getting viewers to subscribe to your newsletters, webinars, blog posts and email updates (perhaps via a call to action in your video) will allow you to retain those eager audiences over time, giving you the opportunity to engage and touch base with those valuable potential clients.
Monitoring Retention
Thankfully you don’t have to rely on educated guessing to determine whether you are successfully retaining your audiences through their video views. Many video hosting platforms offer powerful viewer stats so you can measure the engagement of viewers with your video content, find out where they are re-watching content and how many users are making it to that all important call to action.
This will allow you to decipher if your video content is performing at its optimum level and what sections retain the most attention for when you come to plan your next video.
Old favorites like Google Analytics will be able to inform you how long users are spending on your site and if your video has managed to retain your visitors and slow down your bounce rate, not to mention let you know if your call to action goals have been successfully completed.
Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based corporate video production company.
