Google Search is the first marketing channel for most companies. It’s free to use and an easy way to drive people to your website. However, promoting your product using only one channel, like Google Search, limits the number of potential customers who see your product and creates uncertainty.
There’s a near-infinite amount of written content and company blogs for Google to pull from. How do you differentiate yourself? How long will it take you to rank? When will you see a strong ROI?
Ellen Lichtenstein is a Sr. Content Specialist at AgentSync, a company that helps insurance agencies and carriers reduce their compliance risk and streamline operations. In the early stages of her career, Ellen worked as a producer and casting director in the world of unscripted television. In that field, communicating through videos was not optional. After transitioning to creating content for the insurance industry, Ellen has made a habit of adding video into the mix.
This habit made her test the impact of embedded videos on AgentSync’s organic search rankings. So far, creating a video for a blog post has resulted in higher rankings and blog engagement.
We interviewed Ellen, who has eight years of experience working in Vyond, to learn how AgentSync has been using Vyond for the past year to outrank competitors on Google. Apply her lessons to grow your content’s ROI and engagement.
What made you start using video content?
Some of the topics we cover can be a bit hard to understand. Including a video allows readers to absorb that information in another way. Video content is also known to perform quite well in organic searches. So when it makes sense, we increase our presence in the search results by including videos in our blog posts.
Not every video creation process is alike. What does yours look like?
Usually, my process begins with writing a script. Each line corresponds to a scene number in Vyond. I don’t always outline my ideas for the visuals. But I tend to do that if I’m creating a video for someone less familiar with my work or with video creation in general.
If I need to get sign-off on the visuals before I begin working in Vyond, I’ll create a table. One column contains the script lines (either voiceover or words on screen), and the other column contains a description of what will appear on the screen.
I’ll just write out the lines if it’s unnecessary to sign off on the visuals. After spending so much time working in Vyond, I usually find my lines correspond accurately with what will end up in that scene number. But there are always surprises when I get into Vyond where I need to change something up, like splitting a scene into multiple pieces or combining scenes into one.
What impact have you noticed since you began using video in your marketing efforts?
Our team tracks how much engagement the videos get on our social posts and how well the blog posts perform in organic search results that have videos embedded in them. So far, we’ve seen a pattern of increased and consistent growth in page views after adding a video to a blog that was previously published text-only.
Gradual increase in blog post page views since adding a video to a blog post
For example; we published a blog in July 2021 and charted its pageviews. You can see there wasn’t a lot of traffic at first, which is fine because it was new. We’d expect to see more traffic over time. Then we added a video in mid-September. You can see the monthly page views for September were a lot higher than the August page views when there was no video. And it’s continued to grow since then.
In another instance, we saw a blog post move up eight spots in ranking for a specific keyword after adding a video to that post.
We also publish videos on LinkedIn and Twitter to see additional engagement we might not otherwise experience with just the blog post without the video.
Tell us about a recent video that exceeded your expectations of what video can do.
Recently, AgentSync partnered with Senior Life Insurance Company. The goal was to create a customized producer onboarding portal that took Senior Life Insurance’s agent onboarding process from days to minutes.
We produced a video, including using Vyond for parts of it, and put some paid ad spend behind it. We wanted to tell this powerful story and show potential customers the improvement they could expect by adopting our technology and some customizations. We have been very impressed with the results.
This video has brought in a large number of qualified leads and contributed significantly to our sales pipeline. That’s proof of how the AgentSync/Senior Life Insurance story impacted our audience of potential customers when told through a short video.
You’ve been using Vyond for eight years. Which aspects of it do you like the most?
I find Vyond to be extremely user-friendly and intuitive. As someone who comes from a video production background, most of the features and functionalities of Vyond are intuitive to me. I’ve used Vyond across many companies and clients, in-house and as a contractor through my own company.
I’ve typically used Vyond for educational purposes for both internal and external audiences. For example; I’ve used it to educate employees about company culture and benefits and to teach potential customers about industry topics relevant to my clients and their products. I’ve even used Vyond as one of several tools in a large-scale public health initiative. In all cases, Vyond helps me convey complex information to audiences of different education levels in a way they can absorb and retain.
How long did it take to feel like you mastered Vyond?
It took me about six months to feel like I really knew Vyond. My skills have continued to grow over the years, and I’m sure there are features I don’t even utilize.
I credit my expertise in Vyond to a larger understanding of visual storytelling methods and experience creating content across various media and many use cases. Vyond was simple to learn and performs as I would expect it to.
What advice would you give a reader who wanted to try Vyond after reading this interview?
Just get into the platform and use it. You can definitely spend time watching training videos and participating in educational resources. Still, I think the best way to learn is by doing.
Beyond that, my advice is to get creative and experiment with the software. I’m always surprised by how much I can do when I explore different functions and combine them in unique ways.
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