I was recently in a meeting with a client, and I was explaining how video is superior to writing blog posts in order to engage and educate your audience so they get to know, like, and trust you, and they start seeing you as an advisor who can really help them solve their problems.

And the client brought up a really good point: they thought text is better than video, because you can skim through it and focus only on the parts that are relevant to you.  In that sense, a blog or a white paper is more efficient than video.  In fact, they thought video can be frustrating because you have to wait for the interesting material to come up, while you’re wasting your valuable time.

Very good point!  BUT, and there’s a big but here.  HOW are you going to get that text content in front of your audience and get them to consume it?  If you’re paying for traffic, it’s going to get expensive.  Because when you post a blog or white paper, it gets indexed way in the back on page 10 or something of Google results.  For competitive keywords, it’s practically impossible to appear on the first page or two.  And if you’re posting on LinkedIn, you must have noticed that video dominates there as well.  Because consumption has moved to mobile, and people don’t want to read on their phones.  But they definitely watch a lot of video.

So the first - and perhaps most important - benefit of video is that it can help you leapfrog the competition and cut through the clutter.  You can actually get in front of your audience much more effectively.  You can pay for video ads and use a sniper approach where you pick your placements so you appear in front of very specific videos that you KNOW your audience consumes.  And those views will cost you in the neighborhood of 10 cents each.  If you promote your blog post or white paper with Google pay-per-click ads or even Facebook ads, you’ll be paying an order of magnitude more, at least!

Now, coming back to the issue that video can feel like a waste of time, the fact is that the market has solved for that.  If you’re producing long-winded videos with too much fluff, your audience will tune out and your traction will die out.  Instead, what you need to do is produce hyper-specific videos on top-of-mind topics for your audience, and address them very succinctly in your video.

The concern is that video can feel like a waste of time.  The fact is that it only happens with poorly produced videos, and those will fail anyway.  The good videos pick only 1 topic and address it the right way without fluff.  Video is MUCH more engaging than reading a blog post or white paper.  You have a person engaging with you on-camera, and you can make the video more dynamic with fast cuts, stock footage, and perhaps even custom graphics and animation.

So for a successful video presence on YouTube and LinkedIn, you have to identify all the topics you want to address for your audience, and create a separate video for each one.  That way, your audience will choose which videos are most relevant to them and watch only those.

This approach also helps with your ranking because it makes it easier for the YouTube and Google ranking algorithms to figure out what you’re talking about and rank you for the right keywords.  A side benefit - but a big one too - is that when YouTube knows exactly how to categorize your video, it starts promoting it on other people’s feed that are similar to your organic audience, and if you get clicks and views you’re expanding your reach for free!

Bottom line: video is far superior to blogs and white papers.  Because it’s much easier to put them in front of your audience, much more efficient to grab their attention and get them to consume your content, and video can be much more powerful for expanding your reach.  And besides, when you produce a video by jotting down a few key points and talking to the camera, you can then transcribe and edit so you can repurpose into a blog post too!