One of the biggest challenges that businesses in the financial industry face is helping consumers understand the products and services that can help them the most. When it comes to finances, there are many people who lack an awareness of the various products and services available to them, let alone can navigate the ins and outs of utilizing them to their fullest potential.

This is why inbound marketing is essential to companies within the financial services industry, and why they cannot ignore the importance of video production as part of their inbound marketing efforts.

The Importance of Inbound Marketing

To understand why inbound marketing is so vital to a financial service business, whether it be an insurance company, an accounting agency or a credit card company, it helps to understand what inbound marketing really is.

Inbound marketing is the use of various strategies in order to position your company to be found by consumers online and have information available for those consumers to educate themselves about your company and its products or services.

Because subject matter concerning the financial industry can be a bit tricky for consumers to wrap their head around, content has to be clear and easy to follow. You want to inform and help the consumers that visit your site without confusing or overwhelming them.

For example, if you’re trying to educate consumers about different mortgage loan options, having a graph with the various interest rates, term lengths and requirements can be quite helpful. But for a lot of financial-related subject matter, written content may be too dense for consumers.

Many online consumers often don’t have the patience or attention spans necessary to read through pages and pages of written content. It’s because of this reason that video production is such an important and beneficial part of a financial company’s inbound marketing efforts.

The Benefits of Using Video Production

Video production isn’t just an effective content marketing strategy for businesses dealing with financial services and products, its an effective strategy for companies within any industry. The following are some of the reasons for this:

• An estimated 46% of consumers are more likely to look into a product after having viewed a video online.

• Roughly 90% of consumers state that product videos are beneficial to their purchase decision process.

• YouTube is not only the largest video platform online as well as a huge social channel, it’s also the second biggest search engine in the world behind Google.

• YouTube accounts for 50 percent of all internet traffic, making it one of the most effective ways to increase brand exposure.

• The average person only retains around 10% of any text they’ve read 72 hours after reading it. However, they retain around 95% of any videos they’ve watched 72 hours after having viewed them, making video a much more effective way to get important information across.

• Around 75% of executives will watch work-related videos at least once a week. Many companies within the financial industry focus on B2B, which makes this particular statistic extremely relevant.

Effectively Using Video Production

Simply implementing video production into your marketing strategy won’t necessarily translate to success. Financial service companies often make one of two mistakes when creating online videos. They either put too much effort into trying to make a video go viral or they are using their online platform in the same way that they use TV video marketing.

Viral videos

Videos that go viral can be great for your brand awareness and exposure; however, they are quite rare. It’s also impossible to create a video with the sole purpose of going viral since you have no control over it. A video of a cat walking in a circle could go viral, after all. Instead, focus on smaller goals, such as educating your viewers and providing solutions to their problems.

Inbound not outbound

Outbound marketing, such as creating TV ads, requires you to force information on viewers. It’s typically promotional, something you should avoid with online videos. Viewers aren’t looking for ads to watch, which means if you’re only producing promotional videos, they’ll stop watching after only a few seconds in. Focus your content informing and benefiting the consumer.

A great example of an effective use of video production is Wells Fargo. They were able to successfully integrate video production into their marketing efforts a few years back. It started when they offered a print magazine to a small-business audience that they eventually moved to a digital platform. Eventually, they realized that it wasn’t enough.

Wells Fargo researched their content competitors as well as other companies that served the small business community and realized that they would need to go beyond basic surface topics in order to attract their small business owner audience. Basically, they shifted their marketing strategy and took a good hard look at what their audience actually wanted.

This led to Wells Fargo creating video content as part of their strategy. Their videos are successful for a number of reasons. They use professional looking graphics and title cards, they’re short and to the point, they use relatable people in their videos, they use titles that tell you what the video is about in a catchy way and most importantly, they address the needs of their audience.

If you’re in the business of providing financial services or products, then implementing a video content strategy into your marketing efforts is not something that you’ll want to forgo. Working with a professional video production company can help your business to create highly professional video content that will effectively inform and engage your audience.