Insights

Blog vs Video – Which Works Best?

Author - armstrong-admin
15.09.2021

A marketing strategy with any website will often begin with the advice “it needs a blog”. Easy enough if your business is fertile ground for the kind of subject matter people want to read but what happens if your industry is in a niche where blogging consistently is difficult or the subject matter doesn’t seem interesting enough? Is it better to use video instead?

Before putting together a content strategy, it is important to consider the content your audience will want to consume. Attracting this audience and keeping them engaged will require content that is skilfully and professionally crafted if it is to generate a return on investment be it a video presentation or a blog.

So whether your company chooses to produce videos or blogs, naturally they are going to take some investment in time to produce. For example, recent statistics show that a blog of sufficient length and quality can take 6 hours to produce on average.

Add to this the need to consistently write blogs to make a measurable impact on the bottom line and the investment in all that extra time could be seen as a leap of faith.

Writing blogs is a skill that requires expertise in writing. Take for example the engineer who will know their subject inside out: can they also regularly turn that knowledge into engaging 1,000-word blogs people are going to read and do they have the time?  

Despite these drawbacks, blogging remains one of the most popular content marketing activities behind video and e-newsletters.

This brings us to using video as an alternative.

Video, like blogging, requires expertise to produce as well as the right equipment and production skills.

Linkedin is a space where the use of video has mushroomed. Where once you could post a link to a piece of written content and get wide engagement, this is now less likely when people are able to use increasingly sophisticated video equipment to produce polished presentations instead.

A well-produced video will generally produce better results because it requires less effort to watch a video than it does to read and understand a blog.

For how-to videos and product presentations, video gives its audience a chance to see a product in action. If your customer wants to get a clear idea of how a machine or factory production line works, then video is going to be the best way to demonstrate that rather than leaving it to their imagination with words.

So does this mean video wins over blogs?

The major drawback with using video is its limited reach in organic search results. While search engines will display videos for certain queries, they are still more heavily focused on written words and pictures when it comes to displaying results dynamically. There is simply more chance to rank on the first page of search results with a blog than a video unless your site happens to have the most authority in its niche.

Search engines also use keywords as a major ranking factor for web pages therefore if you have a site primarily filled with videos rather than written blogs, search engines are not necessarily going to understand what those videos are about as well as they do with blogs containing keywords.

Also despite only 55% of marketers prioritising blogging, businesses that do have bloggers regularly posting receive 55% extra visits compared to businesses that don’t. So blogging does seem to have an enduring benefit for businesses that want to increase traffic to their website.

One advantage video does have with SEO is engagement. People tend to spend more time viewing videos which pushes up the engagement rate. Dwell time is arguably another factor that has an impact on page ranking. In one survey 80% of marketers using video say it increased dwell time on their websites.

So the conclusion to whether video is better than blogging is that both can be utilised to add to the variety of content available on a website. Depending on the nature of a search query, a video may provide the best result.

For example, if you have a ‘how to’ type post in mind this may achieve more visibility and a bigger audience if it’s a video rather than a blog that will take a lot longer to get to the point.

On the other hand, a combination of video and blog could be used for a new product launch but a simple information piece describing the purposes and benefits of a product might be better presented as a blog.

While blogs remain a useful way to reach customers, it is worth exploring other ways such as video and infographics to present information. It is also important to spend time finding out the kinds of channels your customers are using including their social media habits to ensure your content gets their attention.