5 Websites with Brilliant Landing Page Videos + Tips

Ask any veteran webmaster their least favorite metric of managing a website, and bounce rates will almost certainly be near the top of that list. Keeping visitors on your site long enough to explain your product or service can be difficult, as you truthfully only have a few brief moments to hold a new viewer’s attention before their mouse quickly moves toward their browser’s “back” button.

So therefore, it is crucial to recognize the importance of creating a landing page that both immediately grasps the curiosity of the viewer as well as answers questions just as quickly; no easy task.

Here are 5 sites that are doing it right:

• Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage company that really took the market by storm a few years ago when their founder recognized a lack of good, simple ways to remotely access your files from wherever you are. It’s not a particularly complicated product, but their video makes a point that even someone less technically inclined could understand.

• Path

Path is a simple and clean social media platform. They were being confused for a Facebook clone for a while, so they made a landing page video to explain what they do exactly and how they’re different from other social media networks.

• Animoto

Animoto is a fun video editing platform that makes it easy to publish slides and pictures into video format for quick and easy sharing. Their homepage offers an example of what their product is capable of, by showing a touching family home video.

• Disqus

Disqus is a relatively new comment software for blogs and any website looking for user engagement. Their landing video does a great job showing exactly what the point of their service is in under a minute.

• StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a great tool for finding almost everything you would find interesting on the web. Their video does a great job of explaining how it all works and why it’s useful for almost everyone with an internet connection.

So do you find yourself interested in creating a landing page video yourself? There are, at minimum, five things that a web page needs to be called an honest landing page:

• A headline that immediately grabs the viewer’s attention.
• A demonstration of your service or product that shows clearly what it is and how it works.
• A display of the value your product brings to the customer.
• At least one support element, like a testimonial or a press release.
• A call to action that clearly tells the surfer exactly what to do next.

If you give your potential customers these five things, you’re giving them the necessary information and impetus to make an informed decision right then and there. Disregard any one of them, and you’re going to lose a significant chunk of your traffic.

The headline is pretty straightforward. You find a great headline by writing a few hundred of them and then picking the best one. It’s a time-tested technique that works almost every time.

The support element is just as easy; you either take a real piece of testimonial from an early adopter, or you write a press release, send it out through a service, and then quote one of the resultant news articles as if it were a third party analysis of your product or service.

But what about the product and value demonstrations?  There’s an entire class of landing pages – the ‘long-form sales letters’ – that use text to make the product and value demonstrations. But modern surfers expect you to put everything they care about above the fold. So how do you convey enough information without pages and pages of detail and feature/benefit discussion?

A short (2-5) minute video featuring simple shots of your product in action and using a voiceover describing its features and benefits can easily take the place of dozens of pages of text. Interestingly, the video itself should follow a format not unlike that of your landing page:

• A short introduction that presents your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) in the simplest possible terms.
• A personalized story of a member from your target audience.
• A voice-over describing how the job the product is doing brings value to the customer.
• The voice-over should verbally point the customer to the call to action.
• There’s no need for a lot of complexity. Mostly still pictures and a voice-over with just a few ‘moving parts’, and you can give your potential customers everything they need in an engaging and interesting manner. Polish it off with a killer call-to-action, and you’ve got yourself a landing page video that’s ready to convert!

This is a guest post contributed by Rob Toledo, who is working alongside Shutterstock and Bigstock photo, creating guides to using stock footage and stock photography to increase user engagement and lower bounce rates. He can be reached on Twitter @stentontoledo.