In-House Video Production vs. Outsourcing – What’s Right for My Business?
Videos are the most commonly used form of online advertising as they can attract a great amount of organic (unpaid) traffic to your website.
They can be used to promote your website, products, or services, and can be branded differently to support different campaigns.
In this article, we will look at some of the SaaS video ads that have proven to be effective marketing tools for their organizations.
Video advertisements are promotional videos that have one major goal to sell your product or service. They are designed to grab your attention and sell you a specific offer.
Let’s see what makes video a popular advertising tool of choice, especially for Software as a service companies:
The data clearly shows that visual medium is the best way to design marketing programs for SaaS businesses and, in general, for all businesses.
One of the biggest trends in online advertising right now is the rise of product video ads. More and more SaaS companies are using them to help grow their businesses.
In fact, SaaS video Ads have been a cornerstone of SaaS marketing over the past few years and for good reason.
SaaS Video Ads have proved to be more effective at driving acquirers to sign up for SaaS subscriptions, and more specifically, to sign up for your products.
In fact, the average SaaS video Ads outperforms our standard text-based Ad by a factor of more than 2.
Next, we will have a look at some of the very good SaaS video Ads examples that have increased product signups, driven engagement, or simply become iconic.
Probably the most popular explainer video of all time, which people still talk about. Basically, it is credited with launching the explainer video movement.
The video is about a bloke called Josh, who’s on a safari in Africa and struggling to keep track of his data spread across his laptop, desktop, and phone.
The video demonstrates how he consolidates it all without emailing files or using a USB Drive. He even shares the photographs with his mom for good measure!
The Dropbox SaaS explainer video was created for a reported sum of USD 50K, all the way back in 2009.
According to Dropbox that video has been viewed more than 25,000,000 and has generated more than $48,000,000 in revenue and over 10,000,000 signups.
The video delivers a perfect overview of the product using motion graphics and great animation. The best product video ad does its job of compelling the viewers to sign-up for the service.
Mint is free and earns revenue from select partner offers.
Further, they say it takes only 3 easy steps to set up Mint and “Start making confident money moves today”.
This video explains how using Pipe’s platform you can grow and strengthen your company with recurring revenue financing With a click of a button.
The video explains how Nectar, the workplace culture builder, helps fight employee turnover and low morale as a result of lack of employee engagement.
The video features the Chief Culinary officer of a large culinary group explaining how they were using multiple systems earlier to keep track of various activities like food production and nutritional analysis, which was inefficient. He explains how using Galley they were able to turn things around and make their processes more efficient.
The video explains how using the tool, consumer goods companies and brands can speed up their strategic initiatives, regardless of where they are on the journey.
According to the creators, their strategy was to “Create a series of unique graphic worlds to highlight how the streaming service functions in users’ everyday lives while differentiating the brand with a bold, imaginative visual style.”
Produced by the Tel-Aviv based Animation studio TOM & HANI who specialize in stop motion, animated films, music videos and commercials.
Visuals help in connecting instructions and ideas to the imagination in the brain. It is impossible to help the potential lead in visualizing and understanding the benefits of SaaS without the help of creative visual aid.
Some brands use the clever method of incorporating visuals in content where it has never been done before, which can many times end up making the content viral and putting the brand on the map, while other brands try to make content revolving around visual elements to make their SaaS videos, graphics, blogs, product demo video ads, landing pages, and newsletters more engaging.
The main objective of using video ads, however, is to promote a product or service and increase signups. In fact, they can increase product signups by 7% to 20% because they are typically more interesting than other types of marketing.
They can be highly targeted and informative for their audiences and can compel your customers to take action and boost conversion rates.
Of course, you can use videos for various purposes and integrate it with your overall campaign.
Finally, it is important that the product video ads do not offer too much information on how products work but instead should demonstrate the benefits in an engaging way.
It is important to choose the right platform to run your ads to get the best ROI. Where you want to spend your advertising bucks depends on where your audience is to be found.
First, let’s look at some ad platform related statistics from Explain Ninja and some recommended best practices:
| Platform | Best Practices | Statistics |
|---|---|---|
|
1. Customize your ads. 2. Tell a story. |
1. 75% of brands use video ads. 2. 45% of consumers spend their time on Facebook |
|
| YouTube |
1. Have a clear CTA. 2. 15 - 60 seconds-long ads work best. |
1. 90% of customers discover new companies or products here. 2. 2+ billion users (roughly a third of all Internet users). |
|
1. Limit on-screen text. 2. Promote your brand at the beginning. |
1. 1 in 4 consumers purchase after they see a story on Instagram. 2. 79% of brands claim that they have landed a new customer. |
|
|
1. Make 6-15 seconds long videos. 2. Display your logo prominently. |
1. In the last 12 months, video views have grown 220x. 2. Video is the fastest-growing advertising tool |
|
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1. Keep videos short. 2. Animated ads work well |
1. Videos on LinkedIn earn an average of three times the engagement of text posts. 2. Video posts on LinkedIn have generated more than 300 million impressions in one year. |
As a SaaS company, you might be wondering what type of videos you should be creating. No worries, we have you covered.
The following table tells you with examples the type of videos you can create for SaaS video marketing. Read our Top 10 Tips to Create the Best SaaS eLearning Videos for more information on the topic
| Type | Uses | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Video ads | To get discovered by customers | fiverr |
| How-to | To educate users | Ethnio |
| Explainers | To explain a product or a service | Content Beta User interface effects compilation |
| Webinar | To convert a webinar into video | leadfeeder |
| Academy | To educate customers | VWO |
| Product demo | To show products to potential customers | Zoom |
| Product Marketing | To showcase your value proposition quickly | Hopin |
| Customer stories | Using reviews and success stories to boost trust and credibility | Kissflow |
| Educational | To onboard customers | ManyChat |
| Docs to video | To transform PDFs, Case-studies, Presentations, or Blogs to videos | Properly |
Creating the correct type of video at each stage of the marketing funnel is vital to maximizing brand awareness, product engagement, sales, and customer loyalty.
To get a clear understanding of the topic, read our article How to use the Right Videos for each Stage of your Marketing Funnel and Why?. We discuss how to use different types of videos as effective marketing tools throughout the customer journey.
Recent studies have shown that some of the top marketing strategies for acquiring customers for any SaaS brand Include steps like using explainer videos to decomplexify the product’s UI, mass targeting of the audience using product video ads, circulating emails and newsletters with engaging videos, starting a YouTube channel that includes an exhaustive playlist tackling the most prominent customer support issues and promoting testimonials on social media to increase credibility.
The best product video ad examples are the ones that concisely explain the features of any product or service while highlighting the multiple benefits that the brand promises to provide at reasonable expenditure by the potential lead, and when done right these product video ads bring in the highest ROI for the company.
To get a product video aligned with your target audience, timeline, and budget, it is important that you choose the path that will work best for your company, be it hiring a freelancer, producing the video in-house, or hiring/outsourcing a video production agency.
We discussed some of the best SaaS product video ads examples, each of which stands out for its UX/UI design, scripting, or innovative storytelling.
Like we said, video is undoubtedly the future of content. Before we wrap up, we will talk about why and when you should create videos for your SaaS marketing campaigns.
All of the best product video ad examples have a few things in common. Optimizing the first 15 seconds of the video, offering value upfront, highlighting the benefits of the product, telling the brand’s story in an empathetic way, using an effective call to action, and keeping the length of the video shot are a few important aspects to keep in mind for creating the best product video ads.
Some key factors can help in engaging the audience better with the introduction of the product in a SaaS video ad. Inclusion of upbeat music, creating excitement with visually appealing motion graphic elements, including storytelling in the video, and inculcating humor as a part of the dialogues can help vastly.
The most efficient product video ads are the ones that drive value immediately, create excitement, underline the main features, answer frequently asked questions regarding the product, explain the UI and speak about the benefits.
YouTube and Vimeo are the most preferred platforms Vape brands prefer to showcase their SaaS video ads. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Instagram are also popular platforms for product video ads.
How-to videos, webinars, customer stories, product demos, and marketing videos all work well. The important thing is to connect with leads and customers using useful content and convince them how your product or service can solve their problems.
Use paid ads to target an interested audience. But once you have them visiting your site, use explainer videos about onboarding and customer support videos to make them feel comfortable. Put your customer testimonials to good use through your network. Nurture your relationship with customers using emails and newsletters.
A good question because the platform does play an important role in that each platform offers a specific feature that makes it suitable for your business needs. For example, to grab the eyeballs of customers with your company and products, YouTube is a better choice than others.
Viewers prefer video ads that are focused, that give a clear message, and that is engaging. They prefer short ads that give them the essential information about the services they are interested in, give a clear picture of pricing options, and how they can sign-up using a CTA.
