The ultimate list of Video Growth Hacks
Creating the correct type of video at each stage of the marketing funnel is vital to maximize brand awareness, product engagement, sales, and customer loyalty. In this blog, we discuss how to use different types of videos as effective marketing tools throughout the customer journey.
Content Beta has been the preferred choice of top SaaS companies for showcasing their products using videos. In this blog, we will talk about how to use the correct type of videos to guide your leads at each step of their journey through your marketing funnel.
Let’s start with some important questions.
Are the days of using text content as the primary tool to engage with your audience over, going by the recent trends in the content creation and content marketing space?
The powerful-than-ever gadgets, affordable data plans, and shorter attention spans of the consumers are all speeding up the inevitable shift toward video.
And the content strategists are scrambling to leverage the visual storytelling medium to help businesses drive awareness, engagement, sales, or whatever else they want to try and win over customers.
Let us start with the 4 stages of the marketing funnel the prospects go through to understand what content strategy to adopt at each stage:
For example, if you are trying to inform your customers or attract potential customers of your services, stick to that and do the best job you can.
| Stage | Primary Goal | Success metric | Video types |
|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Announcing your presence to the world | No sales talk | No. of views generated | View count | Product marketing, Product demo videos, Repurposed webinar videos |
| Consideration | Establishing yourself as a trusted source of quality information | No sales talk | Time spent by leads consuming the content. | Product demo videos, How-to, Case study videos |
| Conversion | Applying human touch | Making emotional connection | Click on CTA, request for a meeting. | Product-related videos, Customer testimonials |
| Retention | Nurturing long-term relationships | How they behave after signing up. | As applicable to Loyalty + Advocacy |
| Loyalty | Make it about THEM, not you | How they behave after signing up. | Onboarding, how-to videos |
| Advocacy | Continuing to add value. | Number of referrals, for example. | Academy Video courses |
Let’s consider Mt. Everest as an example to illustrate the first two stages of the funnel.
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first to scale the mountain in 1953. Before that everybody knew about Mt. Everest, but no one knew about the adventures the mountain offered.
Since then, however, the tallest mountain peak in the world has become an obsession for every climber. But they don’t have the information to pursue their dream.
Let’s say you deal in products and services related to mountain climbing.
So the climbers have a desire, and you have the power to fulfill it.
But do you see the problem?
You do, of course. Your prospects are sitting in some corner of the world and looking for information that might get them a step closer to achieving their dream. They want answers and information, and they are seeking someone who can provide them.
Remember, at this stage you are looking to establish your identity and exposure to potential customers.
So, you should not be even thinking about sales. You must spend your energy and resources establishing a presence on forums and social media sites where your leads are likely to spend a considerable amount of time looking for information.
The answer is simple: Using VIDEOS!
Why? Have a look at the following data:
How can the videos help? You can promote them using social media ads like this example from the pipe and in targeted searches. Include a video on your landing page or use it as part of the blog to make it more shareable, leading to even more views.
IDEAL VIDEOS FOR THE AWARENESS STAGE
Product videos: Here are some fine examples of Product marketing from ThoroughPut Demand sensing and Product demo videos from PRY, the financial planning and forecasting company, which can help you to spread brand awareness.
Webinar videos: Webinars are a valuable resource, but most webinars being live events don’t always provide the best user experience. Getting an expert as a key speaker is hard, so you wouldn’t want to miss out on sharing invaluable content from the webinar because of technical issues.
Here’s an example of how a webinar can reach a whole new level of UI/UX from Outreach Sales Engagement Platform.
Repurposed webinars: Webinars are great for reaching out to a larger audience and positioning yourself as an expert in your field. Here’s an example of how you can repurpose a webinar.
Generating fresh and relevant content is costly. Being able to repurpose existing content can save you time and resources you’d otherwise spend creating from scratch.
THE METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS
‘View Count’ is your best friend – the more, the better.
You have successfully negotiated the first all-important step. But your new audience is information-hungry, which presents you with an opportunity to treat them to some tasty titbits.
It’s important to remember here that the idea is to establish you as a trusted source of information, but doing so by not being too overbearing:
What kind of information would you provide them with? Here are some other pointers to consider why you might want to create videos:
Taking our mountaineering example forward, your leads would be interested in climbing gear, clothing, porter services, hotels, travel-related information, popular hiking routes, or language services.
Let’s see what options we have to impress the prospects.
A case in favor of videos is that almost eight out of ten people watch online videos each week, and over half view them every day, and these numbers show the trend in content creation – Social Media Week
IDEAL VIDEOS FOR THE CONSIDERATION STAGE
How-to videos are extremely useful to convince the leads that you know what you are talking about. Here’s a good example from Chirotouch:
Here is another example from Book Like A Boss of how Product demo videos can showcase your product as no blog or article can.
Case study videos give your leads the confidence to make the next move because it’s easier for them to relate to an example that talks about solving a problem they are interested in.
THE METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS
The time spent by your leads to consuming your content is a reliable indicator of how successful your efforts have been.
Depending on how well you managed the earlier stages, now you are where every marketer aspires to be!
Let’s recap the hard work you have put in so far:
But are they ready to bring out their credit cards yet?
The demos and how-to videos have done the groundwork for you.
Now it’s time to lend a human touch to the proceedings and make that emotional connection through a bit of human touch because studies tell us that
Human emotions play a major role in decision-making. The more the trust, the better are the chances of a sale.
So, what type of videos can do the magic for you and make the difference between conversion and disappointment?
The product-related videos can help reinforce the belief, a good word or two from happy customers also does the trick.
Perhaps the most important factor here is how favorably your prospects perceive you and your brand.
So buyers are also interested to know about you, your values, your company culture, what your employees feel about working for you, how your company is involved in CSR activities…
The list goes on – you are the best judge of what works for you.
In case you want some supporting statistics why you should create compelling videos to showcase them, here it is:
THE METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS
A click on your carefully created Call-to-action button, a video email requesting you to arrange a meeting, or maybe even a personal call…
Now that you have won over your leads and converted them into customers, your responsibilities go up, not down.
There’s nothing like having repeat customers. Every marketer and salesperson dreams of realizing the LifeTime Value (LTV) from a customer. They know what it means to the business – and to their monthly sales targets!
Let’s now talk about the two important stages of the retention stage:
We’ll start with the ‘Loyalty’ stage.
Customers may sometimes start showing no or little interest in your products. So how can you address this issue and sustain the engagement?
By making it about them and by telling them how your product can be useful for them.
To do that, you must continue to add value to the relationship by providing them with educational content, giving them exclusive deals for product launches, and by telling them how as a company you are a right fit in their lives.
With videos, it’s simple to engage with your customers.
IDEAL VIDEOS FOR THE LOYALTY STAGE
Check out the Onboarding video from Raken, the construction management software company, and the how-to video from Ethnio scheduling.
THE METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS
By studying the user behavior after they convert, you can find out if they remain loyal to your brand or do you need to up your game.
The next stage in the ‘Retention’ process is ‘Advocacy’, which is considered the utopia in the marketing world!
Imagine your loyal customers doing the work for you by spreading the friendly word about your business.
IDEAL VIDEOS FOR THE ADVOCACY STAGE
Academy Video courses from VWO are how you provide value to the most loyal supporters of your brand.
THE METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS
The number of referrals, for example, is a good indicator to measure your success.
Before we wrap up, we would like to bring your attention to a last piece of statistics:
According to Buffer, if time, resources, and budget were not an obstacle, 83% of marketers would rely more heavily on video as a marketing strategy.
That’s how useful videos are, and there is no reason for you to miss out on the benefits of using video as an effective tool in your marketing efforts.
Don’t let the amount of work involved in creating a video for your business worry you.
Let Content Beta handle all the work for you. We convert even your old marketing brochures, PDFs, and PPTs into slick SaaS marketing videos like this example from Dynamic Signal that can help you connect with your audience in an instant.
A marketing funnel is a graphical representation of leads or visitors to a website. This funnel shows the progression of customers from one stage to the next in their journey. Your video marketing team’s job is to get them to move to the next stage of the funnel until they are ready to convert.
In many cases, it is divided into 4 stages with each stage performing a particular task. They are Awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention. Videos offer the best chance to help customers along as they are more engaging than PDFs and brochures.
That’s why we recommend that the retention stage be divided into two sub-stages: Loyalty and advocacy. If you want to earn the loyalty of your customers and also get them to advocate for your business, you must nurture the relationship to earn it.
