How to use the Right Videos for each Stage of your Marketing Funnel and Why?

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?

“What exactly is causing the disruption in the content world?”

“The realization that visuals can have a bigger impact than words – at least in the marketing world.”

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:

“Remember, at every phase of the funnel, you must create a video that mainly addresses your primary goal before guiding your leads to the next 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.

How to identify your primary goal at each stage of the funnel and create the most suitable video to achieve it:

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.

THE AWARENESS STAGE

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.

“They don’t even know you exist, much less the services you offer. Stand up and wave at them, NOW.”

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.

“So, ask yourself: How am I going to do THAT?”

The answer is simple: Using VIDEOS!

Why? Have a look at the following data:

It is expected that online videos will account for over 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022, a 15-fold increase over 2017 – Cisco
The engagement for tweets with videos is 10x higher than those without – Twitter

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.

THE CONSIDERATION STAGE

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:

Present facts and useful information from various sources, and not just your own.
Allow your leads to decide based on the information provided and by weighing the pros and cons of each option.

What kind of information would you provide them with? Here are some other pointers to consider why you might want to create videos:

Videos are more likely to be shared than text-only content. For example, the most shared content on LinkedIn is video, 20 times more than in any other format – LinkedIn
Most engagement comes from videos that are between 2 and 3 minutes long – Wistia

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.

THE CONVERSION STAGE

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:

You got found by your target group.
They enjoyed and shared the videos you thoughtfully put together for their benefit.
Everyone – Leads, their friends, their connections – knows about your business and the value you can offer.
All of them agree that they can rely on you to provide expert guidance and reliable knowledge using your videos.

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

“People buy with emotion, justify with logic.”

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.

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.” – Simon Sinek

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:

Learning about a product or service with video is preferred by 72% of customers – HubSpot
Including a video on your landing page can boost your conversion rate by up to 80% – Unbounce

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.

THE RETENTION STAGE

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!

“The task is more hard work, but so far you have shown exemplary commitment in winning them over. That means you are ready to nurture a long-term relationship with them.”

Let’s now talk about the two important stages of the retention stage:

We’ll start with the ‘Loyalty’ stage.

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.

“Simply put, it does not even have to be about you and your product. Any relevant, shareable, and useful content will do.”

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 ADVOCACY STAGE

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.

FINAL WORDS

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 videos like this example from Dynamic Signal that can help you connect with your audience in an instant.

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Avoid spending long hours in software video production and fix customer churn today!

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