You’ve nailed your buyer personas and crafted carefully thought out, compelling marketing messages to engage your ideal customers.
Yet, as time goes by you are seeing that your outbound email, digital advertising, eBooks, and organic social is returning diminishing returns. What do you do to turn these trends around? It may be as simple as adding video marketing to your campaigns to boost engagement and move prospects through the buyer’s journey.
These days your potential customers are being inundated with hundreds of marketing messages every day, making it harder and harder to penetrate awareness and build your brand. If you do get a potential customer’s attention, keeping it more than a few seconds is also a tremendous challenge.
Adding video to an email can increase click-through rates by up to 50% Click To TweetWith that in mind, today we explore why video is perfect for demand generation and also cover some best practices with video that will help you build brand awareness and generate more leads.
Why Video Is Perfect For Demand Generation
Video is a great tool for demand generation. It allows you to succinctly explain complex ideas, increase engagement with prospects, promote thought leader status and develop personalized relationships with your leads that other forms of marketing cannot.
These benefits all lead to more rapidly qualifying your most engaged leads faster.
Video provides more detailed analytics than other marketing vehicles. When you use video in your marketing efforts, you are able to get a deeper look into your potential customers and how they are interacting with your marketing content.
For instance, if you use a downloadable whitepaper as a piece of gated content, while you are able to see you have a new lead and also see that they downloaded the whitepaper, you have no actual idea of how much of that whitepaper they read.
Video, on the other hand, gives you a wealth of analytical data. You can see how long people are watching the videos, how many times they’ve watched them and even if they shared them. This gives you a much better insight into the quality of the leads you are getting and how far down the buyer’s journey they really are.
Video Grabs The Attention of the Audience
If you open your email inbox and you see a message from a company that wants to do business with you are you more likely to read that message and click through if it’s a text-based, plain email, or if it’s an email with a video embedded that clearly displays an eyecatching thumbnail in the email?
If you said the video email, you are correct. Imagine if the video even had someone holding a whiteboard with your name written on it? You would certainly click on the video in the email message to see what the video was all about.
Studies show that prospects are actually five times more likely to engage with a personalized video message they receive in their inbox than they are in a traditional text-based email message.
Build Relationships With Prospects And Customers Using Personalized Marketing
Not only that, the novelty of the video personalization increases the likelihood they will share it around the office with their colleagues.
Video Establishes You As A Thought Leader And Helps Build Trust
Using video in your marketing gives you the ability to establish a much more personal connection with your prospect.
The key to taking a prospect through the buyer journey and getting them to the point where they are ready to convert is building trust.
Engaging informative videos build trust and establish you as a thought leader in your space. Video does this with much more simplicity and speed than an ebook, email or phone call could ever accomplish.
What is One-To-One Marketing? Definition, Examples, and More
Using the advanced analytical reporting described above, once you have insight into what your lead is most interested in, you can also customize the buyer journey experience with custom demos, or videos from your product or customer experience teams that will bring the whole experience together, making it even more personalized.
Video coordinates your outreach, breaks through busy inboxes and offers a personalized, trust-building experience that converts leads into customers. Let’s look at some specific tactics you can use to make this happen.
Use Video to Convert Leads on Your Site
The easiest way to dive into using video to increase demand generation is employing it on your website. Your website undoubtedly has calls to action on it that ask prospects to sign up for your email list or subscribe to your blog.
Simply adding a short video to these sections of your site will all but guarantee that you are going to see an increase in subscription rates. Videos encourage the prospect to click on them. If your message clearly explains the value they’ll receive by subscribing to these things, they are exponentially more likely to sign up.
Most brands can easily update their website’s pages with video in these parts of the site without going through tremendous effort, so this simple change is a great way to increase demand generation.
Use Video As Part Of Your Gated Content
Have you ever wanted to download an eBook, whitepaper, checklist, or report, but needed to enter contact information first? That is what is referred to as “gated content”. Gated content is a standard go-to when brands want to generate new leads.
Here’s a quick video on gated content by the folks over at Marketing 360:
While most of the data offered on these landing pages are text-based resources such as PDF files, there’s no reason you can’t use video instead. There are actually two great ways to use video for gated content.
First off, use a video on your landing page. For instance, if you have an ebook that is your piece of gated content and want to boost the conversion rate of the page, rather than tell people what they’ll get when they fill out your lead form with a bulleted, text-based list, why not put a short video on the landing page that describes what they will get?
Conversely, what if the video is your actual piece of gated content? Video is a great type of content that drives demand generation.
The best practice, in this case, would be to have a snippet of your piece of gated content that resides on the landing page itself. Your prospect can click on it to see the first 15-30 seconds of the content, for instance. Then, to view the entire piece of content they simply have to fill out the lead form and they are instantly taken to the full video.
Use Calls To Action In Your Videos
Did you know you can insert calls to action in the videos you generate for your brand? You can.
While it’s great to create compelling and engaging video content your prospects will love, if you don’t have a final step for the prospect to take as the video concludes, your campaign isn’t going to be that successful.
Adding a call to action inside your video will remedy this problem. It might be something basic such as summarizing the video and letting the prospect know what the next steps are. Or, you could insert interactive links inside the video itself that a prospect can click on to take the next desired steps.
No matter how you approach it, the important take-home note here is that your video has to have a call to action in it to turn it into a lead generation tool, rather than just a plain piece of content.
Add Video To Your Email Marketing
We discussed earlier how video in your email campaigns makes them more attention-grabbing. It’s a very important part of increasing the effectiveness of your email marketing.
The truth is email marketing success is declining. Open and click rates consistently decrease year over year.
Using video in your email campaigns is a great way to refresh an old form of marketing and breathe some new life into it. Adding video to an email can increase click-through rates by up to 50% because it piques the curiosity of the recipient, causing them to have to click on it to see what it’s all about.
Use Video To Generate Leads On Social Media
With social media being a dominate force that is only growing more and more every day, it has become a very noisy place and attracting leads on social media platforms has become more and more difficult. Video can be a great way to drive engagement on your social platforms.
For instance, if you want to engage your followers, consider adding live video to part of your digital marketing plans. Your social media followers know who you are, so when they receive the alert on their mobile devices that you are live, they’ll recognize you.
Much like the feeling they’ll get when they receive your video email messages, curiosity is going to compel them to click on the link to tune in and see what you are doing. This gives you great opportunities to further tell your brand’s story, engage and delight your prospect and get them to take the next step.
Use Video To Highlight Your Happy Customers
You can talk about your brand, your value proposition and how you are the thought leader in your industry until you are blue in the face.
The truth is though, that nobody can tell your story like customers. An independent third party talking about your brand lends an extra level of authenticity a brand just can’t produce on its own.
By using videos to do this, you can show your customer’s personalities to make their stories more authentic and drive a much more personal feeling experience.
The best part of these videos is they don’t have to be highly produced. In fact, simply ask your customer to shoot a quick testimonial video themselves, with their laptop or mobile device. Videos like this are deemed even more authentic by prospects and will be very well received.
Use Video To Educate And Explain
As we mentioned earlier, videos are a fantastic tool for taking complex ideas and succinctly describing them in ways your prospect will easily understand. Based on this, it stands to reason that some of the best video content you can create are educational, or “explainer” videos.
Answering commonly asked customer questions, walking through your onboarding process, or explaining the newest features and benefits of your new product release are all great topics you can use to engage leads and move them down the buyer’s journey.
Start Creating Video Content with Ease
So if you are excited about video and want to get started, we hope this article was helpful.
If your concerned about the actual creation of the content and are wondering how to actually create captivating video that will increase lead generation, we’re here to help.
At Vedia, we help companies create data-driven videos throughout the funnel to increase awareness, educate prospects, nurture leads and enhance the customer experience. We will help you transform your existing data sets (spreadsheets, CRM data, product listings, etc.) to high-performing video assets that’ll attract and convert viewers throughout all your distribution channels. Improve your marketing dollars’ ROI with data-driven videos.
Contact us today to see what we can do for you.
