Video has always been considered an important tactic for brands who are looking to build awareness for their product or service, but there have been many false starts. Every digital marketer has been saying that this would be the year that video takes off.
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin
For the longest time, video was the online equivalent of the TV commercial and was a good tool for mass media communication. It’s been talked about a lot, and it’s all over our social feeds, but for lots of brands video has not yet made it into their mainstream content calendar. However with advances in technology and the ability to now target your audience online with laser precision, video is now proving to be a very effective tool to include in your Lead Generation strategy.
More than 50% of consumers want to see videos from brands, which is more than any other type of content. It can increase website conversion rates by 80% and 90% of customers say that video helps them make buying decisions. This means it can play a pivotal part in your lead generation tactics, not only driving traffic to your website from customers who are undecided about which product to buy, but also increasing conversion when you get there.
Despite the factors that both consumers and platforms favour video, many companies still ignore it. Why is that?
Part of the reason is that video can be time consuming and costly to produce – coupled with a lack of time, resource, or expertise.
-Video Marketing Blogs-
We would argue that producing any type of quality content takes time and budget – However its about understanding the “right” content to produce so it convinces your prospect to buy – If it does this and the cost of the content stacks up ok in terms of return on Investment, then it’s a no brainer!
What can brands do to include video in their lead gen strategy?
“Marketing used to be about making a myth and telling it. Now it’s about telling a truth and sharing it.” – Marc Mathieu
There are some exciting developments in video marketing techniques that can help brands use it to nurture leads and close sales.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence-powered video platforms can help convert blog content into high-quality video snippets that help tell your story. These short teaser videos summarise the main points of your blog in 60 seconds or less.
Even if your visitors don’t read the entire article, they can still get an overview right within their newsfeed.
Here at WSI we use an AI powered video platform to produce teaser videos like this for our weekly blogs. We then share these videos on our social channels.
Check out a recent example below:
Personalisation
“A person’s name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” – Dale Carnegie
Based on our research, B2B prospects are 16 times more likely to watch your video if it is personalised.
We are really excited about some recent developments from our Video platform Partner, Vidyard. We now have the ability to take video personalisation to the next level.
Imagine being able to customise your videos to include your customer’s name or other personal company details right within the video?
Well now it’s possible!
How does it work? You shoot the video as usual and then we can add the personalisation. The personalisation comes from your CRM system – It could be the person’s name, company name, etc.
There are many ways this could benefit your business. Let’s say you are running a promotional event – it could be a talk at a trade show or an online webinar. You can send your top prospects a customised invitation via video. It’s far more impactful than sending the same generic video to everyone.
Lead nurturing
We’ve mentioned already that video marketing can help drive conversions, but just how can it do that?
Firstly, you can tailor the type of video content you make to each specific stage of the buyer’s journey. For example, product demo and how-to videos, as well as case studies and customer testimonials, are more suited to converting customers and closing the sale. If you want to attract customers, you should consider branded or thought leadership videos that position your company as both knowledgeable and helpful, while avoiding overt mention of your product or service.
No matter what the stage of the buying journey, you still need to include calls to action to encourage your prospect to take the next step down the sales pipeline.
Advancements in video marketing technology now mean that you can now add web form overlays right on the video player. This means that you can gate your content or add call to action overlays right within the video to encourage video viewers to take the next step.
Integrating video marketing with your CRM
Another exciting development is the ability to integrate video viewing behaviour right into your CRM. Most lead management software will show you all the interactions that your sales team has with a prospect or customer. For example, you will see the website pages that they visited, the emails they opened, the whitepapers they downloaded etc… It is now possible to see what videos they viewed and how long they viewed them for – very powerful insights that can help in the sales process.
This is powerful contextual data that you can pass to your sales team and use to qualify leads. You can also get a better idea of what types of video drive more qualified leads so you can produce more of this type of content.
The key to any successful Video Marketing initiative is a solid plan that ties back to your Lead Generation strategy – Video is great but it won’t achieve any return on your investment without this plan. Thanks to the recent advances in technology, video marketing has become significantly more cost-effective; both in producing and promoting the video.
WSI can help deliver world class video production and marketing capabilities to your office door at very affordable prices.
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