Getting time with prospects is more challenging than ever. When it comes to communication, there are few mediums more powerful than video. Brands that strategically use video for marketing distinctly set themselves apart in marketing performance from those that don’t. Video creates a 66% greater increase in MQLs delivered to sales (11.2% vs. 6.7%), 2.5 times the growth in marketing’s contribution to revenue, and 54% more growth in brand awareness year-over-year (10.5% vs. 6.8%).
But that’s only the beginning. Your sales team can use video to better engage prospects and communicate value at every stage of your sales cycle. With relevant content, you have a good reason to follow-up and stay top-of-mind with prospects, keep them engaged, and accelerate the sales cycle. Sales guides the customer journey as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) become sales qualified leads (SQLs), and as SQLs are converted into buyers. Ditching the sales-marketing divide and using video strategically throughout the entire customer journey creates a holistic approach to outreach and provides a seamless customer experience that delivers business results.
Marketing’s role in leading the customer journey during the Awareness stage, and the Interest phase of Engagement, is well-understood. What might not be understood widely is that for your sales team, the opportunity lies in using video to complement the team’s calls, pitches, and proposals. In fact, video-enabled salespeople outperform those without video in critical success metrics like customer retention rates (72% vs. 66%), lead acceptance rates (56% vs. 47%), and percent of reps reaching quota (54% vs. 50%).
But first, for career marketers, let’s make sure we’re all using the same language. How can we make the traditional funnel or pipeline that sales uses and turn it into a continuum that matches the customer journey?
Video Marketing with Sales and Customer Success Teams
At Brightcove, we often educate our prospects and customers on using video across the customer journey, integrating video into a multi-channel strategy. Strategically done, video is just one of the mediums prospects interact with across the stages: awareness, engagement, conversion, retention, and advocacy. And while we’ve charted the journey, there are nuances within this process during which sales becomes involved. Have you planned for these interactions? Without appropriate foresight your video marketing can become disjointed.
After all, all three teams – marketing, sales, and customer success – share focus on the customer journey and contribute to each stage. Which department leads the journey changes as the customer moves across the stages is displayed below, with video content suggestions.
With this change to customer-journey alignment, brands are improving the customer experience by communicating in one seamless motion as the prospect becomes the customer becomes the advocate. With marketing, sales, and customer success teams focused on the journey, the only question becomes which group leads at each stage and how the hand-off between these organizations is handled. It’s worth sitting down with your sales and customer success teams however (your greatest source of content in my option), to brainstorm and figure it all out. Your organization has everything to gain-- reduced sales time for converting prospects to customers, higher customer satisfaction, and more loyal brand advocates who make repeat purchases and recommend the brand’s products to others.
An easy way to get started? While building awareness is great, marketers often forget to engage with those that already know them, their customers. You can make an immediate video marketing impact by stopping churn. Your customer success team can use video to inject a human element in relationship building and customer satisfaction that’s paramount to their success. We created “Meet your AM” videos which were hugely successful at re-engaging our customers with an average engagement rate of 82.84%! You can read all about it here: Video for Retention: How We Created a Hugely Successful Campaign, Generating Upsell Opportunities.
Align the Customer Journey and Sales Cycle