Audiences crave video. And with 74 percent of all internet traffic projected to come from video by 2017, it’s foolish for marketers not to serve it up to their prospects and customers, establishing and furthering relationships with their brand.
Video tells a story and guides your audience through the customer journey like no other medium can. But when it comes to getting started with video, many of us are stuck at a roadblock, wondering what type of video content to produce and how to produce it.
Deploying video marketing across your customer journey is a lot like putting your home up on the market. A big investment, like buying a home, tells us a lot about how audiences evaluate, consider, and purchase. Furthermore, it’s not a decision considered lightly, or without emotion-- those marketers facing a long sales cycles can surely relate. Yet, unlike buying a home, your target audiences can’t come inside and interact, so how do you create a welcoming environment while they evaluate the purchase? Your video strategy and, more specifically, these five types of video can help nurture relationships and earn prime real estate in the minds of prospects. In this post, we’ll explain five simple videos for engaging with your customers and prospects at every stage of the customer journey:
1. Thought Leadership Videos
Best Customer Lifecycle Stages: Awareness
Your audience is facing a problem. Your brand offers a solution. But many challenges aren’t so black and white. There are lots of questions from your prospect, and trust is still being established.
Creating awareness can be an ever-moving obstacle for most marketers. In many cases you’re actually marketing to the “pre-awareness” stage, trying to cultivate an understanding of a problem. At this point in the cycle, a homebuyer isn’t making a list of their “must have” features. No, it’s too early. Awareness is recognizing there is a problem, but it comes in subtle ways, like driving by a newly completed development and realizing it’s 15 minutes closer to work than your current home.
FortuneLive Interviews Brightcove CEO, Dave Mendels on the future of online video.
When done well, thought-leadership content highlights your expertise in a sophisticated the way to create the awareness you are in need of. When looking to spread awareness video gets you noticed because video reaches 3x as many people and gets 20% more attention than standard blog posts. Thought leadership content is produced to help educate and inspire during the very early stages of the awareness stage, generating goodwill. Your audience is just starting to ask questions and they’re seeking the best answers to solve their problems. Your brand can make a positive impact early in this customer journey by positioning your company’s subject matter experts as their trusted advisors.
Video reaches 3x as many people and gets 20% more attention than standard blog posts.
-Contently
Get creative and add authority to your brand. Craft thought leadership content like interviews, webinars, and event coverage videos to create buzz. Executives, account managers, digital marketers; they all know your audience and possess the experience to educate viewers and stimulate interest and awareness.
Thought Leadership Video Best Practices
Answer Prospect Questions: At this point in the journey, audiences crave information. Steal a note from the classroom style format and try a webinar. Webinars have shown to be consistent drivers of engagements for brands with 78% of buyers listing webinars as content used to make B2B purchasing decisions. The controlled environment of a webinar allows you to tell the story while still having direct interactions with prospects and customers through Q&A. Not only are webinars great for live event streaming, but on-demand video can be utilized post-event for social promotions and email nurture campaigns.
Social Video: What’s Next. Tips for Creation, Distribution, and Amplification - a joint webinar with Brightcove and the Content Marketing Institute, now available on demand.
Use Expert Opinions: Interviews allow audiences to engage directly with experts.his humanizes your business, helping the consumer to associate your name with individuals they feel expertly understand their problem.
Immerse Yourself in the Community: You’re asking your audience to invest in your solution and should, therefore, be an expert in the community you’re serving. Conferences and showcases are a hub for industry influencers. Presentations, panels, and roundtables naturally position you as a subject matter expert. Utilize this content through live streams and later, video-on-demand, to help continue the conversation long after the event comes to a close.
Kieran Farr, our Senior Director of Business Development, was interviewed at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on the most effective post-event follow-up method. Hint: your salespeople should be using video! Skip to 2:29 to hear what he has to say.
And remember, this video content doesn’t always have to live on your site, in fact, in most cases, it’s better if it doesn’t, as you can see in all of our examples. Think of paid opportunities on third party sites, or earned attention through strong partner relationships and the brand’s well-built social media profiles.
2. Instructional and ‘How To’ Videos
Best Customer Lifecycle Stages: Awareness, Engagement
Playing around with the idea of moving and attending an open house are two entirely different things. In most cases, buyers aren’t engaging in these conversations unless they’re somewhat serious. And with most of our B2B buyers, the same is true. They’re extremely busy and not talking to sales unless they’re ready to evaluate, how do we stay top-of-mind until they’re ready? Engagement campaigns.
Video is 50x more likely to get organic page ranks in Google than plain text.
-Contently
Once they’re aware they have a problem, audiences actively search. With video being 50x more likely to get organic page ranks in Google search than plain text it’s vital that the keywords from your site SEO strategy are integrated into that of your video marketing. Conveniently, “how to” videos have titles that are naturally query-driven ( i.e.: ‘How To Write a Video Marketing Blog Series’). The right results on search engines for your audiences means the right results for you. Video content that correlates highly to the users intent guarantees a better user experience and one less hurdle to purchasing. It’s no wonder then that explainer videos can increase conversion by up to 20% or more.
Supplementing a blog he wrote, Brightcove Product Marketer, Nathan Veer, explains how to optimize videos for search, utilizing schema and other video marketing best practices.
If you’re planning to develop a collection of “how to” videos for your site, host them on individual pages so search engines can index each video asset individually. Embedding all of your videos on the same page does nothing to aid your sitemap’s size or authority and makes it difficult for the searcher to find the content they’re looking for. Creating libraries which then direct to individual video assets is the way to go.
Instructional Video Best Practices
Have a Great Script: A great script not only educates but engages as well. When drafting your script consider your audience and be sure be sure your content is giving them the answers they’re looking for while still embodying the tone and voice of your brand. It’s important to write it down because being engaging and educating all at the same time can be hard!
Don’t Overthink the Creative: The simplest how-to videos are produced with two shots, one with your instructor speaking into the camera and a secondary camera angle collecting demonstrative footage. Also, don’t forget, not every video has to be live action, use screen grabs and images that supplement what you are explaining. Being quick and direct over superfluous is the most important.
Capitalize on Curiosity: Interactivity is a fantastic tool to keep audiences engaged and assess knowledge retention of your how-to video. Once you’ve attracted an audience, keep them engaged by introducing interactive elements like quizzes, questions, and polls to entice your audience as they watch. Not only does interactivity increase engagement earlier in the customer journey, but it allows you to review analytics to see how the viewer chose to control their experience and the flow of information. Examining this interaction with your video content, you can react and test the actual video content or decide on different interactive options and content suggestions to drive action.
Bob Bailey, Brightcove’s Learning Specialist, creates descriptive how-to videos for our customers on the Brightcove support site. These videos live in a video gallery to encourage watching playlists and diving into an immersive video experience.
3. Product Demonstration Videos
Best Customer Lifecycle Stages: Engagement, Conversion
Ah, the dreaded home inspection. Homebuyers don’t feel comfortable buying on surface level alone. Similarly, your leads feel the same way. So how do you get them to seal the deal and make the purchase? Product demos work well because prospect questions are answered, and you effectively mitigated any concerns. In fact, 90% of users say that watching a product video assists in their purchasing decision. this is the optimal moment to guide your prospect to conversion.
Product demonstrations work wonders in the engagement stage because they stimulate interest through explanatory information paired with sight, sound, and movement. This helps a prospective customer understand what it is to use or own your product or service. Video almost makes this feel “true-to-life”. According to eMarketer, 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. This is where video drives engagement through the customer or buyer journey. By seeing your product in practice, prospects can better visualize their unique challenges overcome. This content paired with the feeling of success elicits a sense of ownership pre-purchase.
Viewers are 4x more likely to want to watch a product video than read a description.
-eMarketer
Product Demo Video Best Practices
Tell a Winning Story: The main reason product demos fail? They are too product focused. Yes, your viewers want to go deeper but ultimately they need to know this product is aligned with their goals. So, how will your product or service achieve these goals and why is it the superior option in comparison to all products on the market? Think big picture here and remember that needs evolve. This is a great time to bring up periphery problems or issues that your prospect hasn’t even thought of, and position the value your solution delivers across the board.
The above video introduces the Video Marketing Suite, sympathizing with the lack of time and resources many a marketer faces.
Use Analytics: One of video’s advantages is its insight into viewer behavior over other content marketing mediums. Review your video analytics to determine who’s watching your video, how long they watched it, and any actions inspired after the fact. How can you keep this prospect engaged?
Sync with Sales: Be sure to connect with your sales team to find out how the content was received. Which questions do customers and prospects still want answered? Can you create a playlist or other type of content path with video to accelerate lead velocity?
Don’t forget, no one will benefit more internally from these product demos than your sales team-- you’re now creating a video training center in a flash.
Brightcove introduces Brightcove Social, our new social video hosting platform that reduces the time and resources necessary to publish social video across multiple social media networks.
4. Case Studies and Customer Testimonial Videos
Best Customer Lifecycle Stages: Conversion, Retention
Your customers are likely facing similar, if not the same, problems. Consumers and service evaluators like to learn from their peers. Customer testimonials showcase your proven solution to those exact problems and leverage the brand power of your current customers, increasing your brand’s authority within the market while resonating with your target personas.
82% of marketers use case studies as one of their content marketing tactics.
-Content Marketing Institute
Case studies offer the vital social proof customers need in the conversion stage. This emotional, “feel good” endorsement of your brand is powerful. It validates the (soon-to-be) customer’s choice. Last minute hesitations melt away. Get ready to knock down that “For Sale” sign. These new homeowners are ready to call the movers, start fighting over where to place the coffee table, and start settling into their new home. Case studies move the buying process forward and help to seal the deal..
Dunkin’ Brands uses Brightcove for effective instructional videos for internal communications with franchises. “Video grabs attention and delivers a consistent, clear message,” says Glen Schwartz, Director of Corporate Communications at Dunkin’ Brands.
Case studies also offer tremendous versatility. Whether they’re used as stand-alone content or integrated into blog posts, press releases, or landing pages; case studies give you valuable content for all of your digital marketing efforts.
Video Case Study Best Practices
Pick a Relatable Customer and Target Your Audience: Make sure you’re highlighting a customer whose challenges are universal or similar to those of your prospects. Sometimes customers will use different products in different ways, for example as a video technology company we have customers who use us for live events, internal communications, or demandgen. Each case study needs to be crystalline in its focus.
Deliver Compelling Data: Verbal testimonials give your prospect a sense of relief that your solutions work, but it is numbers and hard data that will push them from engagement to conversion. Conclude with customer results to demonstrate impact.
Get Specific: Though your customer may be benefitting from your solution in a multitude of ways, direct them to devote focus to where they see seeing the strongest results. The clarity frees the viewer from distractions and gives them tangible strategies for a specific, yet prolific problem. A lack of specificity is where many a marketer goes wrong in their content marketing strategy.
Now we’re getting really meta! In our case study, Bill Marriott Sr., Director of Video Communications and New Media at SAS, shows how highlighting one of their customers to demonstrate the impact data can have on people. Telling this story with Brightcove garnered immeasurable visibility and recognition for the brand.
5. Company Culture Videos
Best Customer Lifecycle Stages: Advocacy
There’s a reason it’s called “home, sweet home”. But when you really love something, you want others to participate too, right? These home hunters have found the perfect neighborhood. Maybe it’s time to convince Grandma to move into the house two doors down?
For our customer conference, Brightcove PLAY, we created a campy video using our employees and their charisma, dancing abilities, and musical talents. This video stressed the importance of developing APIs to allow our customers to put video wherever and whenever they want-- one of promises to our customers.
People want to do business with those that they like and companies that embody their values. According to MarTech, brands that inspire a higher emotional intensity receive 3x as much word-of-mouth marketing as less emotionally connected brands. Use video to project your business’s personality to the world and gain brand advocates who willingly engage and share your messages.
Brands that inspire a higher emotional intensity receive 3x as much word-of-mouth marketing as less emotionally connected brands.
-MarTech
Humanize your brand and offer a behind the scenes look with video. Not only are you able to showcase your company’s greatest assets (your employees) to prospective customers, but you’re also propping open the door for future talent down the line. This can have significant benefits for your recruitment initiatives.
Company Culture Video Best Practices
Show Them, Don’t Just Tell Them: You don’t want them to just hear why your company is great to work with, show them. Use video to bring customers around the office and let them see all the aspects of a day in the life. Which visual elements align with your brand beside your website?
Happy employees love to talk about their work. Our human resources department worked with our corporate video production team to produce employee profiles that live on the Brightcove Careers page, personifying our brand.
Capitalize on Internal Advocates: Your employees know your brand best and, chances are, there’s more than one reason they’ve stuck around this long. They’re your internal advocates.
Join Forces with Your HR and PR Teams: If you’re anything like Brightcove, you’re a ton of fun, and not afraid to show it! Launch parties, happy hours, trendy online challenges: look for opportunities to showcase your company as a collection of great people.
Having a little fun and embracing a trend, Brightcove created a mannequin challenge video in one take on Election Day.
Despite what you may think, I’m not in the market to buy a new home. But in the digital space, every brand is looking to stake a claim for their industry. Viewing the customer journey through this home buying analogy allows us to better conceptualize and understand the motivations of buyers with a dizzying amount of options placed before them. Video has the unique ability to connect your brand to your audience in a natural and authentic way. Utilizing these five types of video you can make a huge impact without a massive video library. Each video type addresses one, if not several, stages of the customer journey. When paired with the right distribution channels, these videos not only nurture prospect relationships, but sustain them as viewers convert to customers. Go ahead, start giving your brand curb appeal.
Become a Video Marketing Hero