Over the last few years, marketing has changed. Changed a lot.
The interconnectedness of the world through social media has profoundly shifted the way we do things.
And both customers and marketers have adapted. We’ve entered the Age of the Customer, so it isn’t surprising that inbound marketing is the name of the game.
Now, to stand out and rise above the sea of data and constant stimuli that your potential clients are being submitted to on a moment-to-moment basis, marketers have to become a bit more selective and a lot more strategic with their approach.
Become precise engineers of data and information dissemination.
This has breathed new life—and given a new meaning—to concepts like sales funnels and buyers’ journeys. But when it’s all said and done, it always comes down to this: Understand your target and tailor your approach to fit their specific stage’s need.
Video content is not exempt from this.
As multimedia becomes increasingly more vital to our marketing strategies, it behooves us also to understand precisely which formats work best in which stage of the sales funnels.
And to that end, I wanted to briefly go over a simplified version of the typical sales funnel structure—and discuss the kinds of videos that are most appropriate and more inclined—to bring about the results you’re after.
Awareness Stage Videos: Be Subtle. Be Helpful. Be Engaging.
In this initial stage, potential customers become conscious of their pain points and the needs they want to solve. And they set out to try and figure out what they can do about them.
It’s an exploratory stage, where most people might not even fully understand that they have a problem, let alone think about committing to a purchase. In marketing terms, they’re cold. So, the last thing you’d want to do with your content is to be too “sales-y” and scare them away.
Every product solves a need, so the needs your product deals with should be targeted accordingly.
Your videos should be geared to provide value, inform, and even entertain. Use this opportunity to draw from your knowledge about your customer base and address their pain points while you advise on what they need to do about them—all the while resisting the urge to outright offer them your solution.
There are three types of videos uniquely equipped to handle these objectives:
- Educational Videos: These videos need to be relevant to your potential clients’ pain points and provide information in a straightforward manner they’d find valuable.
- How-to Videos: Procedural in nature, these explain a process or idea in a simple to follow, step-by-step format. They’re easy and clear, ideal to start familiarizing potentials with the solutions to their needs.
- Social Media Videos: These videos can be a bit of everything, from educational to commercials-in-disguise. What sets them apart is that they are short and designed to be shareable on social media platforms.
Consideration Stage Videos: Be Clear. Be Thorough. Be Knowledgeable.
Moving on, we have the consideration stage of the sales funnel. It starts once the potential buyer becomes conscious of the pain points they’re dealing with and understand they want to solve them.
At this point, they start proactively looking for solutions. In marketing terms, they’re warm. They begin considering different alternatives to address their issues, so your video content needs to be more specific and a bit more geared toward the sell. Still, you don’t have to be overt about it right from the start. But now your customers are considering making a purchase, so you can’t be too aloof either.
The consideration stage is crucial in any sales funnel. Here, you’re separating those who are genuinely interested in moving further down to a sell from those who were merely curious or just not ready to commit to anything else. Your video content should reflect this.
There are a few types of marketing videos that are ideal to take potential customers from where they are—looking for solutions—to where you want them to be—choosing your solution:
- Explainer Videos: Serve to illustrate complex ideas in a simple and engaging way. They combine the allure of educational videos, with the marketing benefits of proposing the company’s solution.
- Product Videos: These videos are the ideal platform to showcase individual products or services concisely. A surprisingly undervalued, fantastic conversion tool for any eCommerce business.
- FAQ Videos: The ideal format to anticipate clients´ questions, doubts, and objections and respond to them before they even become an obstacle to your funnel progression.
Decision Stage Videos: Be Human. Be Trustworthy. Be Effective.
A potential customer comes to the decision stage once they figure out their need and have gathered enough information about it to actually commit to one of the possible avenues to address it.
They’re finally comfortable and ready for the purchase. In marketing terms, they’re hot.
If your marketing and sales funnels have been doing their work correctly—and implementing videos goes a long way toward achieving just that—then customers at this stage should be quite familiar with you and your product and solution.
So, the best kinds of videos to use at this point are slightly more directed at addressing potential clients in this frame of mind. These are potentials who already know where you’re coming from and what your product can do for them but still need a bit of a push—usually, in the trust side of the equation—to actually talk themselves into making the purchase.
On that front, nothing works better than these types of videos:
- Testimonial Videos: Ideal to convince potential consumers about your product’s value because the information is coming from a satisfied—perceived as impartial—third party, bypassing biases that would arise if the information came directly from you.
- Company Story Videos: Perfect to connect with potential clients on a personal, empathetic level. Company story videos are the ideal stage to show yourself as more than a faceless corporation and reap the benefits of the trust that you can earn.
- Commercials: Probably the most well-known type of video by most audiences, these need to be adapted to the current trends of the online community they’re being aimed at. When done correctly, commercials can do wonders at projecting your products and branding.
Knowing which type of video to use for each stage of your sales funnel is key to their ultimate success or failure.
Consider the end goal you have in mind for any video content you produce as part of your marketing, make sure to implement them following these suggestions, and you’ll enjoy the full power of marketing through video.
