Videos for Each Stage of your Marketing Funnel
Understanding video in your marketing funnel
Video marketing and sales funnels are two powerful tools used to capture buyers. Together, they can identify a problem, build trust in your brand, and allow your prospects to see your product or service as the solution. This, in turn, will increase conversions and brand awareness and improve sales consistency.
Why can’t you just use the same video at each stage?
It’s important to meet your potential customer where they’re at in the decision-making process. To do it right, take the time to match specific video types with each stage of your sales funnel. Your prospect wants new information and reasons why they should give you a chance. Optimize your videos for each stage of the funnel, and your content will have much greater appeal.
Let’s get started!
What is the marketing funnel?
First, we’ll review the steps of the marketing funnel, then suggest a few video options you can use to optimize your video marketing funnel.
The Marketing Funnel: One of the primary keys to success is understanding and matching your messaging to the three stages of the funnel – the top, the middle and the bottom. The funnel represents the number of customers you’re dealing with as they travel down the pipeline, from the broad audience that sees your initial video ads to those who make the purchase.
At Simple Story, we try to shape your videos to be used throughout your sales funnel and solve your business and marketing objectives.
Stages of the Marketing Funnel
Top of the Funnel: Hook them In
Goal: Initial interest, brand awareness, lead generation.
This is where prospects first meet your brand. They are likely browsing topics of interest at this early stage and probably haven’t even identified the project or challenge they need solving. Therefore, at this first point of contact, the content you expose them to should educate and inspire them on topics that matter to them.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos create a need (or want) for the customer. In these videos, we focus on the product’s benefits and how that helps your customer succeed. It’s less about the brand and more about solving the problem for your target audience. Explainer videos are great for creating awareness, creating a need, or explaining something complicated. For most explainer videos we produce, there is usually a clear formula that includes the current landscape, problem, solution, features and benefits, and finally, a call to action. We keep the foundation but add different concepts and stories on top of that structure to make it unique to your brand.
Where is it most effective? By sitting at the fold of your homepage, the explainer video can be the ideal lead generation or conversion tool that greets your site visitors with engaging content and the right information they need.
Brand/Culture Videos
Brand videos help your customer understand why you do what you do. It digs deeper into your company’s philosophy and helps create a personal connection with consumers. It can double as the perfect introduction to the marketplace or enhance your brand perception. These videos are great for creating a personal connection and showcasing your brand, products, and value.
An effective placement for your brand video is in a multi-faceted social media campaign, email campaign or at the top of your landing page. Alternatively, your brand video can be used on internal platforms or during recruitment or onboarding.
Middle of the Funnel: Feed their Curiosity
Goal: Educate, Learning
By the time your prospects reach the middle of your sales funnel, they’ve identified their problems or challenges and actively researched solutions. This is where you would start building a strong case for choosing your brand by demonstrating the advantages of becoming a customer.
Product Video
Product videos introduce a new product, showing how it would be used in regular life. Shifting the focus from the who or why the product video helps your audience understand how it can fit into their personal or professional lives. The goal is to bring the viewer into the video and make them feel like they are there, using the product themselves.
Your audience may be aware of their challenges and have heard of your brand but may not know how your product can directly benefit them. Using this video in the decision stage of your sales funnel process is where it will serve you best.
Tutorial/How-To Video
These are product tours, showing a deeper look at the product to a user who is already interested or signed up for a trial. If the user doesn’t know how to use your product, they might never give it a try.
Hosting your product or tutorial video on a product-specific landing page is the best way to give your visitors the information they need when interacting with your brand and need a powerful persuader to adopt your product.
Bottom of the Funnel: Close the Sale
Goal: Justify. Purchase.
This is the most critical step; if all goes well, your leads will choose your brand as their solution. This is the final push where you should reinforce the features and benefits that are better than your competitors, as they may still have reservations.
Demo/webinars
At this point in the sales funnel, your viewers are very interested, so your video content should be directly and highly appealing. Whether you are launching a new product in your suite or a new function for one of your existing solutions, your customers need a little “show & tell.” Your demo videos do just that: explain and demonstrate specific information on your solution’s key functionality. Think of these as levelled-up “how-to” videos. Since you have more of their attention, you can use long-form demonstration videos or webinars that dive deeper into features, sub-features and more!
Customer Testimonials
A powerful way to establish social proof. We do this with the testimonial video: use your brand’s success stories to create the foundation for a video that inspires. Your customers are storytellers, too; the testimonial video is their platform.
A company can showcase the benefits of their company without being an advertisement. But, more importantly, it can also stand as a use case, providing real results.
Final Thoughts
An increasing number of your customers want to conduct their research and purchase when they’re ready. Brands that help them progress through these steps with valuable, high-quality information are the ones that will continue to see success.
This article outlines the stages of your customer’s buying journey and the kind of video content that works best for each stage. However, it’s up to you to figure out what will resonate with your specific customers. If you want help figuring out what this might be, feel free to contact our team here!