Jaseem is the founder and CEO at WowMakers. He's a video marketing enthusiast, soccer lover and always curious to figure out how the world works. Beware, he can be annoyingly happy all the time!
If you’ve heard about explainer videos, you probably think they are just used to advertise a product or service of a business.
Fortunately, they are capable of a lot more than that.
From big brands to startups, many companies are using explainer videos in a lot of creative ways to grow their business.
For an example, read our case study to learn how we helped HDFC Bank to promote their payment app.
In fact, videos can be used in each stage of the buyer’s journey. Here’s how Hubspot visualizes the buyer’s journey:
However, a lot of B2B brands only create top-of-the-funnel explainer videos. A video marketing strategy shouldn’t end at the top of the funnel if you expect ROI.
Aberdeen has found 60% of best-in-class companies are now using video from initial awareness through to post-sale. Today’s customers go through more than half of the buying process on their own, so it’s important to have a series of videos on your website to guide potential customers to purchase.
The most effective way to implement a video marketing strategy is the combination of 2 things:
The top of the marketing funnel is where you create brand awareness. You’re letting people know about your company and how your product or service can resolve the issues of your potential customers. So brand awareness videos occupy the majority of this segment.
Objective: Get a lot of views and shares on social media. So, viral and engaging videos are the priority at this stage.
How to do it:
The primary use of having videos is better communication with your audience. At this stage, the key is to inform and not sell at this stage.
Objective: Share information and content that are useful to your audience and keep them interested in what you have to say.
How to do it:
It’s difficult to directly convert viewers into customers. This is why every marketing campaign has a lead nurturing phase prior to purchase. So it’s important to nurture leads through independent video campaigns.
Objective: Build e-mail subscriber base through form submissions and CTAs within the video.
How to do it:
Now your leads are ready to purchase.
Close the deal with an explainer video. Make sure your sales team has the best possible tools to close that deal.
You need great product demos, of course, but sales videos can go well beyond that.
Make sure your sales rep knows which videos each prospect has watched, to give the rep context and full insight into the prospect’s areas of interest.
Objective: To explain exactly how your product or service works and to showcase how your product stands out from your competitors.
How to do it:
The relationship doesn’t end with the sale. Make sure you keep up steady engagement so your customers not only come back but also spread the word for you—and keep coming back for more.
Create some with your current customers in mind, too, so they know you care about keeping them up to date on the latest developments and techniques.
This is probably the most common use of explainer videos.
The idea here is to remind the audience of their pain points and make them aware of the product or service that can help them with their problems.
A lot of companies are using videos in this way on their landing pages. By providing a CTA at the end of the video, you can influence your visitors to stay on your website.
There are many ways that explainer videos are being used for this purpose.
It could also be a video about how your particular product or service stands out when compared to your competitors.
Take a look at HubSpot’s video:
Including video in a landing page can increase conversion by 80%.
That’s a tough number to ignore. Landing page videos are a great way to showcase your company.
Having an explainer video can easily and effectively summarize the product or service your business provides. Here are a couple of tips for landing pages.
Check to see if your video is running smoothly on smartphones and tablet devices. Do not autoplay landing page videos! The viewer should have the choice to watch the video or not.
The problem of auto-playing is that it will reduce the loading time of your entire landing page and this could mean that viewers will leave your website.
Bonus Tip: Landing page does not refer to your home page. So don’t make the mistake of thinking you can have videos only on your home page. Be creative and try to incorporate videos on your work culture page, support page or even pricing page. Leverage the benefits of video throughout your website.
An explainer video is a great way to tell the world what kind of people work for your company.
Consumers are driven to act based on emotions and not on fact alone. Besides learning about your product and service, customers want to know about the culture of your new business.
More often than not your target audience will have a similar personality as your brand.
An explainer video gives you a chance to showcase far more personality and a human approach than text.
Within your video, you can show footage of your crazy and creative team that works at your company.
This would be an ideal video to place on your about us page on your website.
Your goal is to share with the world what kind of people you are.Take this a step further and show the workflow and thought process behind your projects. This is not only valuable information, but it also builds an impression among your viewers that you know exactly what you are doing.
Take this a step further and show the workflow and thought process behind your projects.This is not only valuable information, but it also builds an impression among your viewers that you know exactly what you are doing.
This is not only valuable information, but it also builds an impression among your viewers that you know exactly what you are doing.
Coschedule has done a brilliant job at this through their #overheardatcoschedule vlog series.
Watch the #OverheadAtCoSchedule videos to discover the methods these guys use behind the scenes at CoSchedule to grow faster than ever, and learn exactly how to implement them yourself.
Take a look at the video at their page.
Including explainer videos in your blogs are a great way to boost your SEO (search engine optimization) ranking by making visitors spend more time on your blog.
(We provide SEO services for promoting YouTube videos)
How to make the most out of videos in your blogs:
One of the many challenges in an organization is to train employees effectively. Using internal training video is a unique way to make sure that employees retain the information they need to be successful on the job.
By engaging workers with visually oriented stories, explainer videos ensure that your employees are getting the right message. Additionally, internal training videos can be updated easily as procedures change.
An Animated explainer video is an ideal and most fun way to achieve this.
Whether you’re demonstrating how to use a complicated software system or conveying the details of an acquisition, using video is the best way to ensure that viewers retain the information.
Here are five videos businesses can use for internal training and communication:
Whiteboard animated videos are the best choice of style for effective training and educational videos.
Besides this, you can train your target audience through videos as well. By sharing helpful information, you can really grow your viewer base, and videos are the best way to do so.
Almost every business includes a customer testimonial page on their website. They are important for building trust and loyalty to your business.
But nowadays it’s difficult to trust these testimonials. How do we really know if these are authentic or not?
Marketers are taking testimonials to the next level by making videos with their customers.
By having a customer testimonial video you can have your loyal customers directly share their experiences of doing businesses with you. By actually putting a face to these testimonials, it builds a sense of authenticity.
Check out this customer testimonial by Slack.
This video is interesting because it serves a dual-purpose – it’s a testimonial because the company that made it has used Slack, but it also serves as a demo of all of Slack’s features.
Video is becoming one of the most important content formats online for many reasons, it’s easier to consume for users, it offers many opportunities for great distribution, it allows your brand to be more human, and it’s a great way to implement storytelling in your content strategy.
But emails still remain the most effective communication vehicle to date and probably the biggest driver of ROI.
Think of the possibilities of combining these two powerful channels.
The videos could be product demos, customer testimonials, training course videos or even a simple thank you video to your customer.
Videos add a human element to the communication process and are thus very effective with emails.
Can you think of a social media platform today that does not use video. Even twitter, which started out as a social medium to share text are now focused on videos.
YouTube is the second most popular social media website today. That should give you an idea of the power of videos.
Facebook initially allowed only paid video promotions. But recognizing the immense possibilities of video, they have now optimized the website for much more free video content promotion. Have you ever scrolled down your news feeds and not seen a video?
By including videos on your Facebook page, your followers will get direct notifications on their feed. Whether you are promoting a new product or an update, or just spreading a holiday message, if you go video, you can be sure that people are going to watch it
Similarly, Instagram, Twitter and all other social media platforms are optimizing their sites for videos.
Case studies are very effective content to convince and convert leads. They are great because:
Customer feedback and questions are an essential part of maintaining existing customer relations and properly informing your potential customers.
This is why a lot of businesses today have FAQ pages on their website to handle these queries.
But you can take this a step further by having a video series to address customer queries.
Drift has come up with a great video series called OfficeHours, where they would answer customer queries every Friday through a video.
This is great because it makes customers feel special that you have taken the time and effort to address their questions.
Now that you know why you should use explainer videos and where to. Isn’t it time you start?
Jaseem is the founder and CEO at WowMakers. He's a video marketing enthusiast, soccer lover and always curious to figure out how the world works. Beware, he can be annoyingly happy all the time!
Jaseem is the founder and CEO at WowMakers. He's a video marketing enthusiast, soccer lover and always curious to figure out how the world works. Beware, he can be annoyingly happy all the time!