How Video Marketing Is Changing The Digital Marketing Game

Video Delivers Something Marketers Should Be Talking About More — Safety

I’m a fan of athletes who didn’t just play the game but changed the game. Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Joe Montana and Hank Aaron — whether you like them or not, their abilities and style changed their games.

Today, marketing is changing at light speed. New execution playbooks and new opportunities are available to drive leads, help sales close leads and impact revenue generation at your company. You just have to know where to look and then how to integrate these new plays.

Everyone talks about video marketing strategy, and a lot of people are using video in their marketing and sales execution. But using video and getting results from video marketing tactics are two different things.

Here are a handful of proven tips and techniques for using video to attract more visitors to your website, convert those visitors into leads and then turn leads into new customers and new revenue.

Using Video To Help You Drive More Visitors

How does video help you get more visitors to your website? Simple, video is a highly optimized web asset, and YouTube (owned by Google) is the second-largest search engine in terms of searches, behind only Google. Videos on YouTube and others video-collection services like Vimeo and Metacafe all drive a lot of eyeballs (which means a lot of visitors). Videos also get shared via social media, and this also produces an increase in visitors to your website.

But the real secret to driving visitors with video is not in the posting or the search rankings, it’s in the actual video you produce. Want to drive visitors? Make sure you use keywords, phrases and questions in the associated copy that goes along with the video (tags, descriptions, headlines, etc.). Pay extra special attention to the script and the copy you create for the video. Google is able to scrap the audio and use that for ranking purposes.

Furthermore, make sure your video content is remarkable. Standard talking heads, whiteboard videos, interviews and customer testimonials are all fine, but they’re not going to blow up. If you truly want to drive results, you have to invest the time and energy to create something that tells your story in such an interesting way that everyone in your target market wants to see it. That’s the secret to video that produces results.

Using Video To Convert Visitors Into Leads

Now that people are on your site, you have to get them to come out of the woods and introduce themselves. You have to turn all of your anonymous visitors into inquires or leads. You do that with video, too. Again, do your prospects want to read or watch? If they’re into watching and you don’t have video on your site, you’re likely sending them to your competitors’ sites.

Instead, give them videos on the key pages on your site. Tell your story with video instead of web copy. Are you a thought leader? Do you write a blog? Try a video blog. Take your ideas and turn them into short video snippets, and publish them just like you would publish a blog. Do you have complex concepts on your site? Turn those into explainer videos, use simple language or show graphics in the video that help tell your story.

To see how the videos contribute to conversion lift, benchmark the conversion rates on the site today, then add video and see if the conversion rates go up. Start with your most-visited pages. This will give you the best chance to see the best results.

Another option is to build new offers and conversion points into the video. You might need some extra tools to allow you to embed the offers in the video, but this is an excellent way to take watchers and turn them into leads for your company.

Using Video To Turn Leads Into Sales Opportunities

I know, leads, who cares? You need people ready to talk to your sales team. I get it. Video helps in this area, too. Once people identify themselves to you, you should be using video to nurture them. We’ve all received those horrible lead nurturing emails that start with, “I guess you’re too busy to respond to my last six emails.”

Instead, how about a series of video clips with you talking to your prospects about them, their challenges and how you can help them? Stop asking for five minutes of their time and stop asking them to click on your meeting scheduler button. Instead, start helping them.

HapYak reports that video in lead nurturing campaigns can produce a 16x increase in click-through rates. That’s dramatic, as even YouTube reports most videos only generate less than 1% click-through. Lift like this is significant, especially when you’re talking about lead nurturing, which assumes these are leads worth nurturing.

Using Video To Close New Customers

Right, onto revenue, the key to everything. Now that you’ve used video to get visitors, convert those visitors into leads and turn the leads into sales opportunities through nurturing, it’s time to get those sales opportunities to close and produce revenue.

We’ve been using video in our sales process for years, and it works so well that we’re constantly looking for new places to use it in the sales process. Two obvious places are references and case studies or testimonials. Almost every prospect wants to know that you’ve worked with other people like them. By having a library of video case studies, prospects can watch and hear from real people who have seen real results by working with your company. Assets like this are amazingly effective at getting prospects to feel safe, and prospects who feel safe say yes!

The next place is with references. Anyone like giving out references? Anyone like asking your busy clients to be references? No and no. I get it. Try creating a reference reel full of the same happy clients talking about what it’s like to work with you. Go back to your question inventory and check the questions prospects ask during the decision-making stage of the buyer journey. Then give those questions to your best clients and get them to answer the questions on video. Now put them together and you have a highly targeted, highly effective video asset to be used deep into the sales process.

The results are shocking. In fact, 50% of the time, we see references eliminated completely. We’ve seen weeks cut off the back end of the sales process and we’ve seen close rates double in some cases. It’s one of the most effective sales-related marketing tactics in the book, so we use it as much as we possibly can. You can do it, too. It’s easy to produce and highly effective. If you need help, we can plan, script, shoot, edit and produce any type of reference reel you can imagine.

Using Video To Drive Revenue From Existing Customers

But what about increasing cross-sell and upsell at current clients? Yes, wonderful idea, and getting revenue from current clients is almost always easier than getting revenue from new clients. Most companies report that only a small percentage of their current clients are even aware that they offer new and additional products or services. In most cases, you’re probably emailing current clients already as part of an educational or ongoing communication effort.

Simply shift some of that content into video formats and start sharing additional insights, updates, product applications, case studies and use cases. This gives your current customers clear and easy-to-digest information on what other people are buying, how they’re using it and what results they’ve seen. This is powerful.

Recent studies have noted that 60% of people prefer to watch as opposed to read. That means most of your target audience is going to prefer video over anything else you’re producing. I want that to settle in. They would rather watch a video than read your website, read your e-books, read your blog or read your emails. People like to watch.

This insight should impact your planning. As you make budgetary and strategic decisions on how you spend your valuable marketing budget, keep video vs. copywriting in mind, and perhaps consider transferring some of that copy budget to planning, shooting, editing and publishing more video assets in 2018. 

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