Here's A Video Strategy Any Companies Can Execute To Their Business

In my role at Square 2, I get the pleasure of talking with prospects and clients, and almost everyone eventually gets around to sharing that they’d like to do more videos but never actually do it.

This situation has to be fixed quickly. Video is already a must-have in your revenue generation arsenal. Without video for marketing, sales and customer service, the experience your company creates will be flat and unremarkable.

Consider taking a more aggressive approach with the following video strategy. These video ideas are easy to implement, are highly effective and can be tuned to your overall marketing strategy to generate leads, increase sales opportunities and generate additional revenue. 

Here are the five core elements of a video strategy for companies with basic video capabilities.

Customer Testimonials

It might be hard to hear this, but your prospects don’t really believe much of what you say. That’s why review sites have exploded over the past few years. Even Google got into the game with Google reviews right there on the search engine.

Potential new customers are going to look online to find information about your company before engaging with sales.

This means online content related to customer experiences is critical. You need your customers to actively advocate for your business. This takes the form of online reviews and online testimonials, but it should also take the form of video testimonials.

These testimonials can be used on your website, in email campaigns, as part of the sales process and even on social media. You want this type of content readily available in as many places as possible.

The challenge comes in collecting these videos. First, you don’t want to bother your customers. You want to make it easy for them to participate. You also want a process around requesting their participation and rewarding them.

Today, it’s easier than ever to collect video testimonials. Customers can hop on Zoom for a recorded conversation. You can bundle up several of these calls and edit them into a beautiful customer testimonial montage. While the quality won’t be great, it’s the easiest way to get a video like this done.

Another option is to use a remote video kit that’s shipped to the customer and easily set up. The video is then recorded with the customer under the direction of a video team via an iPhone.

Side note: The iPhone 14 is outstanding at collecting movie-quality video. Just change your settings to 4K and get shooting.

Using a setup like this produces a better-quality video and allows you to do more with the video, including collecting additional footage from the customer’s office. This also allows the raw video footage to go directly to an editor for post-production, which can include music, editing, graphics or closed captions.

All videos should have closed captions because many people still watch videos with the sound off.

Both the Zoom and iPhone video strategies are highly effective, require little technical know-how from your team and really lean into the technology. 

I would still consider using an agency or contractor to handle the post-production work. While someone on your team could probably figure it out, what takes an expert an hour might take someone on your team an entire day. Plus, you’d be getting the advantage of experience and a much better final product.

Most importantly, using tools and a system like this should allow you to create a steady stream of customer videos, so that in no time you have a library of videos to use in all the applications noted above.

Videos for Sales

Your sales process is another must-have application for video. Prospects are only going to buy from you when they know, like and trust your company and your salespeople.

Video is one of the best ways to help people get to know, like and trust your sales team. People are more comfortable when they see faces. Complex concepts are easier to communicate when you tell someone and show someone instead of asking them to read an email.

This means your sales teams should be using video to help create a remarkable sales process and a more intimate relationship with your prospects.

Zoom and the other virtual meeting platforms have made major progress in this area. Another option is to use something more specific, like Loom, that allows reps to quickly shoot short videos and embed them into their emails.

Videos can also be created for sales and then inventoried across your organization and shared with sales in bulk. For example, create six videos, share the applications for these videos and train the reps on where in the sales process to use the videos. 

You can then track the video views, access and impact on your sales process. Do they shorten the sales cycle? Do they lead to a higher close rate?   

Both the individual video and the video inventory help improve the experience your prospects have with your sales team, which will shorten the sales cycle, improve the close rate and enable you to more consistently hit your revenue goals.

Videos for Your Website

There are so many smart reasons to have more videos on your website. Some are technical and some are visitor based. For example, most people are visual learners, which means they want to watch instead of reading.

When they land on your website, they want to watch a video rather than read all your page copy. Having more videos on your website is going to create a better visitor experience, and that means longer stays, more pages viewed and ultimately more leads.

A technical advantage of having video on the website has a lot to do with the signals your page is sending Google. For example, Google ranks your pages higher when people spend more time on them and click around on them.

Pages with video keep visitors engaged longer and encourage them to click more, so those pages rank higher on Google.

The more appropriate and contextual video you put on your website pages and on your landing pages, the better your pages are going to convert and rank. Benchmark your site’s performance without video and then watch the rankings, visitors and conversion rates increase over time as video is more prominently used across your site.

Videos for Social Media

Everyone knows the success of TikTok. The video-only social platform has transformed all the other social media platforms, from Instagram reels to videos on Twitter. Of course, YouTube is already the second most popular search engine behind Google.

Videos and social media are like peanut butter and jelly – you have to use them together.

But not every social platform is right for every business. For B2B, I’d probably advise against TikTok, but that still means you need videos for Instagram (Meta), LinkedIn and YouTube.

But what do you post? How often do you have to post? How do you create so much video content? How do you leverage that video to drive visitors to your website and leads for your business? Those are the key questions that need to be answered.

Any answers to these questions that aren’t rooted in your business strategy are just going to support more random acts of marketing. Marketing tactics that don’t support the overall company strategy and don’t connect to larger, more omnichannel campaigns are tactics that rarely produce any business results.

Instead, think bigger. What campaigns can you run? How does social play a role in those campaigns? What story do you want to tell? How does video help you tell that story? How do you use video on social to get that story out?

Those are the questions you should be asking and working with your team to answer.

Once you do, you’ll need short-form video for social media. By short form, I mean very short – 15 to 30 seconds max.

Since you want to be efficient, split up social media videos into two types: educational and lead or demand generation.

Educational videos simply answer how you do something. Share information in the video that educates and informs.

Lead or demand gen videos for social have to tweak a pain and then offer a solution. Typically, they reside on your website, where the person can go to get them or learn more.

Educational videos are designed to generate impressions, likes and action on the social platform. Don’t expect anything else beyond maybe a follow if they want to get more similar types of videos in the future.

Lead or demand generation videos are designed to move people from the social platform directly to a landing page, where you’re working to convert them into a new contact for your ongoing lead-nurturing efforts.

Let’s dig into the lead and demand generation type of videos more.

Videos for Demand Generation and Lead Generation

Honestly, these are the types of videos most clients are interested in. However, they’re the most challenging videos when it comes to results, so you should set your expectations low.

This doesn’t mean they’re not important, but it does mean it could take some time to dial in the right video with the right offer and the right landing page experience before you start actively generating leads.

These videos should be created with the expectation that they’re going to create demand, awareness and brand equity over time, which should then drive more visitors and leads.

But consider these as a two-step campaign motion – awareness first and leads second.

The key to these videos is the copy. Since they are short, what you say is critical. You have to get to the point. What is the pain you can solve? How do you solve it? Then offer some additional information on your website and you’re done.

Another approach is to try something more attention-grabbing. With people scrolling through hundreds of videos a day, if yours can stop their scroll, you’ll get their attention.

For businesses, this represents a challenge. You probably don’t want to be silly or provocative, but you can be disruptive. Understanding your target prospect and persona, what would they have to see to stop and click? Almost any business can answer that with a little guidance and creativity.

That’s the secret to a video that moves the needle on social media.

For a lot of companies, video can seem overwhelming. But with the right strategy, tools and expertise, you can create a steady stream of new video content that works in all five of these areas.

Consider shooting a weekly video show that includes your customers, and then cut the show up into short snippets for posting on social media. Leverage the snippets in email and on your website. Post your show to all your social platforms, including YouTube.

Now with just an hour of effort each week and some post-production support, you have a system that generates all the video content you need every week. Over time, it will provide you with a large collection of video content that increases website visitors, drives more leads and ultimately helps you hit your revenue goals.