video

Psychologists maintain that human beings thrive on stories, leading marketers to believe that the best way to sell a brand is by telling its story. As far as the medium for telling the story goes, video is the most effective. It is the best way for explaining a product, increasing awareness and keeping your brand top of mind among your prospects and customers.

It is no wonder then that today, most marketers today consider video an important part of their marketing strategy. A survey conducted by Wyzowyl on 613 respondents showed that 87% of marketers are using video marketing. This is compared to 81% in 2018 and 63% in 2017. Predictions from Cisco also show that by 2021, 80% of online traffic will come from video. But as much as adoption of video marketing is increasing, businesses still struggle with certain elements of it, such as creating content that ensures high engagement and more leads. In this post, we will show you how to start making better video marketing decisions to boost your lead generation.

7 ways to increase engagement and generate more leads with video

1. Focus on content relevance

Today, when most people want to solve a problem, they go online (on search engines or social media). Unfortunately, the search process can be frustrating particularly when people don’t find the information they are looking for. A prospect may stumble on a brand that is a right fit, only to be put off if the content they post is not valuable.

People respond to content that holds some meaning to them; they want to see how your product or service will solve a problem they are struggling with. Since there is so much information available online that it is virtually impossible to consume it all, it becomes so easy for your brand to disappear in the sea of all that noise if you don’t offer value. You can put all the marketing budget into your video marketing activities but unless your content holds real value, you will have a harder time convincing prospects to convert.

To provide value, you have to know who you are selling to. That is, you need to create an accurate buyer persona. If for instance you sell enterprise-level software but you are marketing this to small businesses with a low turnover, your marketing content will probably end up in the recycle bin every time. When you know who you are selling to, creating accurate content becomes easier.

2. Video length should be audience- and channel-based

There are varying points of view about how the length of a video influences engagement. Some sources think shorter is always better. Cisco for instance, makes 60-90 second posts on their YouTube Channel, and 120 to 180 seconds on their website. A report from Vidyard shows that while videos have generally gotten shorter, 52% of viewers watch videos to the end, irrespective of its length.

Although video length is probably not as primary as relevance and better audience targeting, it is still a factor to be considered. In fact, it is quite likely that the question of video length is resolved once you have the right target audience. Preference for video length differs based on different markets, audiences and industries. The intended goal of your video, time and people’s habits, will also influence video engagement based on length. A salesperson who is always driving from one client to another may not have the time or patience to watch a long video. On the other hand, an IT manager may just prefer a longer video because it saves them a lot of time looking for additional information from a bunch of short videos.

If, as mentioned above, you have done your persona development properly, you will automatically know what length of video your audience prefers. Additionally, once you create videos, test them to see which ones have the best engagement rates.

3. Target each part of the marketing funnel

Your strategy should focus on producing content relative to your customers’ current position in the funnel. At the top of the funnel, your content should create curiosity. Create a short video meant to create awareness and inform, and provide links to your website where they can read more articles, watch more videos or download case studies. Longer form content that is aggressively placed to close customers may actually work against you at this stage but may have a bigger pay off in latter stages of the buyers’ journey.

You also have to consider that prospects may already know about your product before coming to your website, and that they know it can solve their problem. Sometimes, these activities are conducted anonymously or are a result of a direct referral, hence a first visit to your website doesn’t necessarily mean that you are dealing with a top-of-the-funnel prospect. Your prospect may be in the consideration, or even the decision stage. Conducting landing page surveys can help you know more about such visitors, recommend more useful content for them, or close them. This whole process is quite easy to manage with the right kind of marketing automation tools.

4. Repurpose your video content

People differ in the way they prefer to consume their content. It is therefore important to provide options to cater for these preferences. For instance, turn your video into a blog article or an infographic and repurpose for different social media platforms.

Repurposing content has several advantages:

  • You get more value for your money and time. It takes time and money to create relevant, high-quality videos. When you repurpose, you are essentially getting more marketing assets from the same content.
  • You improve your SEO whenever you create content around the same keywords and topics.
  • You create top of mind awareness requires by leveraging multiple touchpoints. People may watch your video and forget all about you once they exit. To remind them about your brand, send them different types of content in other platforms they visit.
  • Reach and convert new audiences. Your marketing message may be missing a wide audience if you are restricting yourself to just a few channels.

5. Focus on the metrics that matter

It’s all well and good to track likes, views and comments, but at the end of the day, such vanity metrics don’t say much about your ROI. There are more important metrics to track, such as engagement, video play time, and conversions. Let’s say you have created a 10-minute video that’s getting 10,000 views per day. That may seem like resounding success, and it is in the sense that:

  • The topic of your video is catchy
  • You are addressing a subject that is of interest to your target audience and that is why so many people are clicking.

But what if 90% of those views lasted between 1 to 3 minutes and the 10% full views did not convert?

The point is, once you dig deeper into your analytics, you can tell what you are doing wrong. Views indicate that a topic is popular, but analytics will tell you whether your content is valuable.

6. Provide links to your website and social media

All your marketing channels, including video, should link to each other in order to:

Increase website visits

Let’s say for instance you create a 15-minute video and post it on YouTube. Then you create a 1-minute version of the same video and post to Instagram. Anyone who sees the video on Instagram and wants to learn more will follow the link provided in the video to your YouTube channel and once they like what they see on YouTube, they may end up visiting your website.

Keep the viewers’ attention focused on you

Pop ups and other content can interrupt a prospect’s viewing time. Recommending your other channels at strategic points in your video is important to keep prospects from wandering off to look for new content.

Increase engagement

During your video, encourage viewers to send you their questions. This lets them know that if they don’t find what they are looking for in your video, you can provide that information at their request. Not only will this increase engagement, it also a great tactic for getting people to give you their emails.

7. Feature your video content prominently in your landing pages

For the longest time, landing pages have featured text and static images, but rarely videos. Yet when used properly, videos posted on landing pages can effectively illustrate the value your product or service provides.

The rationale behind posting videos on landing pages is that since site visitors first come into contact with your landing page, having a video explainer that gives them an accurate sense of who you are, the problems you solve, how effective you are at solving those problems and why they should choose you and not your competitors, is important.

Videos can make a company seem exciting and connect more with their audience. For SaaS companies or a company offering a complex solution, video makes those products less intimidating to the average user by demonstrating features such as ease of use.

Conclusion

There are so many brands out there just like yours, using video to market their products and services. But just because the market is saturated with videos, this should not discourage you from making use of the channel. Quite the contrary in fact. If you haven’t started using video marketing now is the time.

The amount of effort you put is what will differentiate you from the thousands of other videos created by your competitors. This means you have to:

  • Understand your audience and offer them value
  • Invest in a qualified lead generation services with a track record for creating quality videos
  • Optimize your video content and topics with keywords
  • Create for mobile
  • Embed video lead capture forms
  • Track your analytics. Conduct A/B testing for different aspects such as: video length, video channels, different posting times/days and positioning of lead capture forms.

Abbey Houston is a PR at Unbound B2B. She is a blogger, online marketer and loves to share with you the best stuff in sales and marketing. Follow Abbey on Twitter.

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