As a marketer or business owner, you have most likely experimented with using videos in your marketing funnel from time to time. Videos are a great way to announce a new promotion or introduce a product, but you can use them for so much more. From explaining complicated subjects to including them in an email campaign, videos can easily be incorporated into each stage of your marketing plan.
Studies show that putting a video on your landing page can increase your conversion rates by 80%. Your video strategy can help you convert current leads, attract new audiences, and achieve better marketing results.
One of the main goals you want to work toward is having marketing funnel automation. When you automate your marketing plan, you free up your employees to focus on other things while providing the same customer experience. Using automated videos at each stage of your marketing funnel is key to achieving this immensely important strategy.
Your videos can be used for instructional information about how to use your product, apps, or services. They can include case studies, product demos, promotional videos, and customer testimonials. From advertising campaigns to customer follow-up emails, videos are a useful tool for improving your marketing strategy and overall branding.
Let’s take a closer look at the details of automating your marketing funnel and the best ways to use video when making it happen.
What Is a Marketing Funnel?
With a quick look around just about anyone’s kitchen, you will most likely be able to find a cooking funnel in one of the drawers or cabinets. Shaped like a cone with a small hole at the bottom, it is typically used for pouring liquid from a large container into a smaller one.
A marketing funnel operates around a similar idea. A large opening at the top works to bring in potential leads. As people progress through the funnel, this group of individuals narrows down to people who want to sign up, buy products, or become returning customers.
Your marketing funnel can start with simple techniques like introductions through an online webinar, social media ads, or blog content. From there, calls-to-action get viewers to sign up with their email address or other contact information. Ultimately, the goal is to transform people who view your content into paying customers.
What About Marketing Funnel Automation?
To put it as plain and simple as possible, the technique of marketing funnel automation allows you to attract and convert new leads automatically.
Imagine you hired a robot who was programmed to handle every aspect of your funnel for you. As each lead presents itself, the robot knows exactly what that potential customer needs to learn for them to feel comfortable purchasing your product or service.
With every step and new piece of information received from the lead, your robot will send over the next stage of the process to ensure that individual gets the necessary details. It starts with something like their first look at an ad on social media, progresses to a website visit, follows the path through the education process, and eventually leads to a sale.
Whether the leads sign up via your Facebook profile or enters their email on one of your landing pages, this marketing automation “robot” will know what to do next.
The whole point is to have all of your lead magnets, advertising mediums, and content work together to generate leads without you having to do any of the work.
Beyond the great ROI, automating your funnel offers a wide range of benefits that include:
- Streamlining your marketing initiatives
- Cutting back on manual labor time and costs
- Reducing user error
- Improving overall conversion efficiency
By automating your funnel, you can generate and close more leads. Automating your system lets you streamline and prioritize all of your marketing tasks in an effective, simple way. But to make the most of this process, you also need to include relevant and engaging videos.
Use Videos for Each Stage of the Funnel
No matter what industry you work in, the marketing funnel will work in the same general way by going through the awareness, consideration, conversion, and, retention stages. The retention stage can also be further divided up into the loyalty and advocacy stages, depending on your business.
Awareness
Video marketing works to build awareness by telling people about your brand, products, and company in an engaging and attractive way. These videos can be used on social networks or targeted searches. When it comes to social media ads, you will want to be mindful of where you’re posting and the best types of videos to focus on for each platform.
The awareness stage is all about alerting potential clients to the current problems you can solve. You want these videos to appear in locations where your prospects are already hanging out online. Videos are great for this since they are easy for the viewer to absorb and reduce cognitive load.
Engaging, compelling videos are also more likely to be shared by the viewer, which leads to free exposure for your business. You can use videos on your landing page for key search terms related to your company as well. Videos are easier to share and absorb than written content, so they are an ideal replacement for long, complicated blog posts.
Consideration
After the awareness stage, the next step in the marketing funnel is consideration. This stage is all about educating the leads you generate. During this stage, how-to videos and in-depth content are a great option.
Your goal is to nudge prospective clients along the decision-making process. In this step, you provide them with knowledge about your products and your industry so they can make an educated decision later on. By focusing on knowledge-intensive videos in this stage, you set your company up as a trustworthy, reliable source of information.
Mobile video consumption on YouTube increases by 100% each year. Using videos in email marketing can increase your click-through rates even further by as much as 200 – 300%. As each year passes, videos are quickly becoming the preferred medium for consuming content online.
When you keep viewers engaged, they spend more time on your website, app, or social media profile. You can see if your video marketing plan is working by looking at metrics like time spent watching. Videos can boost how long people spend on your page, which can also improve your bounce rate and Google search engine rankings.
Using how-to content and webinars as part of this phase will set your business up as an expert in the field. This stage of the marketing funnel is the perfect time to brand your business as a leader in the industry and a reliable source of knowledge.
Conversion
The third stage in the funnel is conversion. This is the moment when you finally turn those interested prospects into actual clients. Your goal is to use persuasive content and videos to convince viewers they want to buy your product.
You can use customer testimonials and product videos to persuade the viewer. Emotion is a highly persuasive tool, so compelling and emotional videos tend to do well in this stage. To track how well your videos perform, look at metrics like sign-ups and product purchases.
One way to make videos more engaging is to feature a clip about how a product transformed one of your previous client’s businesses or solved a difficult problem. Testimonial videos and other video content are also great items to place on your homepage.
Retention
In the last stage of the marketing funnel, you have already developed a client. Now, your main goal is to keep them interested in your company for future purchases.
Occasionally, the retention stage is further broken down into a loyalty stage and an advocacy stage. Loyalty is all about increasing your customers’ likelihood to stick with your brand for life. While advocacy revolves around transforming clients into fans who will tell their friends and family about your business.
Word of mouth referrals, anyone?
Whether you break up the last stage into one or two parts, the ultimate goal is to keep your customers coming back. You need to show your clients how you can add value to their life beyond the initial purchase. This entails doing all you can to avoid them losing interest as time goes on.
Focus on continuous education with videos about your company culture, feature launches, and product updates. Videos are excellent for re-engaging clients as people can passively watch and share them.
How Videos Boost Your Marketing Strategy
Over the past few years, more and more savvy businesses have begun adopting video as a part of their marketing plan. But now, a video marketing strategy is quickly becoming a necessity to business success. Videos create an emotional connection with the viewer, which makes it easier to sell a product or service.
Whether you’re creating instructional guides, branding content, advertising campaigns, or customer follow-ups, marketing videos are perfect for any aspect of business development.
Branding
People tend to skim over most written content, but videos are easy to watch and absorb with little to no extra effort. Whether you add videos to your social media page, a blog post, or your homepage, they can be a great part of your branding strategy.
A vlog is rapidly becoming a popular option for branding. These videos last for about one to five minutes and tend to focus on specific information or educational content. Showcase videos of events at your company or unscripted, behind-the-scenes shots. Interviews can also be an informative way to engage potential clients.
If your goal is to give your business a reputation as a leader in your industry, a presentation video is an excellent opportunity. These videos are done in a format like a TED Talk. This kind of clip works to engage the audience and get them interested in your company.
Presentations were famously used by the late Steve Jobs. He showed us all how a charismatic, interesting speaker with a good presentation can really influence the audience’s perception of a brand.
Advertising Campaigns
An estimated 90% of people say product videos help in their decision-making process. On a similar note, 59% of senior executives would rather watch a video than read text if both mediums are available on the same page concerning the same topic.
As videos grow more popular, they will continue to increase in importance for your marketing campaigns. You can use infomercials to educate prospects about a new product. These educational videos are a great way to position your business as a leader in the industry.
Right now, people watch more than 5 billion hours of video each day. With that in mind, how important is it to incorporate your own video strategy?
As you create social media and YouTube videos, take time to choose your relevant keywords so they target the right viewers. And be sure to plan an engaging intro that grabs the viewer’s attention before promoting your product.
Many social platforms don’t activate audio automatically, so each clip will need to be visually dynamic to pull the viewer in. If it isn’t, odds are they’ll keep moving along their newsfeed.
Product Demos & FAQs
When it comes to a product demo, a video is worth way more than 1,000 words. How many times have you tried reading complicated instructions and simply given up? Your clients suffer from exactly the same problem.
There are countless tasks, products, and services that don’t make sense when all you can do is read about them. Even if the written directions are fairly straightforward, a video is still a faster, easier way to learn how to do something. When someone shows you a technique, it takes only a few seconds to catch on.
Other than adding value and simplicity for the customer, demo videos also help reduce your company’s operating costs. Before, your customer service team had to address the most common FAQs and instructions individually. When you create a video for common FAQs, your customers can often refer to the video instead of requiring a dedicated employee to help them out each time.
Case Studies and Customer Testimonials
Written reviews are always helpful and appreciated, but they tend to lack the human touch consumers want. With a video testimonial, customers see an actual person explaining their experience.
Emotionally compelling videos are one of the best things you can use in your marketing campaign. When it comes to demonstrating feeling and emotion, what better way than with a video?
Whether you want to use a case study or a customer testimonial, consider creating it in a video format. Actual people can connect on a much more personal level. Viewers see the video and relate to the characters as fellow parents, students, workers, and friends.
A simple image or written content will never have the emotional, human relevance a few seconds of video can. These kinds of videos help to show real people enjoy your products and help you push potential clients further along your marketing funnel.
Instructional
Instructional videos are an amazing way to set your company up as a leader in the industry. When you teach a viewer how to do something, it shows you are in a position of authority. Later on, the same viewer remembers the video when they go to buy a product.
This kind of topic is an excellent way to market a product without the viewer realizing it. While a book or instruction guide can explain something, a video is more likely to be shared. A video format also makes it easier for the viewer to follow along and learn information from your business.
Instructional videos can be made in a variety of different ways. You can explain how a product is made or even demonstrate it being used. Your company can also offer educational videos and webinars about specific topics related to your industry if you provide a service.
One fun option is to create a behind-the-scenes video. For example, a donut shop or bakery could go through the entire process of making their baked goods. This kind of video highlights your company’s culture, explains your processes, and engages your audience.
Customer Follow-Ups
After someone reaches out to your business, you reach a critical moment in the sales funnel. It is at this point you can either make or break a future sale. How you handle the next few interactions can determine whether you have a loyal, long-lasting client or someone who moves on to the next seller.
In a follow-up email, you can use videos to address common questions and problems. Customer testimonials are another powerful option for inspiring prospects to try out your product. You can even personalize the video follow-up message to help develop the client relationship.
For your customer follow-up messages to be effective, you need to tell the customer what to do next. Spend the first part of the video informing about a product or engaging the client. Then, use a call-to-action to inspire the viewer to take the next step.
People are more likely to watch a video than read an email or a brochure. If you want your follow-up emails to be effective, you have to get your audience to look at them. Whether you add a customer testimonial, a how-to video, or a simple clip, your video is an important, vital part of your follow-up process.
Automating Your Marketing Strategy
What would you give to double, triple, or even quadruple your leads?
Every successful business owner in the world knows the value of leads. Decades ago, salespeople had to stuff envelopes by hand and go door-to-door to generate each potential lead. Now, you can get the same leads with the click of a button.
Using video to automate your marketing strategy is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to bring in leads, convert viewers, and retain new clients. Best of all, your workload will be minimized after your automated marketing plan is in place, giving you more time to focus on other aspects of your business.
Set up the marketing funnel and watch the leads start rolling in.
If you are ready to take the next step and get started on your video marketing strategy, reach out to us via our website or give us a call today at 347-955-3435 to find out how.
