Video. We’ve all read the statistics on why you should be including it in your marketing strategy, but not many people talk about when in your sales funnel you should be using each type of video. You wouldn’t want to show a 30-minute product demo to a person just finding your site, nor would you want to hit a target whose ready for conversion with another hero video that’s geared towards the top of your funnel.
Top of Funnel
Hero Video
Hero videos introduce your brand to the prospect and take a high-level approach to what you do and who you are. Crate47 does a great job of answering both of these questions in their hero video:
How-to & Educational
Just as running an effective and knowledgeable blog helps establish your brand as an industry leader, providing your prospects with how-to, educational videos can be a great tool to build trust and credibility with them. Salesforce made a great video explaining how to understand the basics of Lightning services:
Middle of Funnel
Culture Videos
It’s a great time to introduce your prospects to the culture that inhabits your company. The Crate47 video from above also works as a great company culture video, so you can start to see how you can combine different types of video to make yours unique. This goes beyond just targeting your prospects as well; check out how Apple talks about their company’s culture while recruiting new employees:
Product Videos
While your hero video is a broad overview of what you do, here’s the chance to show off one of your products or services in a bit more detail. Square has a great example for the introduction of Square for Retail:
Event Videos
Attending an event or tradeshow? Share a video about it! Although it’s good to keep in mind that producing a full-blown event video is typically rather expensive because it often requires an entire production crew. Luckily Instagram and Snapchat have given rise to a more authentic approach to capturing live events, so it’s become more natural to document an event through brief snippets as opposed to full-length video.
360 Videos
Want people to really experience your brand? If you can pull it off 360 videos can be a highly immersive tool, but keep in mind that the technology is still fairly new and brands are still figuring out how to use it. Honda gave it a shot, but it seems pretty fitting for an automobile company:
Bottom of Funnel
Product or Service Demo
Your prospect has seen what you have to offer, but they’re still looking to learn more before they make a commitment. Now is the time to hit them with the demonstrations! Show them exactly why your product or service beats everything your competitors have to offer by actually showing them how they would use your product or service. It also helps them visualize themselves using it, which gets them one step closer towards conversion. Here’s a video that sold me on the DJI Ronin, a product that serves both B2B and B2C:
Customer Testimonials
What better way to get a prospect to convert than showing the success of somebody who’s already gone through the process? As with the demo, it’s all about getting them to picture themselves satisfied with their purchase. FreshBooks shows off how they helped their customers in this testimonial:
And then there’s this because MailChimp shows us that, in the end, video can be whatever you want it to be.
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