Are you having trouble coming up with videos to create for your business? Has your boss put you in charge of a video marketing campaign, but you’re not sure where to start?
There are many different styles of videos for your company to produce, from a video to show off the features of your latest product offering, to an animated explainer video that gives a brief overview of how a service works — and so many more. It can be overwhelming to come up with a strategy on how to begin the process of creating a video from start to finish, so using the buyer’s journey can help you figure out the type of video that you want to produce to accomplish your marketing goals.
Before you begin production, it's important to consider some of these fundamental questions first:
After you are able to answer these questions, you can start thinking about who you will want to help produce the video for you. An easy way to do this is to plug your objectives into the video content funnel, which aligns with the buyer’s journey mentioned above.
Using the buyer’s journey helps determine how close your target audience may potentially be when it comes to purchasing your product or service, and also helps identify what kind of video you need to produce to make them take action. If they are in the Awareness stage, you'll want to create a video that addresses a challenge they may be experiencing and how your product or service helps them solve that problem. If your goal is primarily to keep an existing customer around and make sure they purchase future products and services, then you'll want to produce a video that is more focused on delighting them with helpful tips, humor or a unique way to use one of your features.
Each buyer's journey stage has its own goals and audience in mind, and you can break them down into specific phases. There are four main stages, and seven different phases, broken down and explained in the chart below:
Step one of the video process is getting your internal marketing team together to figure out what your goal is from the funnel, which will point you to the specific phase to use.
Awareness videos focus on educating your audience about your product or service. The goal with these videos is to spark a need to drive interest for a new project or solution by becoming a go-to resource that understands the market you are trying to attract. You may also want to provide a specific, unique solution for common needs and potential barriers the viewer could be experiencing.
Common types of videos used for this are:
These videos are for when your audience is unaware of who you are, and you want to make them interested in what you are trying to sell to them. These phases are also great opportunities to turn someone just browsing into an interested prospect or lead.
A video that supports the Evaluation stage contains more details about your services, such as an explainer video or a product demo. This stage can easily be explained as showing a viewer more about a product's features, pricing and how the product works at an overview level.
Create your video goals around viewers wanting to consider and analyze what you are selling. You want to show economic value and help the viewer get approval from their leadership.
Conversion is a very specific stage where you want to go into as many details as possible about your product. Some people might only need the Evaluation stage to make a purchase on something that doesn’t involve much risk, but that’s not always the case. If you are a purchasing manager helping make big decisions when it comes to company spending, like evaluating a costly software platform to secure for an entire workforce to use, then you will most likely be doing much more research than watching a quick overview video.
In these types of videos, you want to provide a detailed answer for every question a viewer might be asking themselves. Outline a smooth roadmap to make the product or service easier to sell by producing more in-depth videos like an FAQ, tutorial, deep dives into more advanced features and even testimonial videos. A brand video even fits into this category, because someone may already be convinced about the product or service, but wants to know more about your company’s values and culture. Those are very important details that are part of the decision process now, so this is a great opportunity to make sure you have that information available to potential buyers and to share with the world.
If you can nail these videos down, you'll have a higher potential to close the sale.
The last stage is the Delight stage, which is about building loyalty among your customers and helping them become advocates for your brand. You want to consider this stage when you are creating videos to retain longtime customers that will come back when you release a new product or service.
Building loyalty among your customers creates referrals, which is the most effective form of marketing. You also deepen the relationship by becoming a trusted source of information, engaging with the client regularly and tackling any obstacle they might come across.
These types of videos can be filed under:
Think of this stage as any type of video that will keep your customers engaged with your brand in the long run, and ensure you are top of mind and don’t fade away after the early sale has been made.
Always remember that creating a video doesn’t mean much unless you have a strategy around it. You can create a video with incredible production values, but if no leads or sales come from it upon release and it falls flat by only garnering a few views, then your efforts were mostly for nothing, except maybe a fun experience creating the video.
Once you take a step back and figure out your video goals, whether turning a prospect into a lead or finally converting them into a customer, you can use this video content funnel to help guide you on how to produce the proper type of video. It will help you figure out your audience, the role of the content and the types of videos to use for each category. This funnel really does help make the process more “plug and play”, taking out a lot of initial guesswork.
After you have this part figured out, and lock in your main objective for producing the video from the very beginning, then you can start focusing on how to turn the video into a reality.
Still have questions or need help starting your video marketing journey? Reach out to Kuno Creative. We are a full-service inbound marketing agency that provides video production solutions, from ideation and scripting, all the way through production and distribution. We look forward to speaking with you!
