The digital landscape is continuously improving, as is our ability to communicate with each other. Over the past few years, social media platforms and other digital channels have ramped up their video uploading and streaming capabilities.
Video content is a great asset that helps you boost your sales, so adding it to your marketing strategy can be very beneficial. 80 percent of marketers say videos have directly helped to increase sales. As long as you have a solid strategy and use your videos the right way, your marketing team is likely to see a large ROI from developing video content.
As with any form of marketing content, one of your main goals is to land more clients and boost your sales numbers. Video content is outshining all other forms of content when it comes to this goal. While each company tackles video a little bit differently, there are a handful of common ways that video is used to achieve higher sales numbers.
This list contains five different areas of your business where video content can help you land incremental sales, both directly and indirectly. If you are not using video content today, start with one area from this list and work your way into different areas as you solidify your strategy. If you already use video content today, see if there are any other opportunity areas for your business to add more video content.
Let’s dive in!
1. Spread awareness about your brand
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Videos are a great way to pitch your product or service to potential customers and build interest in your brand, all while boosting your trial sales. Customers prefer watching videos to learn about new brands. In a Wyzowl survey, 96 percent of people said they have watched an explainer video to learn more about products and services.
In order to make your explainer videos as effective as possible, your customers need to know who you are, what you sell, the main benefit of your offer, and how to buy it within the first few seconds. Contrary to the popular myth, this is not due to our attention spans getting smaller over time. Since we live in a world where information is thrown at us from all directions, our brains filter out everything that is not relevant. If they can’t see why your message is relevant to them within the first few seconds, your video will get skipped.
Let’s not forget another main element that should be present in your brand awareness videos: storytelling. Telling your brand’s story and relating with your customers makes your content more authentic. The more authentic your content appears to your audience, the more engagement you’ll get.
If you need help getting started with telling your brand’s story, we recommend reading the book Story Mythos, and listening to the podcast Building a StoryBrand.
2. Improve your customer experience
Making your brand’s overall shopping experience engaging and positive is what keeps customers coming back for repeat business. Since it is 5 times more expensive to land a new customer than it is to keep an existing one, retention is crucial. Enhancing your customer experience with video content is a great way to leave a good impression with your audience.
To improve your customer experience with video content, you need to place videos where your customers are looking for information about your brand. FAQs, your about page, customer support emails, and social media are all great areas to put these helpful videos.
Below are a couple of types of videos that can help improve the shopper experience:
Explainer Videos
Shoppers typically want to know as much as they can before they decide to make a purchase, especially if your product has a large price tag.
Explainer videos give your customers a large amount of technical information in the most efficient way possible. These videos can be used on your product's landing page or during customer on-boarding after they have completed the purchase.
When creating the script for this type of video, it's a great idea to put together a list of criteria that are important to your customers when they are making a purchase. Make sure to touch on these points right away to keep their interest piqued!
Tutorial Videos
Depending on what your brand sells, there may be a lot of FAQs that you get on a regular basis.
Putting together tutorial videos can be a huge asset for your customer service team. Creating a visual element to answer questions for your customers will reduce the amount of time your customer service team spends answering those questions.
This frees up time for your team to resolve more customer service issues, which improves your company's overall customer experience.
3. Drive traffic to your website
What does SphereMall do? They offer strategy that helps your customers find the best product possible on your e-commerce website. They integrate intelligence into your site to create a great shopping experience for your customers. They test their hypothesis and fine tune the algorithm so your customers can find the right product.
Videos are a great way to improve your search engine placement and attract customers. 87 percent of marketers say video content has increased traffic to their website. Whatsmore, 81 percent of marketers say videos increased the average time customers spent on their website. Customers that land on your website and spend time browsing are more likely to make a purchase.
Adding videos to your website also improves your organic search placement on search engines. Google, for example, looks at several factors to determine who gets on the first page of search results. One of those factors is how dynamic your content mix is on your website. The more content types you have, like text, blogs, static images, and videos, the better your ranking becomes.
If you have no video content on your website today, starting slow is the best approach. Start with one or two videos, and place them on pages that make the most sense for your business. A good rule of thumb is to start by having a content ratio of 90/10 - 90 percent text and static image, 10 percent video. Take time to analyze your website traffic to understand how well your videos perform. From there, you can dial it up or taper it down depending on the response from your audience.
4. Increase engagement from your customers
THE STORY: 52 MILLION VIEWS! The team at Karen X (agency) came to us needing storybook animation to play off of the age-old story, Cinderella. The goal of the project was to create a video that would go viral so that everyone would buy the "Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls" book.
Video is a highly engaging form of content. Consumer engagement with video content is stronger than any other form of marketing content. Videos promote brand recall, resonate with consumers, and can deliver an impressive amount of information in a short amount of time. All of those benefits create a recipe for increased sales.
The data continues to show that consumers love video content. When surveyed, 86 percent of people want to see more videos from brands in 2020. Clearly, shoppers are experiencing a lot of value with the videos brands are putting out there today. When your videos add value to the shopping experience, people are more likely to engage with your brand.
Another great benefit of videos is the ability to track exact moments when your potential customers tune out, giving you the ability to identify what sections of your pitch need some love. You can also see at what point your customers generally take an action to purchase and identify what parts of your pitch are working well for you.
Video marketing platforms like YouTube and Facebook have tools that bust out some very robust analytics to help you evaluate and improve your video marketing campaigns.
When people find a brand they really love, they tend to share this with the people in their own personal network. People are twice as likely to share video content with their friends than any other type of content. When you publish a highly-engaging video, your audience is more likely to share it on their social media pages and/or tag their friends in the comments of the video. Referrals are a great way to land more sales!
5. Promote brand trust and reputation
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Your brand is up against a lot of competition whether you do business online or in-store. Companies that promote trust and transparency generally keep the most loyal customers. One of the best ways to become a trusted brand is to say what you mean, and mean what you say.
Let me elaborate.
If you sell vacation packages, and your brand puts out a video on Facebook titled “The 10 BEST vacation spots for families with kids”, you better be darn sure that those are, in fact, the best of the best vacation spots for families with kids. Spend more time researching and delivering facts rather than useless fluff and SEO boosters. If you don’t, young parents will sniff out your BS quicker than a newborn can fill a clean diaper. Say what you mean.
Your customers deserve to know who you really are, not who you say you are. There are a lot of companies out there that promise much more than they actually live up to in reality. If your brand is an online ski and snowboard shop that claims to have the best customer service in the industry, then you should have a team trained to go above and beyond for each and every customer to back up the claim. Mean what you say.
When you say what you mean, and mean what you say, your customers pick up on it almost right away. People recognize when a company values every customer, or when they just see them as another sale. Being truthful, humble, and appreciative of your customers will make you a more trusted brand, which leads to repeat business.
Final Thoughts
Video content has been shown to boost sales in many different ways. However, the results are never guaranteed. Successful video content relies on several different variables, and slacking in areas can limit your results.
That goes for any area of marketing.
With that said, incredible opportunities are out there for companies that incorporate video content into their marketing strategy.
We recommend studying the companies that are out there killing it with video marketing. Especially the ones that are in your industry. Dissect their videos to understand each component. Identify how they are speaking to their customers, and then analyze your own thoughts and emotions after viewing their videos.
Then, go assemble your team and figure out how you can build a campaign better than theirs.
