Content marketing is something that all businesses can benefit from, but how video fits into your strategy is the right question to ask. Understanding the role that a video plays in your overall content marketing push is essential to make the right choices when planning your approach since matching the right videos to your goals will determine if you get the results you are after.
When do you need to produce a testimonial? Is it better for your video marketing strategy to go with an explainer video or a product review? In this piece, we will tell you all you need to know about implementing different types of videos in your strategy to ensure its success.
How can video boost your content marketing strategy?
While most types of marketing videos can add something to your content strategy, there are some essential marketing areas where video content gets the best results. Let’s talk a bit about the most relevant ones!
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Build trust with your viewers
Video content gives you one of the best avenues to build trust with your audience because the medium often feels more authentic and personal than a block of text on your blog or a still image on your company’s social media profile.
By showing your viewers the real people behind your business or giving them a look at what you do behind the scenes, your brand can come across as transparent and more approachable and have viewers feel more comfortable doing business with you.
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Engage your prospects
If you can deliver interesting insights or valuable information with your videos while still making them entertaining to watch, you have the makings of an irresistible content marketing recipe. One that will not only engage your prospects but also keep them coming back for more!
People already spend a lot of their free time online, and if you are taking care of the technical side of things (SEO, ad placement, etc.), you can have the type of audience you want to engage coming across your videos and deciding to learn more about what you do. Maybe visit your website or follow your social media presence. Even for top-of-the-funnel strategies that aren’t necessarily after a purchase, a great video might encourage viewers to come back later just to see more of your content, even share it, fostering brand loyalty and expanding your reach!
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Create an emotional connection
Emotions are another big factor that plays a crucial role when people make a purchasing decision. Video can help you draw a desired emotional response from a potential customer like no other type of content can.
It’s not enough to just throw facts, figures, and product features on the viewer’s face and hope it sticks. If they can’t empathize with the situation, the message, or the characters in your content, it will probably fall flat. However, when you make videos that people can relate to in any of those levels, they will see that you understand them and their problems, ultimately leading to greater customer loyalty and brand affinity.
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Improve your SEO
Whether you outsource your SEO or prefer working on it yourself, there’s no denying that anything that helps your business show up in relevant online search results is worth trying.
If you didn’t know this already, video content performs quite well for SEO purposes for two key reasons.
The first is that Google includes YouTube videos at the top of the page for many queries, so video content increases your chances of ranking higher and getting more visitors to your site.
The second reason is that quality videos on your website help increase the amount of time people spend on your site, which bots recognize and use to determine the value of a website and its ranking.
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Increase conversions and sales
Videos are incredibly versatile and can be used to promote your business on television, social media platforms, even on apps and websites to reach a wider audience than any other kind of content. Thus, the chances of making a sale increase exponentially.
Moreover, all the factors we’ve mentioned before (building trust, boosting engagement, and fostering an emotional connection) can improve your conversion rates themselves by making it easier for prospects to become interested in your brand.
Type of videos for each stage of the buyer’s journey
Ok, video content is great, but how to go about implementing it on your content strategy?
Well, the thing with video is that it is not enough just to hit record on your cellphone, edit a couple of stickers and animations into it, upload, and call it a day.
When you produce a video for a content marketing strategy, you need to be clear on the goals you are pursuing and develop a piece designed to help you fulfill them.
To make things easy for you, let’s break down the typical sales funnel – or buyer’s journey – and talk about a couple of types of videos that perform really well with audiences at each stage.
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Awareness stage
The beginning of your prospects’ journey involves discovering they have a problem and finding information on how to solve it. So, for this stage, you’ll want to focus on educational videos that are not only informative but also helpful and entertaining, such as explainers and commercials.
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Explainers
To help your prospects with their pain points, you have to introduce your business to them as a potential solution. A charming explainer video can grab the viewer’s attention in a matter of seconds to effectively convey your message in a way they can understand and relate to.
Keeping the focus on your audience’s pain point, you can use animated characters and an engaging story built around the problem they are facing, who you are, and how you can help them fix said it.
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Commercials
Commercials are typically used to put your brand out there and advertise what you’re selling. Since these videos are usually very short, the idea is to give your audience just a tiny glimpse of what you offer to draw people in and pique their interest.
This way, you’ll inspire them to want to know more about your business and your offer and help them move along to the next stage of their journey.
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Consideration stage
The next stage of the buyer’s journey is to identify and compare all the viable solutions to a problem. This is your time to shine and stand out from the competition by showing your viewers how your product or service works and the benefits it can provide.
You want to strengthen your relationship with your audience, increase their trust in your brand, and help them feel confident about choosing to do business with you. Tutorials, FAQs, and product reviews can be powerful assets towards achieving those goals.
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Tutorials
These videos are used to teach other people how to accomplish a specific task or learn something new. They provide highly valuable content that audiences can immediately benefit from, so you should definitely take advantage of that.
You can produce your own tutorials surrounding topics or tasks related to your niche and products. Another popular option is to walk your audience through the process of using your product or service to achieve optimal results, with neat tips and tricks to help viewers get the most value out of them.
Either way, just make sure you’re providing clear step-by-step instructions that your viewers can follow without too much trouble, and you’ll be golden.
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FAQ
You probably get tons of repetitive questions about your business every day, and you might even have an FAQ page addressing some of them, but why not do so in a video?
Constantly repeating the same information over and over again—or directing potential customers to a boring block-of-text site—can certainly be a drain on time and energy or drive people away. Gathering all those questions in a single, entertaining piece your audience can watch when they need can be like having a virtual assistant that makes your life easier, and is often a great addition to your content strategy.
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Product reviews
A product review video can be incredibly helpful to your audience when they’re trying to decide whether to purchase something online. This type of video allows you to showcase your product through the experiences and options of other people that already used them—whether that’s an expert, a regular customer, or an influencer!
With these videos, potential customers can see your product in action, what it actually looks like, and how it performs, but also get an earnest take on how they work and how someone else might benefit from them; all things potential buyers will find extremely useful and compelling.
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Decision stage
The last stage of the journey is the most critical one because customers know they have a problem and that you have the solution, but they might still not be completely sure about their choice. Here, you have to convince them you’re the best option around and clear out any remaining doubts that might be keeping them from taking action. And you can do just that with the help of testimonials and about us videos.
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Testimonials
Customer testimonials are one of the most effective ways of closing the deal when it comes to video content for the latter stages of a funnel. Use them to show your happy customers talking about their positive experiences with your company or giving their honest opinion about you to demonstrate why prospects should choose you and reassure those who might have objections.
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About us
About Us videos give you a space to tell your audience where your business comes from and where it’s going, putting a face to your brand and showing the real people behind the curtain. By sharing your mission and capturing the life and spirit of your team in a video, you will be able to increase trust in your company and convince any skeptical prospects.
Conclusion
Videos are incredibly versatile and can help you boost your content marketing strategy, but with so many different kinds of videos out there, it can be hard to know which ones you will benefit from the most.
So, we’ve given you 7 of the most popular and effective types of videos you can implement on each stage of the buyer’s journey to ensure the success of your content marketing strategy. Hopefully, this piece will serve you as inspiration to start producing your own videos!
