4 Ways to Make Your Videos for Lead Generation More Successful

• Updated on: 2019-07-17
• Read original article here

Video marketing has been a staple of lead generation for quite some time. Some examples of this are: live video, virtual reality and 3D. But are you using video correctly? Our bet is that most companies are not using this premium content to its fullest potential. Video is undoubtedly one of the most popular marketing mediums right now, but how are you using this content to help move your prospects through the marketing funnel? Are you looking at measurable ways to use video and tie it back into your ROI?

Video marketing exists in various forms and can be used in lots of ways. 2018 is even positioning itself to be a huge year in video. Here are some tips on how to turn your videos into lead generation magic:

Anyone who has ever been in a parking garage or an apartment complex knows you have to plug in a code or pull a ticket to get that turnstile arm to lift up and let you in. Your video marketing should employ the same methodology. The simplest way to capture prospects’ contact information is to set up a gate or turnstile on your video. Traditionally, inbound marketers would create a landing page requiring an email address or some other type of information prior to sharing the video content on a redirect link. This method is not always ideal due to long page load times and more work for the user, not to mention the landing page is open to sharing and won’t be private. Now products like Vidyard and Wistia have created ways for marketers to display a simple form in the video player, ensuring you grab that lead’s information before the video plays.

Keep in mind this kind of gate is best suited to mid-funnel video content. For example, think of your content trail as leading a prospect to your product demo video. All the content that leads them to that demo video is ungated, but the demo video is gated, allowing you to see how many leads will volunteer more information to get that particular video. If you have already offered them a lot of quality top-of-the-funnel content, you will get some high-quality leads.

YouTube Annotations and other forms of pop-out CTAs are great additions to make sure your viewers are  engaging with your content and moving down the marketing path they want to take. You want your viewers to take action, and including these elements during a video is a great way to engage them in the moment—for example, if you are discussing a particular service or product and that annotation text link pops up right at that moment. This is a great way to link people to other content you want them to view.

While one-off videos are well and good, we are in the go-live era. A live video marketing strategy is most successful with a regularly scheduled series that can provide value and keep viewers coming back. Here is a great example of a brand using a regularly scheduled live video series to enhance its online presence.

The best way to approach putting a series like this together is to start with your SMART goals for inbound: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. An example of a SMART goal for a live video series would be to produce a 5-episode series, biweekly, that gets an average monthly viewership of 200 and engagement of 75 over the next 3-6 months.

It’s one thing to take a chance and produce a cool live video series or a live webinar through Facebook, but some of your buyer personas might choose to live on a different social platform or channel. If our cable providers can give us on-demand video, then surely you can do the same with your content. If you only went live on Facebook, be sure to upload your video to Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo, and other social networks that accept long-form video. This helps keep all of your accounts active and increases the odds of your content being discovered. Referencing the subject matter of a live video in a later blog post is another great example. You can do this in a couple of different ways, such as taking the Q&A from the live video and turning it into a series of social media posts, transcribing your video into a blog article, and even turning that video into a podcast episode by creating an audio file. A few other repurposing ideas come straight outta Hollywood—use smaller clips, take meaningful clips from the live event and edit them down to smaller clips for sales enablement, and use special articles and other references in your content marketing strategy.

Sales gets left out of the video marketing experience these days, and that shouldn’t be the case. Sales teams now have the ability to leverage video in fun and powerful ways. Video voicemails, one-off demo videos, and quick hand-off videos are great ways to integrate video marketing into the sales process.

Video voicemails are probably the most notable in this list because they have been trending upward recently. One-off demo videos are ways for you to answer a question or highlight a specific product feature without having to go through the hell of coordinating a demo meeting, while engaging with leads in a personalized, helpful way. The quick hand-off videos are something that we rarely see but are extremely effective. In a complex sales cycle, there might be a need to hand off a lead from an inside sales representative to a blue-chip closer. A cool way of doing this is introducing that closer and saying goodbye through a nice video. This is a fun and really personalized experience for a lead who can sometimes feel a little passed around reading about a hand-off in email text. Tie this in with the CTA idea in Tip # 1 above for the lead to schedule some time on your calendar.

Videos are a lot of fun, and there is no real limit to how they can be used in your marketing strategy, especially to generate leads. All you need is some creativity and a willingness to think outside the box. The best way to think about video and all the different ways it can be used is to sit back and think about all the places in a buying process your buyer persona (or maybe even you) would care to have a video instead of something else. Video is the most powerful storytelling device, and as millennials start playing a larger role in the consumer and B2B marketplace, if you do not use it you just might be missing out on tons of ROI and opportunities.