A great marketing funnel has two essential elements: quality content and persuasive marketing messages. It’s a tried and true formula for attracting leads and convincing them to move further along their buyer’s journey.
However, if your message doesn’t resonate with your audience, they’ll click away to opt for competing products and services they can genuinely connect with. A common problem that high-quality video content excels at overcoming!
In this piece, we’ll go over how you can develop your brand with videos integrated within each stage of your marketing funnel, allowing for a more pleasant buyer’s journey and, most of all, more conversions!
Table of Contents:
- Marketing Sales Funnels A Video Perspective
- Why Use Videos to Drive Conversions
- Let Us Talk Quality Content in Funnels
- Time To Create a Fantastic Video-powered Marketing Funnel
- The Awareness Stage
- The Consideration Stage
- The Decision Stage
Marketing Sales Funnels: A Video Perspective
When most people click to watch a product video, scroll to see what else is there on your brand’s socials, or stick around to read in-depth whitepapers, they are just trying to find a solution to a problem or need. That’s also when they enter your marketing funnel.
Funnels segment each vital stage a person will go through as someone interested in your offering (a.k.a, a lead). Once they reach the last stage, it will be your marketing messages that convince them to take action and pursue your brand. This is where your leads transition into becoming conversions.
A successful marketing funnel is designed to seamlessly move leads from awareness to decision by continuously educating, informing, and even entertaining them on their buyer’s journey.
Content such as short ads, testimonials, explainers, and educational videos work to fulfill these marketing objectives and provide reassurance. Hence, an effective funnel excels at communicating with leads. It justifies that they’ve made the right decision to invest in a brand that is perfectly capable of delivering its promises.
If your funnel’s content does not live up to your audiences’ expectations, it will become tough to generate conversions. It’s your job to optimize your content to suit each stage of your marketing funnel and nurture a more fulfilling journey. So, let’s explore how and why videos can help you do this.
Why Use Videos to Drive Conversions?
Nothing ruins a marketing funnel like poor quality content. If people have to put in a lot of effort in order to learn about your products and services or their reliability, they’ll click off – ending their journey unsatisfied and with a poor impression of your brand.
And that’s why video content has taken over most digital spaces.
As the only digital medium that can engage multiple senses at once, videos have become essential to modern-day content strategies. With video, you get to engage your target audience through creative visual cues and spoken messages, offering the sort of practicality and appeal that most customers look for today.
As we move further into a more digital-business era, browsing online for products and services is becoming the new normal. Today, marketers are constantly being challenged to find innovative ways to showcase their offerings and grab the attention of internet users.
Long blogs and generic graphics just aren’t cutting it anymore. Video content, on the other hand, remains highly diverse and can be adapted to suit people’s needs so that they can be informed and entertained at the same time.
Let’s Talk Quality Content in Funnels
If you want to create a video marketing funnel that actually converts, you first have to ensure that the content you put out provides value. High-quality videos can genuinely impact your audience, making them feel understood and catered to while positioning your message and offerings as a reliable solution to their problems.
In this section, we’ll explore two ways to help you produce video content that enhances your funnels, exceeds your audiences’ expectations, and offers exceptional value.
Performing a Content Analysis
A content analysis will help you get a clear idea of how effective your marketing funnel’s content is. It highlights areas that can be improved so that your leads experience a more seamless journey.
Since we’re predominantly dealing with video content here, the first step would be to look at all the videos you’ve published thus far. Which of them have gained high levels of engagement, and which could have done better?
It is important to analyze underperforming content because all it takes is a single low-quality video to prevent your funnel from producing the results you are after. It would be wise to ask for opinions from employees or team members as you do this analysis and maybe have a content strategy meeting to discuss the following questions:
- What could be improved to provide more value to the audience?
- Does the video effectively showcase their pain points and problems?
- Is the video engaging/entertaining enough for viewers to want to watch the entire piece? Are they?
- Is the video customized to make it easy for the audience to relate to?
- What part of the video could possibly deter viewers or make them click off?
Optimizing Your Videos Around Your Viewers
Once you’ve identified the holes in your content strategy, it’s time to patch them up! Here are a couple of reliable strategies you can use to refine current and future videos and have them perform better once added to your marketing funnel.
- Understand your audience: If you’re looking for a great way to connect with your audience, use their demographics and psychographics to create relatable video characters. Then, you can put these characters in situations that mimic the challenges your audience face. This emphasizes that you understand where they’re coming from.
- Learn from competitors: It would be a good idea to analyze the high-performing content your competitors publish. How do they use videos to move leads along their buyer’s journey? This can provide you with some inspiration to get going, allowing you to adapt your videos so that they fulfill your goals more effectively.
- Planning Ahead: When preparing content, many marketers look at “before and after” states. They anticipate how people should feel before and after watching one of their videos. Doing this narrows down the purpose of your video, simplifying what goals it should meet to gain positive reactions from your leads at each stage of their journey.
Time To Create a Fantastic Video-powered Marketing Funnel
By now, you have set a good foundation by learning how to create quality videos for your marketing and content distribution purposes. Now, we’ll examine how you can adapt this content to suit the needs of the different stages within your marketing funnel.
The Awareness Stage
There are people out there with paint points that your products or services can solve – you just haven’t met each other yet! The awareness stage is the entry point of the marketing funnel, where you introduce target audiences to your brand. Before any conversion can take place, you have to start building a relationship with them.
This is where ToFu content comes in. ToFu, also known as top-of-funnel content, is designed to attract and establish a connection with your audience. It revolves around a current problem they are struggling to overcome or something that might be missing from their lives.
Content in the awareness stage draws prospects to the start of their journey. More often than not, they might not even be entirely aware of said problem, but your videos should work to help them identify a need that pushes them into action-oriented behavior. They should nurture a sense of curiosity in viewers, pushing them to understand this problem and look for a solution.
There are a variety of video types that can be used to nurture awareness and most experienced production agencies have their preferences of styles for this stage. Some popular go-to’s include short ads and educational pieces.
It is important to note that since we are at the start of the funnel, where establishing a connection is a priority, it is crucial that you are not super promotional or salesy with your content here.
Awareness videos cast a wide net in an attempt to maximize exposure. Hence, the key metrics that you use to measure their success are view count and engagement interactions.
Grammarly gives us a perfect example of how you can use creative videos for your business to relate to viewers at the top of the funnel. In this short ad, we see them identifying the pain points of people who would be most likely to use their writing app, and instead of making their app the initial focus of their video, they first identify a problem experienced by the customer and then follow by including their app as a solution.
The Consideration Stage
At this stage of the buyer’s journey, people are considering potential solutions to a need, your brand being one option among many. While they’ve been made aware of the solution you can provide to solve their problem — if you did your work right in the previous stage — you now need content that presents you as the best available solution.
So, it would make sense that during the consideration stage, your content should aim to substantiate the reliability of your brand, product, or message and focus on what makes it stand out from the rest.
It will take some convincing to move leads from the consideration stage to the last stage of your marketing funnel. To do this, you can highlight your brand as the best choice by positioning it as a thought leader and providing more detailed information on the ways you can address your audience’s needs.
Now would be the perfect time to showcase your USPs (unique selling points) and use them as a foundation for a super persuasive, high-value video. An added benefit of consideration videos is that your brand credibility and trustworthiness will also receive a boost.
Since you are essentially advising leads regarding their decision process, the key metrics that indicate whether a video is performing well or not are watch time and bounce rates. When people take the time to watch more of your video, it shows that you are engaging them with your message and providing them with relevant information.
As a brand that needs no introduction, Amazon uses this explainer video to present its virtual currency, Amazon Coins, in a short and charming way.
Their focus here lies in educating viewers, showcasing all the unique benefits and uses of this product while anticipating and addressing critical questions people might have. This makes it an ideal video to transition people from the consideration stage to the decision one. Providing all the relevant information in an engaging way, followed by polished CTAs that inspire viewers into action.
The Decision Stage
The last stage of the marketing funnel; where leads need that final push before they decide to take action.
At this stage, people are aware of your brand, product, or message and how you can help eliminate the state of tension caused by their pain points. However, questions around whether your offering will suit their specific needs or if it’s worked for other people before can prevent someone from taking action.
This is why content in the decision stage is characterized by the need to reassure your leads.
Successful marketing content at this stage gets people to trust your brand; what it says and offers. It eliminates any doubt by addressing the things on your customers’ minds and showing them that you will deliver what you’ve promised. That’s where BoFu content comes in.
Bottom-of-funnel content is made to target audiences who are ready to commit and tends to perform really well on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. This is where video can be used to do away with any lingering doubts they have and increase your conversion rates.
Testimonials and FAQ videos work great to reassure your leads because they focus on third-party perceptions of your brand. They aren’t promotional messages but simply the experiences that people have had when interacting with your products or services.
The key metric to focus on at the last point of the funnel is conversions. This can be in the form of sales, sign-ups, or even website visits, depending on the final move you want your leads to make. Conversions indicate that your video messaging was persuasive enough to get your leads to follow through with those last few vital clicks.
This testimonial video from Ascender looks at what customers have to say about using their payroll and HCM optimization services. They strategically ask them questions that other viewers may have in mind. They also get genuine opinions on how the brand’s services have made their customers’ lives easier and why they’ve chosen to continue using them.
Wrapping Up
Since video content is booming in today’s digital landscape, it is the perfect tool to refine your marketing funnel and generate more conversions. To create an effective video-powered marketing funnel, you need video content that meets the requirements of each stage.
By doing this, you can use videos to seamlessly guide leads along their buyer’s journey, providing them with purposeful information about your products and services. Thus, turning leads to conversions without breaking a sweat.
