The most successful businesses understand every customer seeking a solution for their business is on a journey. The penetration of online into every aspect of our lives has extended the potential length of that journey, increasing the number of opportunities for brand interactions and influence.
Incorporated into a rigorous marketing strategy, video content substantially enhances a brand’s influence over a business’s decision-maker. Significantly, this process is an ongoing one making loop rather than points along a linear path.
Axonn Research’s Video in Content Marketing 2013 paper demonstrates what an incredibly powerful tool video content can be in business marketing. Below, I’ve outlined four practical considerations on how to use video content to engage buyers on their purchasing journey.
1. Develop a ‘lightbulb’ message
Video marketing is not solely about enhancing brand exposure, it is also about providing customers with something useful, thought-provoking and interesting. There are several points during any customer journey where video can be utilised effectively in this way.
More video content is being watched and shared, more frequently than ever before, and often serves as the trigger for initial consideration of a product or service. This makes knowing how to use video effectively even more important. Here, video should be used to illuminate something that a customer is only vaguely aware of. For this kind of video, it is important to understand that brand and product are less important than being informative and enlightening. Your video needs to excite interest and prompt that crucial shift in perspective, transforming a viewer into potential customer.
As customers seek to understand and evaluate their purchasing options, videos enable brands to accommodate our predisposition for visual learning. Demonstrative and explanatory animations, which can be paused and replayed, are often preferred to alternatives.
2. Create visual appeal
Making your video look professional is a key consideration, but does not guarantee engagement. A video that is not visually appealing, or worse, off-putting despite its professional execution, is ineffective and can even damage brand engagement. Enhanced production values have the power to transform a thought-provoking message into an inspirational one.
An important first step is to benchmark your target audience’s expectations. Examine what other videos exist that seek to deliver what you are trying to achieve with your own. It is advisable to look beyond your direct competitors. Assess what businesses have achieved in different sectors with video, including those with a larger budget. Getting inspiration from a broad range of sources will help you to stand out.
3. Build authority
The most valuable marketing videos are shared and watched repeatedly. This has a domino effect, enhancing engagement among customers who are already well into the purchasing journey and, if shared, serving as a potential trigger among new viewers.
Being perceived as an authority is a trust-building exercise, so when defining your target video customer make sure you consider how they might make use of it themselves.
A good way of approaching this is to think about video not just in terms of how it enhances your role in a customer journey, but also how it can be incorporated into their own company narrative. Sharing tends to be prompted by useful information and valuable insights, and seeking to fulfil that objective transforms a video into a resource for your customers to share with their associates.
Knowing how to use video to support other content, such as blog posts, research papers or product pages enhances ‘stickiness’, encourages customers to continue their journey with you. Integrating calls-to-action into your videos is a good way to achieve this, but take care to ensure they add value. Integrating an explicit purchase prompt could undermine any authority and trust you’ve built throughout the video.
4. Make your video accessible
Ensuring your video is capable of being shared in as many different ways as possible is crucial for maximising its impact on your marketing strategy. So many of the advantages I’ve outlined above replay ability, visual appeal, sharability rely on video being accessible across devices and shareable across different onsite and offsite channels.
Video formats such as HLS (Http Live Streaming) adjust the quality of video output automatically depending on device connectivity. In principle, this enables videos to be viewed where other formats may not support playback. Equally though, it is important to opt for a format that will be supported by a variety of browsers and devices, and provide alternatives where end user accessibility will be limited.
You must also be mindful of the impact of different screen sizes. The absence of desktop monitor and speakers has the potential to severely dimish audio and visual quality when experienced on a tablet or smartphone screen.
User behaviour is also key. Two-thirds of the business professionals surveyed for Axonn Research’s Video in Content Marketing paper preferred to share videos through Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter. Knowing where your audience is accessing videos is as important as understanding when they are accessing them, so you can ensure yours is released at the right time and in the right place to achieve maximum impact.
