The best businesses work to create impressive customer experiences that lead to satisfied new leads. Yet increasing sales requires retaining customers as much as converting new ones, with 80% of future profits coming from 20% of current customers.
To this end, companies rely on video to increase sales more than any other format. In fact, 80% of marketers credit video for directly increasing sales.
Video is effective because it builds emotional connections. Emotional connections generate a 306% higher lifetime value over satisfied customers. There is no easier way to break through the noise than with a sincere or humorous moment that lightens viewers’ hearts.
This article covers how to use video at every stage of your sales process. So no matter where or how someone engages with your company, they receive the value your business offers.
Benefits of Video in the Sales Process
Weaving video into your customer experience yields benefits for both the consumer and the company. Here are a few ways video helps move leads toward conversion and retention.
Jump-Start Discovery & Consideration
Videos are easy content to digest. If someone discovers your brand or product and likes what they find, a library of video content makes it easy for them to learn more and become invested in obtaining your product or service.
Supplement Your Customer Journey
No sales process is one hundred percent linear. Planning the customer journey is essential for good marketing, but the goal is to meet people where they are. In this case, that might be social media, their email inbox, your website, or a Google search.
Foster Trust & Showcase Values
Video is a powerful storytelling medium. Tell the story of your company. Share its greater “why” with those you intend to serve. Or showcase how your products and services improve people’s lives. By uplifting your company’s mission, you create an opportunity for viewers to emotionally connect with your brand in a meaningful way.
Save Time for Customer Support & Sales
Knowledge bases and support documents have become commonplace, especially with enterprises. But text-only resources can quickly become overwhelming for someone already frustrated with a roadblock. Video for customer service provides visual, step-by-step solutions to specific questions and common hurdles.
Elevate Your Brand
It doesn’t take much to create a professional website with the plethora of online platforms available. Presenting a business that consumers can trust is often found in the details, like consistent branding, good grammar, and responsive support. But another way to quickly elevate a brand is with a high-quality sales video. The video acts as an introduction to your brand. And a well-made video can quickly establish a baseline level of trust with the consumer.
How to Use Video to Increase Sales
A video that is valuable to consumers in the awareness phase usually doesn’t translate to retention. Instead, create sales videos that cater to various stages of the sales process. This strategic and valuable content will move your target audience closer to conversion.
Showcase the Value of Your Products
Introduce leads to the value of your company and its products or services. This might include product demos, explainer videos, and brand stories to be used as advertisements, on social media, and embedded on your website.
Create Value in Your Niche
Produce value for your ideal audience. The tried-and-true way to garner trust and build loyalty is by providing valuable information that makes customers’ lives easier. Create helpful information on topics relevant to your industry; this will naturally lend to strong customer relationships.
Entice Leads with Inside Information
Provide an in-depth look into your products and services. Give leads a peak behind the curtain to stoke interest and promote continued engagement with the brand. This encourages super-fans to congregate around your products and services. If your business can ignite customer passion, your brand awareness will rapidly increase by word of mouth.
Boost Email Open Rates
Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective ways to convert leads into buyers and maintain contact with loyal ones. Encourage engagement by incorporating video in your email campaigns, then use video analytics to evaluate success. Just using the word “video” in email subject lines can increase open rates by 6%.
Personalized Support Messages
Allow your support team to offer snippets of value, provide a moment of validation, or offer their opinion on best practices. Video provides the opportunity to provide personalized value in short video responses, without replacing text-based support. These should be supplemental, allowing the customer to choose whether to engage with the video or quickly solve their issue via text.
Types of Sales Videos (with Examples)
The goal of any sales video is to move prospects further down your sales funnel. Any video created to improve the customer journey can be considered a sales video.
Product Demos
Product demos provide the experience of using or handling a product. They highlight standout features and the unique value propositions your product or service offers. Product demos are used throughout the sales process and can be valuable for generating awareness just as much as converting an interested consumer into a buyer.
Sony Headphones
This combination of an explainer video and product demonstration excels at highlighting the headphone’s standout feature: noise cancellation. Within 15 seconds, the main value proposition for these Sony headphones is perfectly conveyed.
The rest of the video highlights the product’s many features while following two young people moving throughout the city, seamlessly engaging with others without ever taking the headphones off.
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) videos expedite the time between discovery and purchase by allowing the consumer to get their questions answered immediately. Have you ever had the experience of discovering a product, watching video after video to learn more, and getting excited?
FAQ videos allow consumers with some knowledge of your brand to dive deeper into the experience before deciding to purchase, making these videos highly effective as middle-of-the-funnel content.
Nespresso
Nespresso is known for creating tantalizing product demos. But their information content is perhaps more impressive, albeit underrated.
This is the ideal “consideration” stage video. The lead has heard of Nespresso, and maybe even tried the coffee. But they don’t understand the unique pods Nespresso machines use. This 5-minute video not only explains the range of coffees available for use with the machine but also provides backstory into how the company began and how to make the perfect cup of coffee.
Explainer Video
Explainer videos are the ultimate top-of-the-funnel content. Consider this the elevator pitch for your product. Companies have made some truly clever explainer videos to garner public interest.
These videos highlight a common customer pain point and showcase how the product or service is a transformative solution. The result is emotional catharsis for the viewer and a clear understanding of why your business exists.
Puls
Puls conveys its value to consumers in 30 seconds: the company will set up or fix your digital goods any day of the week. Not only does it give a wide array of potential reasons to hire Puls, the video shows you how easy it is to book the appointment online.
This is a great example of a video that centers its message. There’s nothing fancy about the production — and there doesn’t need to be. The value of Puls quickly becomes apparent.
Brand Story
Professionalism and providing free value go a long way to building trust with consumers, which is important for making the sale. But it is easier to establish trust through shared values, personal stories, or the service-based mission that leads a company forward.
Brand story videos are usually on a company’s About page, shared across social media, and sent to media contacts for additional distribution via press request.
Etsy
This brand video is a masterclass in visual storytelling. Etsy is an online marketplace where makers and crafters sell their goods. This short ad successfully showcases its value to the consumer and small business owner. We see a mother connect with her son by embracing his interests in the fantastical, while the small business owner can visualize the positive impacts their goods will have on buyers.
Case Study
A case study provides a real example of how your company has positively impacted one of your buyers or clients. It paints a “before” and “after” picture, then discusses how your product or service was able to produce those results.
This bottom-of-the-funnel content is highly effective at converting curious leads into customers. Case studies are ideal for B2B companies that want to present proof of past success to prospective clients.
HubSpot
Avison Young is a real estate service provider with worldwide branches that use different customer relationship management (CRM) systems. In the United States alone, Avison Young increased broker CRM adoption from 23% to 90% — just by switching to HubSpot.
The video centers the before and after transformation for Avison Young, allowing the viewer to imagine how HubSpot could improve their business as well.
Personalized Video
Customer support and direct sales are perhaps the most underrated uses of video. With the rise of short video content, consumers have welcomed casually-made vertical videos. Companies can use this to build stronger relationships with current leads and customers.
Personalized videos allow the customer to receive specialized attention, making them feel seen, instead of just another customer. This generates loyalty and retention. Another approach to personalized videos that have become popular is the personal achievements video, which highlights your platform-specific wins based on that year’s data.
Example: A customer support person is answering a complex support question. They share a short screen recording alongside text-based information on how to solve the issue. They include a voice-over that validates the customer’s experience while providing an easy solution.
Nike
Nike outdid itself with 100,000 personalized achievement videos. Designed to retain Nike+ users, the video uses 2D-styled 3D animation to bring French illustrator, Mcbess’ illustrations to life while showcasing the viewer’s specific running achievements in 2014.
There are plenty of lower-cost ways to achieve a similar video that engages your audience and encourages them and celebrates their success. But this type of personalized video effectively builds an emotional connection between your platform and the user by encouraging them to appreciate the progress they’ve made and inspiring them to continue.
Customer Stories
Customer stories are emotional powerhouses in marketing storytelling. Similar to testimonial videos, they generally have greater production value and cut-away scenes. By focusing on a specific customer and their unique journey, this middle-of-the-funnel content allows viewers to easily relate by imagining the customer’s transformation as their own.
Peloton
This customer story features a mom who bought a Peloton after giving birth to her first child. She talks about the Peloton groups she belongs to that help her stay motivated. “We’re all on our own journey but we’re never alone,” the one-minute video concludes.
People in the comments shared their own stories and how they can relate to her. Peloton created a series of videos like this, allowing people from various backgrounds to find themselves in the content and feel the potential transformation the product offers.
Best Practices for Effective Sales Videos
Create Tension & Resolution
Remind viewers of frustrations and create a sense of conclusion by showcasing the transformation your solution provides. This can be applied to any type of sales video. A brand story, for example, highlights the personal struggle or business conflict that inspired the company. A case study highlights what wasn’t working and why a company was instrumental in creating the current success.
Know Your Audience
Center your ideal audience in everything your business creates. Even the way a brand story is told should consider the pain points and experiences of the audience. A sales video can exceed expectations by stepping into the customer’s shoes, understanding what they value, and showcasing how your company provides the next level of service in that industry.
Determine Your Hook
A sales video should “hook” the viewer within eight seconds. A hook is anything that convinces the viewer to watch the video. Some examples of hooks include humor, storytelling, pain points, and questions.
Value The Audience’s Time
Video lengths vary greatly depending on the type of content you’re producing. Explainer videos typically run 90 seconds or less, while an FAQ might be up to 20 minutes long. Always consider your viewer’s time. Eliminate superfluous material and get right to providing value.
Tell the Story With & Without Audio
It’s highly likely that your video will be watched without sound. Especially across social media, videos are often watched muted and/or with subtitles. Therefore it’s important to consider how much of the story your video conveys through visuals alone.
Even with the option to display subtitles, craft a video your audience can understand without sound. Another approach is to create a hook so compelling that it convinces the viewers to turn on the sound.
Include a Call to Action
What action do you want viewers to take after watching the sales video? This call to action might be as simple as “Shop Now” or “Get a Free Trial.”
You can also use a call to action to entice viewers further down your sales funnel by highlighting related videos, sharing freebies, or setting up a call with the sales team.
The process of moving leads from discovery through retention can be messy. But driving sales with video cleans up the process, allowing you to reach potential customers wherever they are.
Ready to start brainstorming script ideas? Or, learn how to effectively use emotion in video storytelling and get inspiration from this list of the best explainer videos. Our library of helpful content can also teach you how to produce high-quality animated videos or discover special effects that can help your content stand out.
