Attention marketers! Your video marketing funnel should be supplying your sales team with more hot, juicy leads than they can handle - without the need for inefficient, expensive cold outreach. 👍
If you need to tune up your video marketing funnel, or you don’t have one yet - read on. We’ll explain what a video marketing funnel is, why you need one, and how to build one.
What is a video marketing funnel
A funnel is a way of visually representing the ideal customer journey.
It maps out the touchpoints a prospective customer needs to go through with your brand and product to convert. It’s a “funnel” insofar as it’s understood that the further down the path you get, the more prospects will have strayed off - so the numbers involved are expected to tail off gradually to the conversion point.
Improving your funnel consists in losing fewer leads between each milestone.
What does “convert” mean here? Well, it can mean any kind of action that represents a milestone on the way to becoming a customer. That might mean making a purchase, or it might just mean submitting an email address. It depends entirely on what type of funnel you’re looking at.
A marketing funnel will typically treat conversion as the successful handover of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to sales operations. What counts as an MQL? Well, that’s specific to your business…
How many stages should a marketing funnel have? Again, that’s specific to your customer journey - how long your sales and nurturing cycles are; how frequently people need your service; how many touchpoints there might be; and so on.
The simplest model divides the funnel into Top of Funnel (TOFU), Middle of Funnel (MOFU), and Bottom of Funnel (BOFU).
So what’s a video marketing funnel?
At last! One we can answer without an “it depends…” kind of answer! 🤣🤣🤣
A video marketing funnel uses video content at key touchpoints throughout the funnel as a means of optimizing engagement and speeding up progress from TOFU through to BOFU.
Why you need video in your marketing funnel
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ll know that video is by far the most popular online medium there is.
But did you also know that:
- 90% of shoppers say that video content helps them make buying decisions?
- 74% of people who watch a video demo of a product are more likely to buy it?
- 59% of senior executives say that they’d rather watch a video about a topic than read about it?
- While people only retain around 10% of what they read, they retain 95% of what they see in videos?
- Video testimonials are rated as the highest-converting type of marketing material around?
Well, now you do!
Not only that, video has a big impact on your visibility:
- Video on your website will improve visitor dwell-time and reduce bounce rate - both important factors for SEO
- Rich snippets that include video in search engine results pages will give your content massive prominence in relevant searches and drive higher clickthrough
- Video content is highly engaging, clickable, and sharable on social media
These points help to explain why video is so prominent in marketing, which sits at the top of most businesses’ overall sales and marketing funnels.
The final factor we want to mention is video’s capacity for creating rapport with your audience.
“People buy people” as they say in sales, and if you can put a name, a face, and a voice to your marketing content, it will connect far more than if it’s presented impersonally. Remember, trust is vital to driving conversions of any kind, and a smiling, honest face goes a surprisingly long way to generate trust.
Mapping your video marketing funnels
The most successful marketing funnel, as we’ve seen, is one that drives the greatest number of prospects to convert. This is accomplished by:
- Mapping and understanding every touchpoint and interaction prospects go through from the Top of the Funnel (becoming aware of the problem) to conversion
- Devising strategies, experiences, and content that maximizes the probability of prospects who hit each of those touchpoints progressing along your ideal user journey by taking your preferred action
Of course, it’s possible to map your entire sales and marketing process as one single, all-encompassing funnel - starting from prospects being ignorant of who you are and what you do and ending with them buying from you.
But this can get extremely complicated if you do it thoroughly - or, if you simplify it to save time, your ability to optimize it can be compromised.
So it usually makes more sense to zoom in on particular sub-funnels of this “master funnel”. For example:
- How you generate awareness and capture contact details through your website landing pages via social ads or organic search
- How you nurture your email contacts over a while until they are ready to speak to a sales agent
- How you encourage website visitors to sign up for a demo or free trial
For any of these cases, you need to identify:
- Where the audience starts from
- Where you want to get them to (ie what counts as conversion)
- What each step in the workflow between the start and ends points are, what could stop somebody from taking the desired action at each point, and what could be changed to make that more likely
What does this mean in practice?
Well, let’s suppose a prospect has just ended up on one of your landing pages after searching for a term that’s highly relevant to what you offer:
- Does the page content immediately demonstrate that it’s relevant to the search term? That first impression is a key touchpoint. If it doesn’t, a high percentage of clicks will bounce away
- Now they’ve passed that hurdle, is it easy for the visitor to see what they have to do next to find what they want? Are FAQs answered? If the answer is nonot to either of these questions, you will leak prospects from out of the funnel
- Are there UI elements that could distract them and take them away from this funnel? This risk is one of the reasons why many landing pages don’t include links back to company homepages!
- Is it clear what the visitor has to do to show their interest? A clear CTA followed by a simple signup workflow is vital
- Is there anything else you could provide to drive more visitors along the right path? A chatbot, for example, could help answer questions and direct specific needs towards customer service agents
- Are you taking every opportunity to maintain the relationship? Exit-intent pop-ups, for example - presenting a special offer as visitors go to navigate away from your site can be used to capture email addresses as an alternative to “full conversion”
Start with a blank canvas and work your way through methodically!
Creating the right content for your video marketing funnels
Once you know what all the touchpoints are between your start and endpoints (and you’ve noted all the potential points of leakage in your funnel, where prospects could end up going off track) you need to decide what the best means of keeping them on the straight and narrow is at each one.
Video won’t always be the right tool for a specific task. But there are lots of situations where it’s ideal.
TOFU video marketing funnel content
The channels to focus on here are “discovery” destinations - like search engines and social networks. As we’ve already mentioned, video has advantages over other media in these environments.
At this stage, your content marketing should concentrate on being useful and/or entertaining around problems that your audience is grappling with. Provide something of value in this way and you’ll earn a hearing for your offering.
The best kinds of video content for the attention stage are:
- Educational content: this can be a demonstration of how to perform a certain task better, or about how to choose a solution to a problem more effectively. Video is great for educational purposes because you can “show” rather than just “tell”
- Brand value and company culture content: Video is perfect for showing what it’s like working with you, creating rapport and trust
- Animations: These can be used to get complex or dull information across in an appealing, fun format - and of course, you’re not limited by “real life” constraints!
- Viral content: OK, this is the holy grail of video marketing - and you don’t have to look far to see how much effort marketers and creative agencies put into searching for the elusive formula that will make people laugh, make them share their content, and then stick in viewers’ minds! Of course, for every video that blows up - hundreds fall short. But they can be a lot of fun to work on!
Even the best funnel will lose some potential customers at each touchpoint. The key is to keep them in circulation and not allow them to drop off the grid. Make sure you don’t forget to remarket to leads that have gone cold. A friendly, personal video can be a great way to re-engage them!
MOFU video marketing funnel content
The Middle of Funnel stage begins when prospects start to weigh up your solution against alternatives. So their needs change a lot from the attention stage, and you need to provide content that will help them answer the questions they have once they get here.
If you’ve mapped your touchpoints thoroughly, you’ll know what questions each segment of your audience will have.
Video types that are relevant here would be:
- Product demos and comparison videos: As we’ve already mentioned, seeing a product in action can be highly convincing
- Case studies and testimonials: Nothing beats hearing a satisfied customer’s own words of endorsement! Sendspark makes it easy to collect video testimonials using our Request Video feature - click here to find out more about that
- More educational content: Keep showing other use cases and applications for your product, so as to give viewers more value, and to amplify the ability of your service to solve their problems. They may not realize just how much it does! This is great for nurturing leads via email - just because they don’t convert immediately, doesn’t mean they won’t later on, either because the time is right or because a new angle has had more traction.
But bear in mind, video isn’t always the right medium. Pricing information, for example, is probably better conveyed in writing.
BOFU video marketing funnel content
OK, we’re now trying to get people over the conversion line! Where video excels here is in helping to generate trust - which as we’ve seen is key to taking the perceived risk out of proceeding with the relationship.
- More testimonials! Social proof works best when it’s piled on at scale
- Personalized videos: A direct appeal can work wonders at convincing prospects to take the next step. And Sendspark makes it simple - whether you want to produce and send genuine bespoke videos or you want to create them in bulk from a template. Try it for free now!
- Tips, tricks, and hacks: Expand your prospects’ knowledge with power user advice in a friendly, conversational format
- New feature previews: Again, this is great for building the perception of value and building rapport by treating the leads you’re nurturing as “insiders” and partners in your product’s development
- Video sales letters: Deliver your entire sales pitch in video form to save your sales agents time.
Conclusion
So now you have everything you need to start playing with your funnel…
No, not like that!
We mean it’s time to start putting these lessons into action and get optimizing. Remember, a video marketing funnel should never be a “one and done” project. You should constantly be testing out new content, calls to action, triggers, and other variables to drive better and better results.
Sendspark makes it quick and easy to create videos that you can send via email, share on social, or embed on your website - and to analyze their performance. Sign up now to start recording and sharing videos for free.
