Wayne Lockwood: Getting Started with Video for Lead Generation

Author: Margot Mazur

Lead generation is a huge part of a well rounded B2B marketing strategy. But in today’s marketing oversaturated world, your buyers respond by safeguarding their information. Prospects won’t give you their email addresses unless they trust that your company will give them valuable information—not spam.

Videos can help you build trust with your audience by introducing them to the people behind your brand and giving them a glimpse of the value behind the gate. Done right, it can be an important and valuable lead generation tool, building trust with your audience and expanding your marketing strategy.

Here are four steps to set up your videos for lead generation:

1. Prepare Your Equipment

The reality is that most marketers don’t have the budget or resources to create high quality video with fancy video equipment and production software. However, you can create low-budget, low-effort videos that still make a big impact.

By using some iPhone recording best practices, you can create a professional business video. Use a tripod, face some natural light, use a good mic, and you’re well on your way. You can also use your Macbook to film your video or shoot it directly from your laptop. And once you’re ready to step it up, you can put together an excellent lighting kit for about $100, right in your office or conference room.

2. Identify Your Use Case

Before you start rolling the cameras, you need to understand what the purpose of your video should be. Your videos can be culture-related, product-focused, or even promotional.

Here’s a breakdown of three different use cases:

Event Introductions

For your first go, you can start with an event introduction video. Lead generation and events (virtual or physical) go hand in hand. Whether you’re hosting a webinar, tradeshow, or roadshow—there’s a lead form involved. But before your prospects give you their email address and register for the event, there’s a level of trust involved. This is the perfect place to insert a video and start seeing higher conversion rates.

A great event introduction video will explain the purpose of your event, so your viewers can understand the value and trust the people behind the process. Here’s an example of a webinar introduction video we made recently:

Thought leadership videos can be anything from how-to guides, quick fun facts and tidbits, to in-depth talks about a specific topic, such as Whiteboard Fridays from Moz. These videos help build brand affinity and trust with your audience, showing them that you’re invested in their success.

The best thought leadership videos are the ones that answer your audience’s questions. Think about what your audience struggles with and what problems they want to solve. You can make how-to videos that answer those questions, animated videos that highlight facts and statistics, and videos that go in-depth to explain tricky topics. Try adding one of these videos to a blog post to get your point across in a more human and relatable way—it’ll also increase your time on site!

Product Videos

Product videos are a great way to get your prospects excited about your products or services. In fact, 64% of businesses who use video believe that it has led directly to increased sales, according to Wyzowl. This is especially true when you consider that you can assign prospects to a product-specific list based on the videos they watch (more on that below.)

Product videos come in many shapes and sizes. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for your product video:

Do create an animated video for products that are otherwise hard to explain. For example, Slack’s product video is mostly a screengrab video that shows off their interface—making it easy to get the point across.

Do make your product video inviting! Your video should not only explain your product, but also engage your audience—whether that’s through animation or live action.

Don’t try to explain every single feature. Keep your video short and sweet.

Don’t leave viewers hanging—have a clear call-to-action. Do you want them to sign up for a demo? Contact your sales team? Let them know where to go from there!

3. Add a Lead Generation Form

Using videos for lead generation is easy. With certain video hosting platforms, you can add a form directly in your video, which we call a turnstile. Aside from gathering their information, turnstiles help you initially qualify your leads, since the people who fill it out are the ones who take the time to learn what the video was about and decide they were interested—making it more likely that they’re the right audience.

Lead Generation Form in Video

You can ask your viewers to sign up before viewing your content by adding a turnstile to the beginning of your video. Or, to create a more trusting relationship, add the form towards the end so that your prospects can decide whether the content is valuable to them before they give up their information. In fact, our research shows that that adding a lead generation form 20-30% of the way through your video or 60-70% through your video will garner the most conversions. You can even plan your video script around your lead generation form so that it doesn’t come as a surprise for your viewers.

4. Connect it to Your Marketing Automation Platform

Wyzowl reports that 77% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video, but to truly prove the ROI of your videos, you need to be able to connect the right data together.

By integrating your video hosting platform with a complete marketing automation platform, you can connect your video’s engagement data directly with your central marketing system. This allows you to factor in the videos your prospects watched into your lead scoring, create smart lists based on viewing data, and send out emails with integrated video links. You can also see exactly which videos converted your prospects into leads to better optimize your marketing campaigns and provide sales with information on what certain prospects are interested in.

Marketo example

The tips I outlined above are just the start. Once you get your video strategy up and rolling, you can start exploring other strategies to maximize the value of each and every video asset. Pretty soon, you’ll be seeing the dollars rolling in along with those views.

Have questions about using video for lead generation? Leave them in the comments below!

Getting Started with Video for Lead Generation was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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