How To Close A Deal With Video Content

How to Close a Deal in Sales with Video-First Content Sharing

It isn’t easy to close a sales deal, and it’s only getting harder, as according to Forbes, a whopping 82% of customers do research online before making a purchase. That’s roughly eight out of every ten customers walking into your brick-and-mortar stores, or even your online stores, that come into every potential transaction armed with knowledge, biases, and know-how. People want to feel like they’ve got the best value for their hard-earned money.

Of course, there are still those who simply buy things impulsive on a whim, but those types of customers are few and far between. The customer buying journey has become an integral part of a transaction—the keyword to keep in mind here is “journey.” It’s no longer about simply walking into the store and asking a salesperson what product is best for you. Instead, customers come into stores after doing hours of research and might even think they know exactly what they want. Sales and marketing videos have an incredible potential in swaying customers’ minds to buy your products as they’re making their mind up about how to spend their hard-earned money.

In that same Forbes survey, 45% of retailers consider “closing the sale for a major purchase online as a challenge.” For good reason, too: you don’t get the added bonus of a great in-person salesperson to help close the deal, so you have to rely even more on great sales video content. That’s not to say that that concern isn’t there for brick-and-mortar retailers, either. With so many customers doing such thorough research, you have to be on your A-game to ensure that your product or service is at the forefront of a customer’s mind both when they’re going to click that “purchase” button online or tap their card in a retail store.

People, of course, do conventional research via reading reviews and articles, reading news stories to see if there are potential recalls on products, as well as checking out reviews of products online. That being said, as people spend more time online, video content can not only supplement conventional content but can often replace it. For example: why write out a long and boring review comparing five sets of wireless headphones when you could record a video review? Or better yet: combine the best of both worlds by supplementing the written article with video. Why try to explain something complex, or new, or innovative about a product via text, when you could demonstrate it via video? In short, the opportunities for video content are absolutely massive.

Video content trends to watch for:

  • 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool—up from 63% in 2019. (Hubspot)
  • Mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year. (Insivia)
  • By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic—15 times higher than it was in 2017. (Cisco)
  • 78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day. (HubSpot)
  • YouTube is the second most popular website on the internet after Google. (Alexa)
  • People watch more than 1 billion hours of video each day on YouTube. (YouTube)
  • 59% of executives say they would rather watch a video than read text. (Wordstream)
  • Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text. (Insivia)
  • 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video. (HubSpot)

Think back to your personal experience, too. Say you’ve recently been in the market for a new TV or a new laptop. You don’t simply go in blind. You do your research, and when you’re doing that research, the convenience of being able to watch a video helps. Google searches even queue up relevant videos at the very top of the screen so eyes are drawn to video content.

If you haven’t already, you should read our article covering the best video for each stage of your buyer’s journey, which outlines the steps of a buyer’s journey and what types of videos you should use for each step of the buyer stages. We’ll briefly cover them below, but make sure to check that article out later.

Video content is vital during every step of the customer buying journey, especially if you want to close the deal. As a refresher, these are the stages your customers will go through:

  • Awareness: the consumer is aware of the fact that they have a problem they need to solve, and might be researching products or services that will help solve it. At this point, making a good impression and making them aware of your product is a great first step. A well-executed brand video that gives customers some background, history, and context is a great introductory step to get them thinking about your product and brand.
  • Consideration: Your customer is actively doing research and weighing their options about their solutions. This is when you need to swoop in and convince your customer why your product or service is the best solution with things like demonstrations and product videos that show just how a product works, what a product can do, and—most importantly—what it can do better than other products, or what it can do those other products can’t do.
  • Decision: Finally, the decision is ready to be made. This is arguably the hardest step of the process, despite being the shortest. So much can ride on the last 10% of the customer buying journey, so it’s vital that you stick the landing and get the decision phase right, and we’ll talk about just how to do that using animated sales video content.

Through clever use of inbound marketing techniques, and carefully constructing your marketing campaign, and plans, around each step, you’ll get the most out of your chances at securing that customer and closing the deal.

Essentially, you’re funneling your potential customer towards an end-point of conversion through effective video content.

Video Content is Proven to Lead to Success

The great thing about video content is that it’s immediately engaging, fun, and dynamic. The stats don’t lie: people are consuming more video content than ever before—and that includes how they buy things.

To back up those numbers even further: 76.5% of marketers and SMB owners that utilize sales video marketing in their customer outreach said it “has a direct impact on their business.”

On top of that, 74% of people who watched an explainer video to learn about a product ended up buying that product, and a whopping 77% of people surveyed said a sales video ended up convincing them to buy a product/service.

Not to mention, as we explored in our blog about video taking your business to the next level, video content also has massive SEO potential; way more so than just plain text articles. Video content, when done well, can explode in popularity, and become viral, which text-based content alone simply can’t do because of how we engage with it. Since video is so dynamic, and engaging, and also often so bite-sized that it encourages sharing, the potential for your content going viral is limitless, which means more eyes on your content, and more eyes on your product.

Don’t just take our word for it: “The potential ROI is huge. At the end of the day, what matters is ROI. If you sit down and crunch the numbers, 88% of video marketers report being satisfied with the ROI video for business marketing on social media (Animoto, 2018). The report goes on to state that 80% of marketers are satisfied with the ROI of social media video ads, which drives home the importance of video.

Now that you’re convinced, let’s talk about types of sales video content that can help close the deal, explore what makes them work, and how they’re made.

Effective Sales Videos to Close the Deal

    1. Testimonials: A great style of sales video is a testimonial video, which can be perfect for the consideration and decision phases of the customer buying journey. Essentially, testimonial videos feature real-life customer testimonials that help build trust with your potential customers, as appealing to their emotions, and highlighting that others entrust your brand/product is a great way to foster a sense of loyalty. Not to mention, they can also incentivize potential customers to engage with your product, get involved, and offer a great call-to-action. You can jazz up your testimonial videos with animation: animated typography and motion graphics for quotes or motion graphics/infographics to show just how many people have used the product and enjoyed it.

 

    1. Product Videos: Product videos are an amazing tool in any marketing campaign’s arsenal to help guarantee a sale. After all, testimonials and things like brand stories are great, but at some point, a potential customer needs to see a product/service in action. That’s what product videos do: they demonstrate exactly what a product does, often using a combination of different animation styles, like real-life footage, or screencasts of apps, combined with dynamic illustrations to demonstrate more complex or abstract parts of a product’s capabilities, all wrapped in engaging, vibrant, and slick transitions and editing.

 

  1. Brand Videos: Brand videos are a vital part of any marketing campaign, and we’ve explored them quite a bit because they’re so important to the customer buying journey. A well-executed brand video introduces customers to who you are and plants the name of your company into their mind whenever they think of how to solve a problem they need to solve. Brand videos aren’t just for the initial stages of a customer buying journey. They can be great to use during the closing stages of the journey, or even after the sale to ensure your brand sticks in their memory, and to ensure the customer becomes loyal to you, possibly repeat customers or even brand sirens.

Let’s focus specifically on explainer videos, which can truly make or break your chances at guaranteeing that final sale, and explore different types of explainer videos.

Different Explainer Video Styles

    1. Animated character videos: Animated character videos are great and effective because they give your brand/product an easily-identifiable mascot that people can latch onto. Think of some of the most famous products—they often have mascots like Tony the Tiger for Frosted Flakes, Snap, Crackle, and Pop for Rice Krispies, or Mr. Clean for Mr. Clean. Mascots/animated characters become as integral as the product themselves and help build up audience loyalty, and brand awareness. They can be a great, fun way to give animated videos some life and fun.

 

    1. Animated typography: Animated typography can be a great way to spice up your scripts, and your text, especially if your videos are more information-based. This helps bring a sense of motion to your explainer videos.

 

    1. Animated infographics: Infographics can be a fantastic addition to any explainer videos much in the same way that animated typography can be great to use in explainer videos. Animated infographics help bring some vibrancy to information that can be rather dry if you’re simply presenting it plainly, but spice it up with infographics and you’ve breathed life into your information-heavy explainer videos. This can be especially great as you’re trying to back up your claims about how great your product is with hard facts and numbers.

 

  1. Whiteboard videos: While not as popular now with modern looks, whiteboard videos are still a fun way to add some dynamism to your videos, and to help educate people on your product. Whiteboard videos are a great way to introduce your product/service, and educate potential customers about it.

There are many styles of animated videos, and we have a blog post featuring some of the best that provides plenty of tips and examples of what makes a great explainer video, and by extension, what makes a great animated sales video, so check out that blog for even more helpful information on animated explainer videos.

Seal the Deal with Explainer Videos

Explainer videos are short videos that boil down everything about your brand, product, or service to the essentials, and, more often than not, are no longer than a minute or so long. The aim of these bite-sized, easily-shareable videos is to cut out all of the fluff and get down to the essentials of what makes your brand, product, or service unique and great. Think of it like an elevator pitch in video format: sum up what makes you stand out in just two sentences. Now translate that to a video and you have the premise of an explainer video: wow your audience immediately, dazzle them with what makes you so great, and do it quickly.

What makes explainer videos so effective is their relatively low investment time from audiences: everyone has 30 seconds or a minute to spare, and these types of videos have incredible potential for growth and going viral.

What makes these videos work is an incredibly tight, dynamic, and engaging script that knows all of the exact right words to use and when and how to use them combined with stellar animation. Explainer videos are a perfect marriage of dynamic, powerful, and striking words and images to convey a message as quickly, and impactfully, as possible.

That all starts with a strong explainer video script: you need to create a script that grips people immediately, holds onto their attention, and gets to the point quickly. Every single word needs to be deliberate and calculated to be the optimal word to get the point across as succinctly, and powerfully, as possible.

Writing a script for an explainer video takes a certain type of skill and a way with words: it’s all about the efficiency of words. Check out our article on video writing explainer video scripts that convert. It not only breaks down step-by-step how to write the most effective explainer video script, but gives you the “why” behind each step, and helps expand upon each step of the explainer video process.

An integral part of the explainer video process comes after scriptwriting: storyboarding. You can’t simply write a script, then start animating your video freehand without an idea of where exactly your video is headed. It would be a headache, and a massive waste of time, to do so. And that’s where storyboarding your explainer video comes in—storyboarding is the process of outlining, in rough details, the shots, and the general feeling of your animated video. This helps to keep you on track and your attention focused. It can also help greatly in your editing process, too, as you can look through your storyboard, and consider the “feel” you want for your video more closely, which in turn can help you go back to your script and tweak it to better fit the feel of the video you want.

Storyboarding can also be great for the actual editing process of your animations, as well, as it can be a fantastic tool to look back on and see if you achieved what you had originally envisioned, and keep you on track to make sure you reach that vision.

Don’t Do It Alone

If that all sounds like a lot of work, don’t worry. We know creating explainer videos can be hard because even with tutorials like this one, the multi-step process can be difficult, tedious, and quite possibly simply out of your skill range.

It can be a lot to ask just one person, or even a small team, to take on every aspect of putting an explainer video together, not only because there’s quite a lot of steps to it all, but also because they can be quite challenging. Writing a script, editing the script, possibly re-writing it for edits, and editing it again until it sounds right, shooting the video itself, or hand-animating videos, on top of editing, creating motion graphics, or animating cartoon-style animation, as well as editing the video itself, and then recording voiceover. It’s a lot of work.

Not to mention, say you have to start investing in things like new programs, or better computers to be able to animate these videos properly, or you need to invest in audio equipment, or sound-proofing a studio, it can get very pricey, as well as time-consuming if you’re having to learn a whole new skillset and flex creative muscles that you haven’t used before.

That’s why Explainfy is here to help at any (or all) stages of the process.

Explainify has the experience, credentials, and resources to pull off any kind of animated sales video you need, with as much or as little input as you’re comfortable with. Do you have it all planned out, and you just need someone to execute? We can do that. Do you just have an idea, but don’t know where to go beyond that? That’s fine, too! After an initial consultation with us, we can bring any idea to life, and turn it into an animated sales video that not only will get people talking, but will lead to conversions, sales, and repeat customers.

Get in touch with us today—we can’t wait to work with you to create your next great animated sales video that closes the deal and nets you more customers than ever before!