Since video now touches every part of an organization, it’s crucial to understand how each department is leveraging video for more success.
Marketing
The goal for marketing teams is to drive interest, generate leads, and build brand awareness. You only have a few seconds to capture and captivate someone’s attention for better retention or they will disengage, video is the go-to medium. By communicating the value of their product faster and more succinctly, prospects gain clarity from the first touchpoint with a company.
Many marketers focus on high-level brand storytelling and fundamental top of the funnel video content that is unlikely to change quickly. These videos strongly position a brand as an expert resource and help prospects understand what they can learn as they move further into the buyer journey.
Since video is not a siloed activity, marketing now works closely with customer support and sales teams to reduce friction at the top of the funnel in order to position prospects for success when they reach the other teams.
Branding videos and product demonstration videos have shown to be effective with marketing teams. It’s also common for marketers to interview team members and create video content that highlights their expertise.
Put video on your welcome page, email sequences, and within the product to convert users to Product Qualified Leads faster. Using video is table stakes – its the easiest and most digitally effective way to explain products to “lay-folk” without being too technical.
– Dana Oppermann, Product Marketing Lead, Onera.
Highlighting your unique experiential offerings through video keeps you top of mind and relevant within a crowded market.
– Dana Oppermann, Product Marketing Lead, Onera.
Video is a great way to update customers, build relationships, and bring additional value.
-Tabitha McFadden, Vice President of People Operations, RevUnit
Sales
Video enables sales teams to spend less time educating buyers and more time closing deals. In a sense, sales teams want video to do their job for them. Video is not a people-replacement tool, but rather, a force multiplier for sales. The right video at the right time will cut communication time, build trust, and drive leads to buy without extra steps and effort.
Since customers have been self-educating prior to reaching sales, they have a baseline knowledge already established which moves a sales conversation along more quickly. Instead of setting up a customer with a demo, sales teams are now using demo videos first to show the product and then sell based on the customers’ feedback.
It benefits sales teams to have a wide range of videos. By looking at viewership data, a sales rep can determine what features of a product a prospect is most concerned about and deliver a video tailored to their needs. When video is used in this way, you can expect an increase in conversion rate.
Sales teams also take notice of how they can use video to upsell within a product. To accomplish this, they may have a demo video of a free product feature and have a CTA to watch a demo of the premium feature at the end of the video.
As a salesperson, my goal is to have an educated buyer that I don’t have to educate myself. That’s the power of demo videos, you’re having a sales conversation with an educated buyer.
– Garret Mehrguth, CEO, Directive
We weren’t expecting the quality of our conversations and conversion to qualified leads to be so connected to video.
– Dana Oppermann, Product Marketing Lead, Onera
A lot of people want to go look at a product themselves instead of going through a demo.
– Melodie Hays Terry, Product Owner, SupplyPike
Customer Support/Success
In the realm of SaaS and B2B software, CS is all about activation and onboarding. When these processes can scale, you’ll increase your trial conversion rate without increasing costs. Making
a new client feel welcome is one thing, but support centers would rather cut a majority of their tickets simply by sending videos aligned with a customer’s needs.
Whether it’s a prospect trying your software for the first time, or a newly-converted paying customer, the goals are the same – get them to self-educate and empower them to have success with your software through strong activation content.
They don’t want to ask for help, they don’t want to speak to sales, and they don’t want another long marketing pitch. Video solves all of these problems through calculated and relevant training modules, demo videos, and feature walkthroughs.
To create this content, CS teams look at customer feedback and create videos that answer common questions and reduce any barriers to customer success.
The goal is to make that one individual who is using our platform into a superuser. We want them to be incredibly successful, which means we have to have great documentation. That documentation has got to be a really dynamite set of videos that support what we’re doing.
– Matt Garrepy, Chief Digital Officer, Solodev/DigitalUs
What makes a customer successful once they’ve purchased, is the education, the access to documentation, the access to knowledge, and then the final piece is access to community.
– Matt Garrepy, Chief Digital Officer, Solodev/DigitalUs
Video helps us in our communications with customers by shaping the support experience, not by just telling them what to do, but by showing them. This leads to greater ROI because we don’t have to involve technical support.
– Bianca Vaccarini, Social Media Relationship Manager at ServiceNow