We have seen business video usage grow tremendously over the last ten years; however, we still see organizations shy away from using video to its full potential. In part because video has traditionally required a specialized and technical team and in part because until recently, it’s been nearly impossible to measure the impact of video on business goals such as lead generation and employee performance.
This guide is a comprehensive, yet easy-to-read, resource that breaks down how modern organizations create effective video experiences that generate opportunities, drive results and improve communication.
Raising Awareness
To expand your reach and attract new audiences, use short videos distributed as widely as possible. The goal is to drive traffic back to your own website where you can continue to educate your leads or promote your products. Content should entertain or entice your viewers to want to learn more with a focus on benefits and pain-points. This is your first impression moment so you’ll want to be strategic about how you deliver these videos and focus on making them attention-grabbing.
Generate Sales and Nurture Leads
Video is a proven high quality lead source and effective component of lead nurturing campaigns. Many organizations have the perfect video content for lead generation, but often these videos are not configured to capture leads. In-depth product tours, recorded webinars and thought-leadership interviews with your employees are excellent videos to gate with a lead form or incorporate into email nurturing. Sophisticated video marketing programs will integrate video technology with marketing automation for seamless lead management.
Accelerate and Support Sales
Video speeds up the buying cycle by answering common questions quickly and making it easier to show your buyers exactly what they are getting from you. The principles are similar for ecommerce and sales-driven organizations. Video, more than any other format, connects you with your buyer and demonstrates your value. Set up your sales videos to either lead straight to a purchase screen or make it easy for your sales team to send the videos they need to prospects.
Onboard Customers Quickly
Video shortens the learning curve. By incorporating video into your customer onboarding process you’ll get your users to achieve early wins and become proficient quickly. Your content should focus on explaining and motivating customers and the video experience should be built so that viewers can get help where they need it. Sometimes your customer training videos turn out to be great marketing material. Look for opportunities to cross-pollinate programs.
Drive Usage
Once customers are onboarded, video becomes a tool for expanding usage through advanced tutorials and continuing education. Forward-thinking organizations use video to provide continuing education, even career development resources via video academies which result in customers becoming power users and upgrading to premium features sets.
Training Customers
Build expertise and create advocates by providing a video certification program for your customers. These types of programs are typically revenue-generating for your organization. Subscriptions can be managed within your video platform or externally. Get started by organizing your video training into courses with built-in quizzes. Individual viewer reporting is key for auditing purposes and providing certification upon successful completion of course material.
Recruiting
To attract top talent to your organization, use video to share your company culture with a wide audience. The goal is to inspire people to want to work with you by showing them what it’s like to be a part of your culture so employee-generated content works well. Host this video content on your own site with sharing enabled. You’ll want videos to have their own playback page on your domain to bring interested candidates back to your site.
Employee Onboarding
Bring new employees and partners up to speed quickly. Video training is a great medium for transmitting process and safety information effectively. Built-in quizzes and contact tracking enable you to create an audit trail for accountability and records keeping. With on-demand video training academies, organizations are onboarding new staff members in flexible ways including on-the-go mobile training for employees across locations. Keep employees engaged with short, action-oriented videos organized in simple, easy-to-search video academy.
Knowledge Sharing
Keep everyone on the same page and accelerate communication across your organization with video updates. There is a lot of information created every day by employees. The more you can share this information widely, the faster your organization can learn and grow. For example, customer feedback from your support department is crucial feedback for your product team. Internal video creation and sharing is an effective way to circulate knowledge and ideas. Now with mobile video capture this is easier than ever.
Skill Development
Support your employees and develop their strengths with continuing education. By providing internal universities, you keep employees at the top of their game with the latest best practices. Education also empowers employees, creating a sense of appreciation and personal fulfillment. As opposed to heavy learning management systems, light-weight video academies provide a flexible platform for constantly evolving content and exceptional user experiences to increase usage.