When it comes to generating new leads, there's three different steps that you need to think about. The first is attracting audiences into your website and into your digital properties. The second is once they've come inbound, identifying those leads and offering them something that they're willing to give up their information for, and finally, once they're a known, identified lead, is nurturing and educating them to get them ready to be handed off to sales, so let's look at how video can help you in each one of these stages of the lead generation life cycle, to generate better results for your demand gen programs.
Turning Viewers Into Prospects
First, let's talk about attracting new prospects. There's lots of different ways in which video can help you drive more inbound traffic to your website. First and foremost is using video across your site to drive better SEO results. Search engine optimization is so key for all of us marketers, and with video, you can rank better with Google as well as use all that rich information within your videos as part of your metadata and your keywords within your pages to generate more inbound traffic on the topics you're talking about.
Pages with videos tend to convert higher from an SEO perspective than pages without, and Google prefers them and will rank them higher because of that video content. You can also use video as part of your online advertising strategy, whether that be YouTube pre-roll ads, advertisements on Facebook and Twitter or through display and banner ads. Video ads, again, tend to convert higher than do static images, and can be used effectively in both B to C and B to B marketing.
The secondary is social and using video on your Facebook, Twitter and social channels to get the eyeballs, get people leaning in, and then to convert them back onto your site, where you can identify and work them through the cycles, and finally, is using video as part of your outbound sales methodology. Are your sales reps doing outbound cold calling? Are they connecting with people on LinkedIn to prospect and see if they're interested in?
Video can be a great way to get their attention, and again, get them into your funnel. So lots of different ways in which you can use video to attract more people in and get them interested in your content.
Now, let's move to the next step, which is perhaps the most important, is identifying who those anonymous people are. Once they're on your site, there's lots of different ways you can use video to help identify those audiences. The first is using video to drive action on a supporting call to action, so for example, I've got a landing page here and I've got this button down here that I really want somebody to click. It might be to download a certain resource or it might be to sign up for a demo. A page with a video on it that's introducing the topic and building a more emotional connection with the viewer tends to convert higher than landing pages without video, so think about how you can use video to complement or support pages with existing calls to action.
The second is actually bringing the call to action right inside your video. With today's technology, you can add buttons, you can add custom calls to action, you can add annotations right into the videos themselves that are clickable and actionable by the viewer, so imagine watching a video and part way through, you see a little annotation come up that prompts you to go and watch another customer story or to request the demo or to sign up for a newsletter. Those things are all possible now, and it's a great way to engage your viewers and to convert them from an unknown audience member into a known lead, and finally, is actually embedding lead forms right inside the video, so instead of sending somebody off from this button to go and do something where they might convert, it's bringing that transaction right into the video.
Again, imagine watching a video and at the end, it flips into a form that prompts you to then submit your information to request a demo or to sign up for a webinar or something like that. Give somebody an offer in that video frame and you'll see a higher conversion rate than having it elsewhere.
The nice thing about embedding data collection forms in your videos as well is that it follows the video around, so when that's embedded on your social sites, on third party sites, people can still interact with that and get right into your lead funnel, so that's now possible with today's technology.
Nurturing Your New Video Leads
Now, the next piece is actually nurturing those leads to make sure that they're ready for sales engagement, and with video, there's lots of ways to warm people up, educate them and move them through the buyer's journey, to make them a truly qualified lead for sales. First is your email nurtures. So somebody's come to your site, they fill out a form to do something. You're now nurturing them with emails. Think about using video content within those email nurtures to drive higher click through rates and higher engagement and ultimately create better educated customers. We find things like customer story videos to work really well in email nurtures, as well as product explainers, thought leadership videos and interviewers with influencers in your market.
The second, then, is if you have a sales team who are now following up with those leads to test them out, to see if they're warm enough to engage. Try using personal video messages as part of that outreach. We again find that sales reps who use personal video messages to reach out as opposed to text-based emails have a five to seven times increase in their response rates because it's personal, it's human and it's much more engaging.
And finally, as your audience members are engaging in all of this video content, wouldn't it be nice if you knew exactly what they watched and could use that information to figure out when they're right to flip to sales? Well, that's exactly what you can do with video analytics. With video analytics, you can track, in this case, John has watched explainer video X all the way to the end, explainer video Y only 10% of the way through, and this customer story, he watched all the way and he watched this end part more than once.
What a sales rep can now glean from this is that John is most interested in product X and there was something very interesting in this customer story that resonated with them. Now, I know this person is ready to be flipped to sales because of their engagement of the video content and my sales rep can have a much better conversation because they have the insights they need to make it personal and relevant.
When you put all this together, you can start to use video to attract more audiences into your properties, to convert them into known leads faster, and nurture them through the buyer's journey and make them sales ready in no time. My name is Tyler Lessard and this has been a Vidyard Chalk Talk.
