How to align your video marketing strategy to the buyer's journey

Marketers who use video grow revenue 49 per cent faster than non-video users. And research shows one in four consumers lose interest in a company if they don't have video.

However, as with any inbound marketing strategy, success relies on you reaching the right audience at the right time.

The buyer’s journey will equip you with all the intel you need to do so. Knowing what kind of video to make, and where to incorporate it in your inbound marketing campaign, will ensure that you get a return on investment.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer's journey is the process that a prospective customer goes through before making a purchase decision. 

Inbound marketing is driven by a consideration of your target audience and their likely mood, interests and expectations at each stage of their buyer's journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. For this reason, you might consider making different videos for each stage. 

Awareness Stage

For many prospective buyers, this will be their first encounter with your business. And first impressions count enormously. 

Your buyer personas will have concerns around a specific topic and will be looking for information that can help them understand and define the problems they’re facing so that they can perform more detailed research. From this desire stems a strong opportunity for using video to help viewers diagnose these problems.

Snack-sized videos are a suitable way to establish that first connection. The first 3-10 seconds are a significant benchmark for web video, after which viewers are most likely to switch off. On YouTube, 20-25 per cent of viewers will watch less than 10 seconds of a video. Online attention can be fleeting.

However, videos of longer length that delve into your company’s area of expertise can be a good way to demonstrate thought leadership and should not be dismissed. 

Use your video to educate prospects and answer common questions. This could take the form of a ‘how-to’ demonstration. Educational content performs well both on and off your site. It can be posted on social sharing platforms as well as your website because interested traffic is usually generated via social or direct search.

The primary goal for awareness stage videos is to drive interaction. This means opening a dialogue and inspiring audience feedback through likes and comments, and the encouragement of social sharing. To support this, include eye-catching social share buttons and CTAs that help drive the spread of content.

Consideration Stage

By this point, your buyer personas have identified their problem and committed to researching the solutions available to them. So your videos need to demonstrate an understanding of their pain points and arm them with the knowledge they need to make an educated decision.

Review your FAQs and produce 'how-to' explainer style videos, vlogs, webinars and presentations that answer them. Or take a key message from a previously shared blog post of eBook and anchor a video around it. 

As the prospect becomes more proactive in their research, they will develop more patience and willingness to listen to the options available to them. HubSpot research shows conversion rates increase by 64 per cent and revenues by $21K per month thanks to the production of an explainer video.

Video transcriptions are particularly important for educational videos made for the consideration stage, not just so that visitors can scan content for a quick answer, but also because crawlers can read it and this will benefit your SEO.

Measure the success of consideration stage videos by looking at viewer engagement.

Decision Stage

Now is the time to convince the prospect that your product or service is the best solution for their problem. By now your buyer personas will have shortlisted vendors or products that they are interested in and will be almost ready to purchase. And they may just need a final nudge to pick you. 

'About us' videos are a fun way to communicate your USP and demonstrate how you work, what you do, and who your executives and employees are. By sharing your business's story and core values you can secure an emotional connection that may just push them that bit closer to choosing your product or service. 

Prospects will be interested in how your company resolved specific issues. Video is an exceptional way to tell genuine stories, and sometimes it’s not just the marketers that have them. You might consider sharing a brief but compelling testimony of one of your current customer's. But let your customer tell their story in their own way, as the truth is most convincing.  

It won’t have escaped your attention that more and more businesses are using video to explain their products or services. And for good reason. Video marketing metrics show an increase in conversion across several channels - but don't forget that the best video content marketing strategies are buyer-centric.

Use a targeted approach informed by the buyer’s journey and grow your business with video marketing.