It’s one of the toughest jobs to generate new leads for your software, product, or service. But how many of your leads and sign-ups are you successfully converting to customers? Hell, you’ve optimized your homepage, your landing pages. You've done your SEO homework. You’ve sweat blood and tears writing blog post after blog post.
Do you know how many new blog posts are being published? More than 3 million blog posts. Every single day. Is video content marketing a better strategy than blogging? You'll be surprised when diving into the statistics.
What is Video Marketing?
In simple terms we can define video marketing as the way to market a product or service using the video. Video marketing, especially for SaaS companies, involves "utilizing video through the funnel to attract, convert and delight customers,” explained Ed Laczynski, CEO of Zype. Video marketing has lot more advantages over a written content as it engages the users more than 88% on your website as reported by Forbes. In addition to it, the message tried to transmit through video retains 95% more than compared to 10% when they read the text.
Types of Video Tutorials
- Demo/Explainer Videos
- Case Studies and Testimonials
- Social Videos
- Expert Interviews and Trending News
- Customer Support
Why Video Marketing Works
Do you know what the average attention span is today? 8.5 seconds. That’s shorter than the attention span of a goldfish. Which is 9 seconds. While those exact figures may or may not be true, we can certainly agree that attention spans have been declining rapidly.
So how about all your precious blog posts, your content marketing? According to TIME magazine, 55% of Visitors Read Your Articles For 15 Seconds or Less. And according to Nielsen, web users spend 80% of time above the fold:
In short:
- Most people don’t read your blog posts!
- They don’t scroll down.
- They never reach your call-to-action.
How about online video?
Put out a 6 to 12-minute video, and 5 out of 10 people will watch to the very end, according to WISTIA:
With video, you have up to 12 minutes of undivided attention from your potential customers! So how do you intrigue your customers and draw them into your videos?
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Just follow some simple rules:
- Show up yourself in the video, in person, and you will build trust and rapport.
- Address your customers pains & challenges, and they will start to connect with you.
- Show the benefits of your product/service.
- Show how you help your customers get where they want, and they will sign up. And buy.
- That’s the secret how you generate new leads and increase your conversions
Video tutorials are the best way of showcasing your software or SaaS. Think of video tutorials as your 24/7 sales & support reps. Always working for you. The good news is that you don’t need to be a video or marketing pro. You don’t even need expensive gear. There’s only one thing you need to get right. That one thing is scripting your video tutorial so your potential customers can see the benefits your software has for them. For their company. For their life. As vivid as possible. Throughout the whole tutorial.
Steps to Create the Perfect Video Tutorial for Saas
Create video tutorials featuring your customer. Not your product.
Video tutorials should educate your customer. Show him what your software or service does. How it works. But that doesn't mean that the tutorial should be all about your product. Or its features. Or your company. I’ll be blunt: Your customers aren’t interested in your software or its features at all. They didn’t wake up in the morning, thinking “oh my god, I need to have that “.
All your customers care about is themselves. They want to know what’s in it for them. How your software helps them solve the big problems they’re facing. How your service helps them get where they want. Your customers are interested in the final results they can achieve. Your product is a pure means to get them there. And if they could get the same results without you, without the hassle of migrating and implementing your software, they’d be even happier.
Credit card processing services Square hit all the right buttons in their testimonial video with a sweet and short 30-second long edit. Portraying a convincing reason why Square is better than alternative solutions, it’s easy to see how the testimonial will help other prospects to choose Square as their card processing solution. Not to mention, we can all take away how such a simple video can be so effective. Watch below.
It’s about your customer, his problems, his goals. When you’re walking in your customers’ shoes, the perspective shifts. That means you should really know your potential customers, their needs, their challenges, what they aspire to. In marketing speech, that’s knowing your buyer persona. When you have a clear picture of your customer, you can start communicating and connecting with them on a whole new level. Always remember that whatever you are doing, whether it’s in marketing, sales or support, should be about your client. It is never about your product or company.
Translate every feature into the benefit your customer gets out of it.
Now that you’ve seen the power of benefits to attract and convert your customers, how do you find those benefits? Once you’ve got all the information, it’s actually quite easy. First, you need to know two areas by heart:
- The features - It doesn’t matter whether big or small, get to know all the features of your software, product or service.
- Your customers' needs - What are your customers struggling with? What gets on their nerves? What do they want to achieve?
Benefits arise when a feature meets one (or several) customer needs. When looking at your features, try to be as specific and detailed as possible. Stick the formula to your monitor: "Feature + Need = Benefit". And that video tutorial? How about naming it “How to get the important things done first with software X “. Now your (potential) customers can immediately see what’s in it for them. And those who are feeling that pain right now, they’re going to watch it. Some of them will sign up for a trial. And some of these will become happy new customers. The benefits of video marketing are endless.
In the end, it’s not just about an intriguing name for the tutorial video, that makes people click and watch it. It’s about weaving those benefits into your tutorial video from the very start to the end.
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Motivate your customers with benefits throughout the entire tutorial video.
With the benefits clear ahead of us, let’s put these to work. Our goal is to attract (potential) customers to watch our tutorial, ideally until the very end. That gives us all the time we need to show benefits and features, and build trust and connection.
So instead of chasing the potential customers away with boring details about the feature, start off the video tutorial by painting a vivid picture of the benefits. Then back them up immediately with a short summary of the feature. Because if you keep “drooling” over the benefits, it sounds like empty promises. That’s why in the end, benefits and features go best together. It’s like the perfect couple.
Cloud-based software Salesforce utilizes video content to demonstrate their Salesforce Essentials software that helps small businesses quickly get started and grow. Engaging from the onset, Salesforce paces their application demo with eye-catching illustrations, light background music and a detailed narrative that helps their prospects and customers to understand the product, what it’s used for and what it can do. Watch below.
Here’s the formula: Motivate with benefits, immediately back up with features. So do your homework, get to know the pains and challenges of your customers as well as your features. And then use the benefit + feature formula to create engaging video tutorials that attract and convert a flood of new customers and delight your existing ones.
What Makes a Great SaaS Promo Video?
Here are criteria for an effective and engaging piece of SaaS video marketing, which the best of the best always gets right:
- It turns a complex idea into something simple - I bet your SaaS offering is pretty complicated. But any good SaaS video should trade confusing complexity for pleasing simplicity that leads to greater audience understanding.
- It stands out from the crowd & communicates uniqueness - There are a lot of SaaS brands out there, and competition is fierce. Your video needs to get across your USP and make you seem different from the alternatives.
- It makes the audience really feel their pain point - To gain new customers, you must show how they're are worse off without your service. The best SaaS videos have a strong pain point that hits their audience where it hurts.
- It encourages viewers to take action - What's the point of a video that doesn't cause a change in its audience? None. So, make sure yours encourages potential customers to start a free trial, get in touch, or just find out more.
- It helps build a solid and consistent brand - Every SaaS company that's found serious success has done so with a strong brand. To quickly earn a place in customers' minds, your video content needs to support and reinforce your brand.
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10 Great Examples of Saas Customer On-boarding Videos
A Few Key Steps to Get Started (Xero)
Xero accounting software smartly focuses their onboarding video around a few key tasks that are crucial to getting started, which helps new customers avoid overwhelm. Financial and accounting SaaS companies can greatly streamline operations for users, but they do require a fair amount of set up on the front-end. Xero makes sure new customers don’t get stuck in a no-man’s land of not setting up their service and not understanding what it’s for.
Walking You Through Your First Task (Canva)
In this onboarding video, Canva walks you through creating your first design using their software. By centring their video around completing one task successfully, they’ve smartly avoided the boring features parade. Because who cares about what a bunch of features do? Your customers want to know what your service can do for them. Canva’s fast-paced onboarding video takes you through each step of creating a design and points out fun add-ons to inspire you to get designing.
A Mini-Movie Walkthrough (Band)
The onboarding video for the Band app is like a mini-movie. It opens on tiny people seen overhead who break out into groups. The video follows the activities of one group using the app to better communicate and share with each other, plus doing fun things like planning events and picking restaurants. By the end of the movie, it’s easy to want to join in the fun.
Friendly Tips for Your First Trip (Uber)
Uber’s onboarding video covers more than just how to take your first trip. It gives drivers the kind of handy tips they’d only know after having completed a number of rides. If you’re a driver who stumbled over your first few trips, you may be tempted to abandon Uber’s driving service altogether. Uber helps drivers reach their first success with a conversational tone and helpful hints that feel like we’re getting advice from a trusted friend.
Lively Instructions for a Complex Product (Penki)
Some onboarding experiences are more complicated than others. The Penki app creates 3D images with an iPhone and a camera set to long exposure. Not easy to explain. Much easier to show in a video. This live action onboarding video shows the clever creations possible with Penki through delightful instructions that flash across the screen.
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Savvy Tips Worth Getting Excited About (GrubHub)
One of the potential pitfalls for a GrubHub driver? Driving on an empty stomach! This live-action onboarding video is narrated by a GrubHub driver on a typical delivery run — all the way from hopping in his car to pick up at the restaurant to delivering to the customer’s door. Right at the open, he promises some cool tips and tricks that keeps the audience hooked. The tips are underlined with catchy on-screen visuals, great for watching with no sound.
Walking in the Footsteps of a Real User (Sphere)
The Sphere app promises a “real experience” of one user from the moment he decided to sign up for the new social networking app. At five minutes, it runs on the long side, but it does give viewers a comprehensive experience of the app that would have been impossible to get so quickly any other way. In written format, this amount of information would’ve gone on for days and been tedious (at best!).
A Pretty Quick Glimpse (Ipsy)
Ipsy is a beauty shopping app that rewards you for purchasing on the app. This animated/live-action hybrid video introduces customers to the benefits of shopping for beauty items with Ipsy with a friendly narrator named Madeline. The video style is candid and more like one person talking to another person about a new discovery they’ve made. Clocking in at less than 30 seconds, this is one fast-paced intro that covers all the important points, yet teases the beautiful bonuses of Ipsy. A great example of leaving them wanting more.
App Tutorial Video (Tasker App)
If you’re just getting started on TaskRabbit, you’ve got a lot to learn about getting hired on the network (and using the app). This live-action onboarding video walks you through the basics of setting your availability and getting hired for your first task with. Although this is the typical close-up of a phone, it’s warmed up with a background of tools and upbeat music. By the end of this video, viewers will know everything from how to work with clients on the app to getting support from TaskRabbit if you hit a snag.
A World of Enticing Benefits (LifeWorks)
The LifeWorks app is a platform that enables companies to reward their employees. This video gives audiences a delightful romp through all the benefits that come with the LifeWorks app, from exclusive shopping discounts to gift card rewards. This client onboarding video even resembles a swoon-worthy Instagram feed at times. Who wouldn’t want to dip their toe into one of these picture-perfect vignettes?
Conclusion
So, keeping these things in mind, you can create a perfect video for your SaaS product and boost your video marketing. How is video marketing helping your SaaS to grow? Please share your stories in the comments section below.
Author: Rishabh Rathi
Source : https://startuptalky.com/video-marketing-saas/
Date : 2020-09-10T12:15:00.000Z