What Types of Videos to Use on Each Stage of Video Marketing Funnel?
Creating a video marketing funnel is included in the marketing task lists of most companies. Moreover, you can build a sales funnel animation that plays a primary role in grabbing the target audience’s attention and making your messages even more memorable.
The video marketing approach enhances your existing sales funnel with top-notch videos of the right type to help you reach your marketing goals.
In this article, the Blue Carrot team will explain the critical stages of the video marketing funnel and give tips on what videos to use at each stage to increase their conversions. You’ll also find out the difference between a standard targeted funnel and a video marketing one and how to make a film marketing funnel at lower costs.
Summary
- What is a video marketing funnel?
- Why creating a marketing funnel with videos is effective
- How to create a video funnel
- 3 key stages of the video marketing funnel
- Top stage: Raising awareness
– Promo videos
– Capturing branded videos
– Educational videos
– Pain point product videos - Middle stage: Getting closer
– Explainer videos concerning the product itself
– Insightful product videos
– Case study product videos - Bottom stage: Selling products
– Demo videos with tips and tricks
– How-to videos and tutorial videos
– Product-focused video content (webinars and demo product videos)
– Testimonial video and product reviews
– Traditional corporate videos
– Lifestyle corporate videos
- Top stage: Raising awareness
- Top-funnel activities for better video marketing and increasing sales
- Sales funnel case study: Our experience creating funnel video content
- Final Thoughts
What is a Video Marketing Funnel?
Video marketing sales funnels are a powerful tool in achieving your business goals quicker. In this article, we’ll use the term video marketing funnel to describe the marketing automation strategy in which videos play a major role.
👉 A sales funnel helps you turn prospects into leads and leads into real sales.
So how does the video marketing funnel work? Let’s review the general idea of the sales funnel. The goal of any sales funnel is to sell your product to as many people as possible. A user’s purchase decision consists of several stages.
At each stage, the user has their doubts, needs, and fears, which you need to address for the user to go to the next stage of the sales funnel and convert to a customer. You can also create a movie marketing funnel to achieve other marketing goals such as registrations, reactions, or public reviews.
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Why creating a marketing funnel with videos is effective
Сreating sales funnels is a common way to boost your key marketing metrics including leads, sales, and retention rates. However, building a video-based strategy requires more investment than working with texts and images. “Will my sales and marketing funnel be more effective if I add videos to customer communication, and will it lead to better marketing campaign ROI?” marketers often ask themselves. The good news is that statistics are on your side.
According to a recent report by Hubspot, 93% of brands admit they gained new clients by publishing video content on social media in 2022. Moreover, regarding social networks, up to 88% of video marketers confirm they are satisfied with the ROI of their video.
You are not alone if you are asking yourself how to create a marketing funnel with video. In the US, it is forecasted that marketers will spend nearly 42% more on video-based campaigns by 2024, Statista wrote.
So what makes the video sales funnel approach one’s winning strategy? Here are some answers:
☑️Videos lead to higher engagement rates
Videos are several times more likely to be shared and go viral than texts and images. They also get more reactions on social media and have higher chances of being clicked on. In addition, users often opt for videos when they have a choice between them and text information on the same topic. More statistics here: Video Marketing Statistics: What Your Business Should Track in 2022.
☑️ Videos boost SEO and your visibility on social media
In other words, search engines give higher scores to pages with videos. That means you can get more page views or reach wider audiences with lower investments if you use videos at any sales funnel stage. According to Cisco, by the end of 2022, online video may become 82% of all consumer traffic.
☑️ Videos make messages digestible and memorable
Multimedia content requires less effort to be processed and memorized than texts. If you create a marketing funnel with animation, you can literally become stuck in your target audience’s mind due to outstanding characters or stories your content features. Again, this means you can save on content distribution.
👉 Need more arguments for creating sales funnels? Read other articles by Blue Carrot: 7+1 Key Benefits of Video Marketing for Business and What Video Content Captures Millennials Attention?
How to Create a Video Funnel
While your products or services may be different, their sales funnels look pretty much the same. The reason for this is that all customers pass similar stages while making their buying decisions including awareness, consideration, decision, and retention.
The sales funnel is a part of your marketing strategy, and to define your strategy and create funnel video content, it is necessary to understand your target audience. The best video marketing funnel is the one that includes videos whose ideas are clear and valuable for your audience. The characteristics of the target audience can include:
If your company has a long history, you most likely already have a good idea of what your target audience looks like. However, we recommend that you update this description regularly and constantly look for new insights.
When the target audience description is ready, it’s time to move on to the video sales funnel stages. Typically, a sales funnel has three to four stages. Follow this simple sales funnel diagram to get into them:
✅ Awareness Stage
According to a typical sales funnel tutorial, at this stage, your potential audience doesn’t know anything about you yet. Your task is to let these people know that you are a reliable company offering a good solution for their needs.
✅ Consideration Stage
Your potential customers are familiar with your brand and product but are not yet sure if your offer works well for them. Your task is to provide them with explainer content to convince them that your product meets their needs or let them explore needs they were not yet aware of.
✅ Decision Stage
Your target audience is thinking of buying a specific product from you. These people are one step away from a purchase decision and are looking for reasons to trust you. Your task is to provide social proof, demonstrate that your product works the way your client needs, remove objections and push them to buy here and now.
✅ Retention Stage(the advanced type of video sales funnels)
People have already purchased a product. Your task now is to turn them into your brand ambassadors or encourage them to buy again by giving them attention and care.
Your marketing goal might be to increase conversions between stages so client acquisition becomes cheaper and you could attract more users to buy your product. At each stage of the funnel, you can use a specific type of animated or live content. This is how you create the video funnel.
Now that you know all the stages, the next question is how to create a sales funnel with video. Let’s define what content works well for every stage described.
3 Key Stages of the Video Marketing Funnel
As you can see, there may be from 3 to 4 stages in your sales funnel. If you are interested in how to build a marketing funnel with videos, check out the tips below and learn how to choose videos for each stage and identify which videos to use at the top (awareness), middle (consideration), and bottom (decision and retention) stages.
Keep in mind sometimes the ‘border’ between awareness and consideration, as well as consideration and decisions, can be blurred. You can use specific videos at two or more stages of your targeted funnel. As a result, you can create a sales funnel with animated videos or other multimedia content at lower costs by repurposing the same videos.
🔷 Top Stage: Raising Awareness
- Intent of Your Videos — capture users’ attention and evoke their curiosity.
- Result — drive users get to know your brand or product, have positive impressions about them, follow you on social networks, or go to your website.
- Platforms to Post Videos — targeted ads on social media and other third-party platforms where your target audience spends time.
- Good Results — 10% of viewers reach another stage (for SaaS products).
Both types of video sales funnels described above contain the top stage. This is the stage of your targeted funnel where users only get to know your brand or a specific product. They are likely to be aware that they have a problem that your products solve. But they are also likely to not know details of how your product or service does that.
Top-of-the-funnel video content needs to intrigue users with your solution, leave a warm impression, and educate them about specific issues and the consequences of not resolving them.
Your top stage videos should contain your brand and product names, as well as a call to the targeted action that you need at this stage. This could be to follow your Facebook page, visit your website or brick-and-mortar store, or call your manager.
✅ Promo Videos
Short promo videos feature the advantages of your products or strengths of your company and contain a clear call to action. Promo videos are the only format with leverage for most sales funnels.
✅ Capturing Branded Videos
These videos are designed to generate user’s sympathy, certain emotions, or respect. You offer users an engaging story that is not directly connected to your brand or product and mention your company as theauthor of an idea or its production partner.
✅ Educational Videos
The main thing you need to know about these videos is that they should be useful. Use your deep industry knowledge and your work experience to share exclusive tips and tricks that will make users’ lives better. Teach people something they’ve always wanted to learn with an easy-to-understand video and catchy text describing the steps they need to take.
✅ Pain Point Product Videos
Present your product through the lens of the issues your target audiences often face. Show users how their lives will improve after buying your product.
🔷 Middle Stage: Getting Closer
- Intent of Your Videos — provide users with useful information about how to resolve their issues or show how the product actually works.
- Result — your target audience understands what kind of value they can get out of your product or service and how do you differ from your competitors. They have all the necessary information to make a decision. Users want to get in touch with you.
- Platforms to Post Videos — your social media pages, blog, website homepage.
- Good Results (for SaaS product) — 10% of viewers reach another stage.
If you’ve already wondered how to create a video sales funnel, the first video ideas that came to your mind were most likely related to this sales funnel stage. At this stage, users are already familiar with your brand and perhaps even some of your products. These people are interested in getting more information from you.
Depending on which videos you used at the previous stage of your sales funnel, your potential customers may come to your social media page or website for the next helpful video releases or for more detailed information about your products. Your task is to continue to intrigue them, surprise them, and help them learn more.
Remember, at this stage, it’s important that your video guides users to the next stage of the sales funnel – buying your product. Therefore, focus on your product features instead of your brand and make users want to pay you for your solution.
✅ Explainer Videos Concerning the Product Itself
Explainer videos are short, engaging videos that clarify a certain subject to your audience. Most often, they are integrated into onboarding tours for clients. You can explain how to solve a problem that your potential customers often face or explain to users how your innovative product works.
✅ Insightful Product Videos
Your content plan shouldn’t consist solely of videos featuring your products or services. Carefully integrate your products into your mid-stage videos, guided by whether your product information will be useful to your audience. Videos of this kind may contain product insights that can add value to them for those choosing between several similar products.
✅ Case Study Product Videos
Case study videos are complex and showcase your product from multiple angles. These are exampless of how your company solved a specific customer problem. Your company employees, guest experts, and customers appear in such videos.
🔷 Bottom Stage: Selling Products
- Intent of Your Videos — motivate users to buy as soon as possible and provide them with evidence that your product or service works as you described.
- Result — product purchase and (advanced level) users leaving reviews.
- Platforms to Post Videos — your website, category, and product pages.
- Good Results (for SaaS products) — 20% of viewers buy your product.
Using video in marketing may be tricky, but now the hardest part is over. You’ve introduced your brand and products to your target audience. Moreover, users believe that your product or service solves their problem better than your competitors, and they need to verify that they can trust you. You must provide them with social proof (like a testimonial), a product demo/trial, etc.
At the bottom of your sales funnel with tailored videos, there are videos that remove the remaining objections and let users buy now. We recommend that you look at your target audience’s list of fears, needs, and objections to determine what to focus on in your final videos.
✅ Demo Videos with Tips and Tricks
As we found out, similar or even the same explainer videos can be used at different sales funnel stages. To create a content plan based solely on tips and tricks videos, you will need a list of your target audience’s problems, needs, and fears. Short, simple, and straightforward videos in which you clearly answer a practical question from your subscribers are the best choice. Use more infographics.
✅ How-To Videosand Tutorial videos
Show your potential customers how your product works while instructing your existing customers. Help your clients improve their user experience, easier and more enjoyable. The approach also helps to build a trustworthy corporate image.
✅ Product-focused Video Content (Webinars and Demo Product Videos)
Users who reach this stage want to know more about your products and perhaps purchase them. Create a video detailing how your product and/or service works. A webinar is an interactive video format that allows viewers to ask questions and get the information they need. A demo video is a video that shows what awaits the user who buys the product.
✅ Testimonial Video and Product Reviews
Testimonial videos show real customers who share their experiences with your business and honestly describe the strengths and weaknesses of your solution. The advantage of such content is that your audience is more likely to trust reviews from people like them.
✅ Traditional Corporate Videos
Classic corporate funnel videos are stories about your company, its vision, and its values. Use this type of video to generate sympathy and build trustworthy relationships with prospective customers. Users usually look to corporate videos to prove they are reliable partners.
✅ Lifestyle Corporate Videos
To generate sympathy for your brand, you can show users how much you and your users have in common. Working closely with your video producer, try to get your audience interested in the events of your daily life, the little joys, and the difficulties that you face. This content type is widely used for recruiting purposes (strengthening the HR brand) and building trust in your company.
EXPLORE OUR CASE STUDIES:
🥕 Boosting sales for AUKA app with our minimalistic video
🥕 Stylish video for promoting DreamCo agency
🥕 Increasing landing page conversions with our video for Scrathpay startup
Top-funnel activities for better video marketing and increasing sales
It’s not enough to understand how to design a video marketing funnel. Since creating videos is often time- and money-consuming, avoiding common mistakes and taking full advantage of a multimedia product you already have is essential. Explore 4 tips that will help you get better video marketing ROI:
#1 A/B test your videos
Wherever you publish your video, be it your landing page, corporate website, or social media account, study your analytics carefully. Especially if it is the first time you communicate using video content. The best option is to develop short, inexpensive videos with diverse concepts to see which idea resonates with your audience.
A data-driven answer will help you understand how to make a video marketing funnel that converts better. Learn from our A/B test experiment here: GetUpside App Store – Promo Video Case Study).
#2 Ensure you use all film marketing funnel channels
A YouTube marketing funnel is a good idea but why not benefit from your video on your website or social media too? Videos are known to keep audiences engaged better than texts and images. To stay cost-effective, think of posting the same video content everywhere. Tips on video distribution are here: You got your explainer video. What’s next?
If your sales funnel’s tutorial or other non-top-stage doesn’t match some of your channels as they are aimed to raise awareness among potential customers, not loyalty among existing ones, consider alternative ways to reach your audiences. For example, you can invite them to watch a new video via email.
#3 Experiment with advertising funnels (paid traffic)
A video agency involved in your content development may suggest you leverage pay-per-click or email marketing strategies to reach a wider audience or to test your ideas. At Blue Carrot, we recommend boosting top or middle-stage video content only. In the first case, invest in paid promotion on social media and Google In the second case, think of targeting your videos at people who had brand interactions before (paid context ads and newsletters).
#4 Get back to the successful video marketing rules (strategy & structure)
Everyone makes mistakes. Even if you know how to create a marketing funnel and have just come up with one, it’s never too late to improve your work using a simple checklist.
First, analyze your video marketing strategy (find some ideas here: Video Marketing For Small or Middle Businesses: Development Guidelines and Tips). Second, make sure your videos have a proper structure, their messages are clear to your audience, and the quality of content is high (How to Create an Explainer Video: Tips, Examples, Steps).
Third, remember that video is only one component of your funnel. Landing page design, email frequency, advertising budgets, and more also matter. That’s why an MVP-based approach may save your budget, help you find mistakes, and strengthen your communication at the early stages. Contact Blue Carrot for sales funnel creation service based on videos.
Sales funnel case study: Our experience creating funnel video content
Blue Carrot is a full-cycle video production studio focused on animation for commercial use. Since 2014, we’ve created advertising and educational videos to help our clients achieve superior business results and reach their marketing goals. We are trusted by over 200 companies from 30 countries.
In our portfolio, you can find short films for every stage of video production sales funnels. Check out our favorite case studies concerning producing a video sales funnel below!
Scratchpay
Sales Funnel Stage — top and middle
Video Type — explainer
Scratchpay is a service that allows you to comfortably pay vet bills even if you don’t have enough money in your bank account.
This explainer video has two versions. The short version was used to engage with new users on social networks and the full version (64 sec) was placed on the company website to make it easier for visitors to understand how Scratchpay works.
The target audience of this video by Blue Carrot includes vet clinic owners, their C-level executives , and veterinarians. The idea was to promote Scratchpay through vet clinics that would recommend it to clients that can’t cover the bill at the moment.
Results — 8.5% of viewers clicked the CTA button.
I had a fantastic experience working with Blue Carrot and will be using them for the majority of our company’s creative projects going forward.
Tim, Alex, and their team are creative, professional, and responsive. Highly recommended whether you need a video, art, or any design work done!
Neil Stanga, VP of Marketing and Business Development Scratch Financial, Inc.
Onfo Revolution
Sales Funnel Stage — top
Video Type — brand video
Onfo is a cryptocurrency earned through network mining. In 2020, the Blue Carrot team created a stylish monochrome 2D brand video that tells a story behind Onfo. This animated film visualizes the fears and desires of the Onfo target audience. It was created as a product video that raises curiosity around Onfo and then explains how to use it.
While producing a video sales funnel with the Onfo team, we considered some target audience insights. The noir aesthetics of this video are our attempt to depict the anxiety and pessimism that Millennials have about the global currency market.
The brand message the video communicates is emotional: Onfocoins give people hope that global finances will no longer be controlled by a small group of the immoral rich. To find out how it is possible, users need to click the CTA button.
Results — this video reached 100K organic views on Facebook in three days.
We love what you guys did. People are talking. We are getting a good reputation with this. As far as I am concerned, Blue Carrot hit this ball into the parking lot.
J.R. Forsyth, Founder at ONFO
Final Thoughts
Presently, sales funnels and video content go hand in hand. Without a thoughtful marketing strategy and a sales funnel with suitable videos, you are less likely to successfully convert views into leads and sales.
Videos are currently the most engaging and informative type of content. They also allow you to communicate your messages and make people remember them. That’s why creating funnel video content means taking full advantage of your sales funnel and quickly achieving marketing goals.
At Blue Carrot, we see a wide picture when it comes to video marketing.
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Contact us if you need a video for a specific stage of your sales funnel or if you need to define what you can get out of video marketing 👇
