These 3 Types of Mid-Funnel Videos Will Help Your Business Build Trust

Brand awareness videos? Super delightful and fun. Conversion videos? Necessary and highly effective. But mid-funnel marketing videos? This is where the magic happens. Like goldilocks on the hunt for the perfect porridge, these videos fall right in the middle between awareness and conversion-focused content.

Videos made for the middle of the marketing funnel are crucial for establishing trust in your business. When it comes to proving your product’s value to your customers, the proof is in the porridge. Alright, we’ll leave that metaphor alone for now, but you get the picture!

After a potential customer becomes familiar with your product, and right before they decide to purchase, something special happens: they learn new things! And not just about your product, but also about related topics that interest them, skills they may need, or even the industry they work in.

All of this knowledge ladders up to a growing confidence in your brand, and that trust turns into fuel that can reinvigorate your funnel over and over again. Plus, you might even learn something new along way! So, whip out those wooden spoons and get ready to dig into why mid-funnel videos are so great at building trust, and ultimately, moving your audience through the funnel.

Build customer trust through testimonials and case studies

How can you show your potential customers that your product fits their needs better than the rest? Well, show ’em what you’ve got! Customer testimonial videos are the 5-star Amazon reviews of the SaaS industry. They point to your excellent track record with past customers, while clearly painting a picture of what problems can be solved by using your product.

“Customer testimonial videos are the 5-star Amazon reviews of the SaaS industry. They point to your excellent track record with past customers, while clearly painting a picture of what problems can be solved by using your product.”

In a typical testimonial video, customers will discuss how a product or service has helped them become more successful, efficient, or better-equipped to do their job. And, like a referral from a friend, learning about a product from a reputable source is often more convincing than anything else!

Buildium, a property management software company, uses testimonials on their site to share how they help real businesses like family-owned real estate firm, On the Mark Management, with financial reporting and managing work-order maintenance requests. Check out this awesome, heartfelt testimonial video:

In this video, the Liberman family discusses how using Buildium helped them cut down time spent on accounting tasks, and made client communication clearer and easier.

This one customer testimonial video offers tons of anecdotal data to help viewers decided whether or not the product will be useful to them. And because the Liberman family is so likable, it also makes Buildium feel like a great company to work with! Afterall, one of the best ways to make an effective customer testimonial video is to identify potential customers that would be great storytellers. The Liberman’s all-hands-on-deck mentality is relatable for small-businesses, making it easy for Buildium’s prospects to envision themselves in their shoes.

Build site trust through expert-level education

Sure, mid-funnel education videos move people down the funnel (and help you capture and nurture leads), but they also help establish your team as leaders in your respective industries. Instructional videos are more like legal briefs or mathematical proofs: they build up arguments for your product through displays of expertise and credibility. And as an added bonus? That expertise makes your site trustworthy in the omnipotent eyes of Google.

“Instructional videos are more like legal briefs or mathematical proofs: they build up arguments for your product through displays of expertise and credibility.”

One of Google’s main criterion for judging site quality is “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T).” You can easily remember this acronym by remembering to E-A-T your mid-funnel porridge at a temperature that’s just right. But seriously, this principle applies to formal expertise when it comes to medical, legal, and financial advice, and also “life experience” and “everyday expertise.”

Let’s look at one of Wistia’s own mid-funnel videos, for example. Our post titled, How to Produce a Stop Motion Video currently ranks #1 on Google for the search “stop motion video.” Here it is in all its first-place glory:

The traffic this post drives benefits both the top of our marketing funnel, as well as the middle. Perhaps people searching for how to make stop motion videos are already considering Wistia for their business videos, or perhaps they’re coming across us for the first time. Since Trevor and the creative team produced a high-quality video, we can demonstrate that we know about all aspects of video, not just the hosting part.

Educational videos can make your site the go-to online resource for specific niches relevant to your business. The audio-visual nature of video makes content more engaging, so adding a video component to pages with fresh content will help keep people on your site longer while also boosting SEO.

Mid-funnel videos contribute to a library of knowledge that improves your site authority over time, but it _is_ a significant investment. In other words, don’t skip on the production quality for these types of videos! To develop (and showcase) a deep expertise, you need to cover topics that are directly related to your product, as well as ones that are a bit more tangential, like how to produce a stop-motion video.

Build personal trust through team introductions

Last, but certainly not least, mid-funnel videos build personal trust by letting people get to know your team. Building familiarity between customers and people from your company makes your marketing more transparent, and also lays the foundation for your customer relationships.

In a sales funnel, these personal videos are more 1:1 — the account manager assigned to a lead will introduce themselves and pitch the ways the product will work for that specific lead. In a marketing funnel, however, you can take this approach at a larger scale. Think of it like a Costco-sized bag of dry porridge that you simply have to pour water onto.

Take this example from Arkansas Family Dental. Now, for most people, going to the dentist doesn’t exactly elicit the warm and fuzzies. But luckily, the folks at this particular dental practice combat that icky feeling with a personal video that helps establish a connection with prospective patients and their dentists.

In less than two-minutes, this video accomplishes a lot. It showcases the state-of-the-art facilities available at this location, while still making most of the focus on getting to know this particular business-owner and dentist. By utilizing video, Dr. Nichols was able to highlight the fact that her practice now offers a high school scholarship for those entering the field. This speaks to the type of practice Nichols runs, and gives viewers a positive impression of the type of people who work there.

Showcasing your employees in your mid-funnel videos makes viewers feel more personally connected to your business and the people behind it. When you give your products or services a human backstory, you’re giving customers and potential customers alike a reason to care. Over time, viewers will grow to trust these familiar faces for all sorts of advice and assistance.

“When you give your products or services a human backstory, you’re giving customers and potential customers alike a reason to care.”

When you help mid-funnel customers get to know your team better, they’ll go into the decision process knowing they’ll be in good hands!

Start investing in building trust

With mid-funnel videos, it’s super important that you’re actually providing some sort of value to your viewers. And while customer trust, site trust, and personal trust are all wonderful goals in their own right, it’s the combination of the three that leads to overall trust in your brand. That trust will make your customers more confident that they’re making the right decision when it comes time to purchase.

Mid-funnel videos are a win-win for both the business and the consumer, so get out there and start experimenting with videos that build trust! You might think, “Hey, that sounds like a lot of effort!” But, did goldilocks give up after trying two rounds of crummy porridge? I think not!