3 Steps to Optimizing Your Marketing Videos for Sales

It’s no secret that marketing and sales alignment is paramount to the success of any growth-seeking business. The best video marketers take a few simple steps to optimize their marketing videos, thereby helping sales and strengthening their alignment in the process.

But there is a secret to making it work, and it all starts with creating the right types of videos. From there, you can set up integrations with your marketing automation platforms and then connect viewing data with triggers and workflows using your marketing automation platform.

1. Identify which marketing videos will help your sales team

Videos can inspire customers along each stage of the buyer’s journey. From creating top-of-the-funnel awareness to retaining customers through product education, there’s a huge opportunity to match videos to every buyer persona. Let’s take a look at a few key types that can help your sales team — and your prospect or customer — at the right time in the buyer’s journey.

Product videos

Whether it’s telling a story, highlighting a customer, or showing a pain point you solve, there are plenty of strong use cases for product videos. Once prospects are aware of the problem they need solved, your video should answer, “Why my product, and why now?” This product overview from Quip does just that.

At this stage, your sales team may already be engaging with prospects, which often involves answering questions around explaining your product and handling any hesitations they might have. A great product video that’s positioned well in email outreach can help shorten the sales process. If you have new features or products that you’ve highlighted in a video, encourage your sales team to share them directly with prospects and customers to help close the deal.

Webinars

Webinars saw a huge boost in 2020, especially after more people started working from home during the global pandemic. Wyzowl, a video creation tool, found that 62% of marketers used webinars in 2020, a sharp increase from just 46% in 2019.

At Wistia, we use webinars for sales enablement. Once they’re recorded, we publish them on our website, send out the recording in an email, track which viewers are watching, then share the results with sales for them to follow up. This empowers our sales team to only reach out to the most relevant and engaged webinar prospects.

One way Wistia helps users collect email addresses from a video asset is with a feature called Turnstile. Turnstile asks viewers to enter their email addresses to keep watching the video. In a world of free content, when is the right time to ask for a viewer’s email address? We’ve sorted through a bunch of data that shows the best place to add a Turnstile is the moment in the webinar when the viewer is getting the most value.

For example, you don’t want to ask for a viewer’s email too early in the webinar recording, nor do you want to wait until the very end. Instead, it’s usually best to ask for an email far enough into the video that the viewer knows what they’re getting is valuable enough for them to continue watching.

“It’s best to ask for an email far enough into the video that the viewer knows what they’re getting is valuable enough for them to continue watching.”

Customer stories and case studies

More than ever, buyers want to know exactly what to expect if and when they purchase your product. They’re searching for everything, including reviews, expert opinions, customer stories, and case studies, before they purchase your product or service. In their book Absolute Value, Stanford professors Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen talk about what really influences buyers in the age of “nearly perfect” information, culminating in the “Influence Mix.” Today, that mix means buyers are more informed than ever on the absolute value of a product before they buy it.

With so much information at our fingertips, we all feel an obligation to research and look for reliable testimonials before we purchase. Your prospects are no different. If your sales team has access to customer stories and case studies, they can help your prospects and customers get closer to understanding the absolute value of your product or service.

Here’s where video comes into play. You can use the visual medium to help communicate your most valuable customer stories and testimonials. From there, your sales team can share these videos at the right time to guide your buyers to what they would’ve been searching for anyway. Not only does this help push prospects further down the buyer’s journey, but also it effectively shortens the sales cycle. Plus, they’re super simple to shoot, as this testimonial featuring Unbounce shows.

2. Integrate with your marketing automation platform

At this point, your team has worked extra hard to get eyeballs on your marketing videos, so let’s move beyond the aggregate and get super granular. Because every video view comes from a real person (ok, maybe a few are bots), it’s important to understand as much as possible about the humans behind the names and email addresses you see.

These people are spending valuable time interacting with your brand, and more than that, they’re learning while doing so. By identifying the humans behind the view and keeping a history of what they’re showing interest in, you’re creating a more streamlined approach to the sales cycle.

“By identifying the humans behind the view and keeping a history of what they’re interested in, you’re creating a more streamlined approach to the sales cycle.”

If you’re using Wistia for marketing and sales purposes, integrating with your marketing automation platform is a great first step. Once that’s done, there are a plethora of steps you can take to optimize your videos for sales, including the following three ideas:

Lead scoring

Marketing automation tools like Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot all have features that help marketers create custom lead scores for contacts. Why is lead scoring so important? For one, it helps identify the best fits and most interested prospects, making it a vital tool for marketing and sales teams. Lead scoring can be used to identify the best potential score on explicit attributes (fit) and implicit attributes (interest).

A few examples of explicit attributes are the contact’s job title, industry, and geography. On the other hand, implicit attributes could include page visits, video views, and clicks. All of these actions imply that a contact is interested in your product or service.

Here’s a quick example: Your marketing automation platform lets you score leads based on video views. You can set lead scoring as a criteria to identify marketing qualified leads, and your sales team can then use these lead scores to prioritize all the leads they’re currently in conversations with. At Wistia, we add 20 points to a contact’s HubSpot score when they watch at least 25% of our HubSpot integration product video. We also set up this type of scoring for many of our other highest value videos.

In this stage, it’s crucial to establish consistent naming conventions for your videos, as it can save time and keep your marketing automation platform neat and tidy. Say you have several customer story videos for which you want to add all video views with the name “customer story” into a list in your marketing automation platform. Keeping your video naming conventions consistent (so that all customer stories will include “customer story” in the name of the video, for instance) will help save a lot of time as you create scores and workflows for different groups and types of videos.

View notifications

Now that you have those product videos, webinars, and customer stories on hand, let’s make sure you and your sales team know exactly when your most important leads are watching them. A timely email notification that one of your prospects or customers watched a key video could make the difference between upselling and losing a prospect altogether. Not only that, but these notifications can also help your sales team better prioritize their time between prospects.

During the decision stage, your prospects might be exploring and researching your competitors for alternative options. How great would it be to have a view notification that goes directly to your sales team? This could spark a timely email reply and continue to position your sales team as the experts who can help solve your prospects’ business problems. These notifications are particularly important for when your brand is top of mind since they show that you value prioritizing your customers’ needs and actions.

Turnstile for email collection

Luckily, Wistia has integrations with dozens of popular email marketing services. When you add a Turnstile to your videos, you’re asking viewers to enter their email addresses to watch the rest of the video. Remember all of the different types of videos that can help sales from step one? Try adding Turnstiles to these videos, and you’ll be one step ahead of the game as you collect prospects’ email addresses at the right time in their buyer’s journey.

Once you’ve captured a new email address, you can send that contact an automated email to share additional content that’s similar (or more in-depth) to the video they watched. You can even give them a chance to set up a meeting or a demo with your sales team right from the get-go!

3. Get your sales team involved in promotion

Now that you’ve created a ton of great videos, it’s time to share them with your sales team! The only problem is, they’re going to have some questions for you. What video should I send? Where can I find them? What problem might this video help solve for the customer?

Sure, there’s always the chance they’ll spend hours watching all of the videos and taking notes. But we’re guessing that’s not likely. Instead, you can make their lives easier (and make everyone else happy) by giving them a quick reference guide that specifies what’s in your videos and provides context about when and with whom to share them.

A quick and easy way to do this is by creating a shared spreadsheet with links to each of your videos, along with the following details for each video:

• The value proposition
• The product features shown
• The best job titles to share the video with
• The best industries and company sizes to share the video with
• The ideal buyer’s stages for this video (awareness, consideration, and decision)

Creating a quick reference guide will not only assist your sales team, but also it will increase the likelihood that your videos get shared with your customers.

If you’re a Wistia user, the fastest way for sales (or anyone) to share an attractive thumbnail that links to your video is to right-click and select “Copy link and thumbnail.” After that, paste it into the body of your email, and bada-bing, bada-boom: You’ve got a great-looking thumbnail and the title of the video all ready to send! And what’s more, it creates a great viewing experience for the recipient since the hyperlink brings them right to your website, where the video will then autoplay.

Make your videos work harder

If you’re serious about video marketing, taking the extra effort to put processes in place will pay off in the long run, especially when it leads to a reduced sales cycle. Even if you don’t have a robust sales team, the tactical steps we covered will help you increase the value of your videos and your video viewing data, ultimately leading to more qualified leads and happier customers. And at the end of the day, who doesn’t want more of both?