The Buyer’s Journey is a key concept that allows brands to create more compelling marketing by understanding their customers’ needs and mindset. If you want to create world-class video content, it should be central to your marketing strategy.
Generally, the buyer’s journey is split into three stages:
Awareness – the prospect is researching a problem and looking for a solution. For instance, they may be searching how to get more website traffic.
Consideration – the prospect begins researching the solution. This is where you introduce your product as the solution and explain how it helps. For instance, you could create a piece of content entitled SEO Strategies for Your Business.
Decision – the prospect chooses which product to purchase. Typically, this involves comparing multiple products and brands and selecting the one they think will best solve their problem. In our example case, this could mean comparing Ahrefs and SEMrush.
These stages roughly translate to customers being cold, lukewarm, or hot leads. When they are hot, they are close to making a purchase, while cold leads may not even know they have a problem yet!
In this article, we focus on how to use video content to move prospects down the sales funnel and onto the next stage of the buyer’s journey.
Video is consumers’ favorite form of media – a staggering 88% want to see more video content from brands (Wyzowl) – and this guide is packed with actionable tips that will help you make the most of this brilliant marketing medium.
Awareness Phase Video Content
In the awareness stage, prospects are cold leads. They are positively freezing. As cold as cold can get. They may not know your brand and product exist. They may not know they have a problem at all!
Video content in the awareness stage should be centered on a soft-sell strategy. The goal is to introduce your brand and valuable industry information in a way that encourages the viewer to trust your expertise.
The buyer journey usually starts with prospects searching for information on a particular pain point. They are looking for content that features solutions to their problem. But they are not researching solutions in any depth. They just want to know what their options are.
Informational Content & ‘How To’ Videos
Right now, your potential customers don’t know they have a problem. Your video content needs to change that and make people more aware of potential bottlenecks in their everyday lives or businesses.
That is where informational content and how-to videos come in.
Informational content has no barriers to entry, meaning that anyone can watch them regardless of their knowledge level. This is crucial to bring people into your sales funnel.
Think of it this way: if your customer doesn’t know they have a problem yet, would they watch a testimonial video for your products? It’s unlikely.
Whereas informational content which puts the focus on educating the watcher (as opposed to making the sale) hooks their attention and introduces your business niche much more organically.
To know which content to create, you need to find out what your sales prospects are searching for and then create content that:
- Answer their question(s).
- Enables you to integrate your brand and industry organically.
How-to guides and informational content are popular. They typically generate high search volumes on both Google and YouTube. They are also applicable to all industries. Every sector has ‘how-to’ related keywords they can target and create content for.
Take the social media scheduling tool, Hootsuite. It might choose to create content targeting the following keywords:
- How to get more social media followers
- How to create better social media content
- When is the best time to post on social media?
Interviews & Content Partnerships
Another way of raising brand awareness is partnering with other businesses to create video content. This gives you access to an established audience that already knows and trusts your partner’s opinion.
There are plenty of examples of this happening in the marketing world.
For instance, the SEO tool, Ahrefs, teamed up with the social media tool, Buffer, to provide a digital marketing masterclass that was a major success. And local restaurants often team up with cocktail makers to put on a joint event. Bars and pop-up kitchens also regularly collaborate, resulting in greater exposure for both parties.
When choosing a partner, make sure they are a non-competitor with a similar target audience. If you are looking for the great content you can make with that partner, consider:
- Expert interviews and knowledge exchanges
- Joint training webinars
- Social media channel takeovers.
Consideration Phase Video Content
The consideration phase is where prospects go from cold to warm. They know there is a solution to their problem and they think your brand could have the answer.
Now is the time to start featuring your product more heavily in content. You want to prove that your product does the things they need it to. There is an art to this, though. If you are overly promotional, you might frustrate prospects.
Instead, you need to draw them in with more informational content. But this time, it will be less general and 100% industry specific. You are going to tell them how your brand benefits them.
Let’s return to the prospect from our intro who wants to generate more website traffic. They read Ahrefs’ awareness-stage content covering the importance of keywords in SEO. But now, they are wondering how you go about conducting keyword research. Ahrefs knows that and hits them with… Keyword Research: A Beginner’s Guide.
Perfect consideration-stage content.
Expert Guides
Once you have introduced your brands and products with awareness content, you need to move them onto another useful resource. Expert guides are an excellent choice.
Expert guides allow you to talk about how great your brand and product are. In the process, you explain how well it resolves the pain points highlighted in the awareness stage. You achieve this by properly introducing your products and explaining what they do and how they benefit the viewer.
This works because the content also provides immense value to the viewer, strengthening their trust in your business, ensuring they appreciate your expertise, and moving them one step closer to buying.
Product Explainer Videos & Demonstrations
Having introduced your products in the expert guide, you can also start going into greater detail about what they do and how they work. It is time for product explainer videos!
Cartoon explainer videos are a great way to simplify complicated information and explain how your product resolves your audience’s problems. They are engaging, informative, and easy to understand. The ideal combination for lightly educational content.
Product demos take this process one step further by showing your product in action and focusing on key features in greater detail. Prospects watching your product demos are warming up.
Decision Phase Video Content
Finally, decision phase content turns warm leads into sizzling hot prospects. At this stage, customers have decided to buy a solution but are comparing competitors’ products. This is where you start the hard sell by creating content that puts all the focus on your business, your product, and its USPs.
Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials are the modern equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising. They are extremely powerful. This is demonstrated by the fact that 9 out of 10 people say they trust what a customer says about a business more than what that business says about itself (Wyzowl).
When every day people come out and support your product, it puts you in a strong position. Their opinions can help sway undecided buyers by alleviating any concerns they have.
Industry Case Studies
Case studies are an excellent way of showing that your product delivers on your promises. They are evidence that it really does resolve key customer problems.
With this in mind, businesses should create case studies for every industry in which their products are relevant. This ensures you are targeting particular pain points and problems, while also speaking and appealing directly to specific customers.
When creating industry case studies, make sure your videos cover:
- What the customer’s problem was
- How the product resolved the problem
- The end result or dream outcome for the customer. Focus on how your product made the customer’s life easier.
Competitor Comparisons
Finally, let’s look at competitor comparisons. Many businesses shy away from mentioning their competitors in their marketing materials. However, those companies are missing a trick.
Prospects can quickly and easily find your competitors. All it takes is a brief Google search. Rather than pretending these competitors do not exist, create an honest video that weighs up the pros and cons of these competing products and compels the viewer to buy yours.
It is a wonderful chance to snatch control of the narrative and give prospects a long list of reasons why your product is the right choice. Highlight the unique features your product has (and your competitors’ product hasn’t), but do not ever attack or criticize your competitors in the video. It will only backfire and reflect poorly on your brand.
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