If you’re looking for ways to nurture and qualify leads, you need a marketing automation strategy. This method of marketing keeps customers engaged by automatically sharing content and messages that match their interests. Adding video to the mix is like adding an extra shot of espresso to your coffee. The effects are invigorating.
Whether you want to add video to your existing marketing automation strategy, or you’re starting from scratch, this guide will help put this power couple to work for you.
What is A Video Marketing Automation Strategy?
Marketing automation is a way of using software to automatically nurture leads at each stage of their buyer journey. Your strategy is how you configure the software and tag your content for sharing within the ecosystem.
For example, imagine that a visitor to your website downloads your free Guide to Video Marketing. Your marketing automation software might put them on the “Video Marketing” list. It will send them emails at regular intervals with information of interest to marketers and advertisers.
If those emails happen to include video, your click rate might increase by 300%.
How you use marketing automation depends on your goals. You might be trying to generate new leads, nurture the leads you have, or score leads based on their level of engagement. Whatever your goals, automating the nurturing process allows you to scale your marketing efforts.
You can reach more people, more efficiently. Most importantly, you reach the right people. That means a lead might get fewer emails from you, but the ones they receive are relevant.
Why Combine Video and Marketing Automation
We’re willing to admit a slight bias here, but we think video is one of the most powerful marketing tools available today. And you don’t have to take our word for it. Hubspot reports that 91% of businesses use video marketing. From the customer perspective, consumers prefer to learn about brands through video and many convert directly from video.
So if you have a powerful tool at your disposal, why not use it everywhere you can? Integrating video into your marketing automation gives you more chances to put those high-converting videos in front of warm leads.
Top of Funnel: Using Video for Lead Generation
Video can be an effective lead generation tool when used at the top of your marketing funnel. You can create special videos for this purpose or use ones you already have. Either way, you’ll want to include a way to collect the viewer’s contact information. You can do this by:
- Creating a “members only” playlist of videos that requires an email to access.
- Including a form at the end of your video inviting viewers to share their email.
- Adding a pop-up during your video that leads to an email capture form.
- For a video series, releasing the first video publicly, then asking viewers to share their email to get the rest of the series sent directly to them.
When choosing these first lead generation videos, remember that leads are not going to give their email address away unless the content seems worth it.
Viewers might not convert to customers directly from this first video. If they did, we wouldn’t need marketing automation. Instead they might opt into your email list and enter your marketing automation pipeline. Now you can start nurturing them.
Automated Video Marketing as a Nurturing Tool
Businesses can use marketing automation to make social media posts, create ad campaigns, or direct email sequences. Some have also found creative ways to combine video and marketing automation on other communication channels.
Social Media Posts
You’re not creating a unique social media post for each user. Instead, you’re using what you know about your audience as a whole to automate some part of the social media posting process.
This might mean using tools like Scoop.it, DrumUp or BuzzSumo to find and share content from other sources. As users like, share and otherwise interact with these posts, you gather valuable information about them that you can use to nurture the lead.
Ad Campaigns
You might think of ads as an awareness strategy, but they’re valuable for nurturing as well. Video ads can retarget website visitors who went away without buying anything. They also keep your brand top of mind for customers who haven’t purchased in a while.
Retargeting leads with video ads is much easier if you have an automation strategy. You just load in your content and parameters and the software takes care of showing the right video to the right person based on their behavior.
Email Marketing
Email is where marketing automation really shines. Incidentally, it’s also one of the most effective ways to deliver video. Some sources say that just including the word “video” in your subject line can increase email open rates by 6%.
Of course, you don’t want to send the same video to everyone. The person who downloaded an ebook about Getting Started with Video Marketing probably isn’t ready for a tutorial on how to use your video review tool. So rather than sending the same video to everyone on your list, marketing automation will help you deliver the right video at the right time.
Outside the (Chat) Box Solutions
Marketing automation has even made its way into chat with chat bots that automatically answer questions posed by website visitors. Stanley Tate, founder of Tate Law, has started using video in his chat bot with impressive results.
The chat bot on his home page is loaded with pre-recorded videos that feel like a casual personal interaction. Depending on the questions asked and the videos watched, visitors might be invited to read a blog post or book a call.
This simple switch, replacing text chat with video, improved Tate Law’s conversion rate by 654%.
“The whole video chatbot experience is also making the leads very comfortable early on,” Tate said. “Many have given feedback that the whole experience mimics the feel of a video chat.”
And all of this happens before the customer makes direct contact with your sales team!
Lead Scoring and Marketing Automation Strategy
So the million-dollar question is: how do you tell when to send which video? This is where your marketing automation strategy comes in. You can use lead scoring to assign a score to each lead based on how they interact with your brand.
Someone who watches your explainer video once would have a lower score, meaning they’re less likely to buy right now. Meanwhile, a viewer who watched your entire webinar and opened your last three marketing emails probably has a high score, they’re ready to buy.
Then, you can map each video in your marketing library to a lead score. If you have different kinds of customers: B2B and B2C for example, or different customer personas, you might fine-tune your marketing automation with different assets for each group.
Of course, any marketing automation strategy is only as good as the content it shares. For help creating marketing videos to attract and nurture your leads, contact the video marketing experts at IdeaRocket.
