10 Ways Explainer Videos Can Increase Your Sales You Need To Know About

Generating Leads Using Explainer Videos

Luke Murphy
01 Mar 2023

So, you've got your explainer video complete. Job done, right? Not really. You still need to put it in the right place to get the right audience to view it.

But the good news is if you can consistently drive the right traffic to your explainer video, it can be a tool for generating continuous leads for years to come.

In this article, we're going to give away some of our best tips for releasing an explainer video in a way to give it the best possible chance of being successful.

Script

Your explainer video must have a good script. But how do we define a good script? It should engage your target audience and gets across a message that resonates with them. Keep them in mind by:

• Avoid using industry jargon that they won't understand. Speak their language.
• Keep the script simple. The more complex you delve into your product's features and technicalities, the more likely people will lose interest. So instead, focus on the value that you're providing.
• Keep their problem/solution at the heart of the narrative to make it relatable.

Storyboard

Before creating your explainer video in its final form, it's good to draw sketches of each important frame in the video. This practice will allow you to get a broad overview of the video and decide how to improve it. In addition, it'll be easier to bring your vision to life if you have a set of storyboards to communicate your vision to other team members. The better you can execute your vision based on your marketing plan, the more likely you are to convert your target audience. You'll also save a lot of money on reshoots and editing revisions.

Length

The ideal length for reaching a general audience is 60-90 seconds. However, the more expensive and technical your product is, the longer the buying cycle will be. The longer the buying cycle, the more information you need to put in your video. Therefore, you may need a longer video than average if your solution matches this description.

Edit

Competent video editing can be the difference between delivering a long-winded, poorly articulated business pitch and a snappy, slick business pitch. Make sure to cut out any "ums" and "ams" and dead space.

Editing is not only a subtractive process. You can also add various elements to create a more entertaining, engaging explainer video.

Voiceover

When selecting a voice artist, consider choosing a voice that will resonate with your brand and target audience. Use the chart below to pick the right voice for you.

Waking Dreams Media Explainer Videos Cork Kerry

Graphics

Use text to punctuate the critical points in your video. Make sure your brand and brand colours are used in the video. Also, ensure that the animation style suits your target audience.

Music

Pick music that suits your brand personality and the message behind the video.

Understand your target audience

A key element to generating more leads is understanding your target audience; their age, gender, demographic, psychographic, occupation, education, hobbies, etc. So then, how can you build this character into the video to enhance your chances of resonating with them and driving leads?

Marketing Strategy - Plan your launch

When planning your explainer video, you should establish a marketing strategy for the video release. Without a marketing strategy, your video does not have a purpose, and without a purpose, it cannot achieve anything meaningful. Decide in your marketing strategy the aim for the video, the expected return on investment, the budget for the project, the best publishing platforms to meet your goals.

Explainer Videos Have a Longer Shelf life Than Other Types of Videos

If you want to bring video into your marketing arsenal, then explainer videos are a great place to start. It’s the Swiss Army knife of video advertising. When created professionally and presuming the nature of your business doesn’t change, your explainer video will work as proficiently for your business in year one as it does in year ten. No replacements are needed.

Focus on Benefits and Social Proof

In your script, make sure you focus on the benefits of your product and the experience of customers that have already loved your solution. Make sure to add testimonials and case studies to your video if you have them. People want proof that products like this have worked for people like them. Your product/service and x and y feature are irrelevant to your audience if it doesn't connect back to something that helps them in their lives.

Track Video Performance

When your video is finally posted, it's a good idea to track its performance using social media and Google analytics. Pay particular attention to the average duration watched and click-through rate. Explainer videos can take a lot of time or cost a lot of money. Therefore, it's essential to try and figure out if the video is producing a return on your bottom line.

Publish to YouTube

YouTube is the second most popular search engine globally, and no wonder. It's owned by Google and has a plethora of content answering every question under the sun. By publishing to YouTube, you're ensuring that your video has a better chance of listing as an official Google answer on a query. This SEO work will improve your chances of getting more web leads.

Compelling Thumbnail

Your video is going to be pushed out on multiple platforms. While some social media sites have auto-play functionality, YouTube does not. We recommend creating a custom thumbnail to increase your video's click-through rate. Think of this as one image to represent the video. It needs to incite interest. Here's an example.

Create a Catchy Title

When evaluating if a piece of content is worth watching, audiences will check out the title. You can't generate leads from people that never clicked on your video in the first place.

Here is a link to a great video on how to write a catchy title.

Publish on your website

Explainer videos work fantastically as lead converter tools on your website. For example, 90% of customers report that product videos help them make purchasing decisions. Furthermore, 64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it. And if you're in the B2B industry, 59% of company decision-makers would rather watch a video than read an article or blog post.

The key to effectively deploying a video on your website is to place it above the fold. Also, consider using a video hosting service as free hosts like YouTube may disrupt the viewing experience with ads, turning flippant viewers away.

Finally, it's essential to have your call to action, the action you want your audience to take after watching the video, near the player. This could be a form sheet, a "add to cart" product button or a list of pricing plans.

Put Your Explainer Video In Your Email Footer

An explainer video is the best first introduction you can make, so attaching it to your email footer makes perfect sense. Plus, adding a video to marketing emails can boost click-through rates by 200-300%.

Publish to Social Media

When publishing to social media, there are a few tips you can keep in mind to boost performance. First, make sure to upload the video natively. Each social media platform aims to keep you on there as long as possible, so their algorithms are biased towards native video.

Secondly, posting in groups and communities related to the topic of the video is a great way to get the video directly in front of qualified leads, increasing your chance of converting. You can also do this by using tags and hashtags related to your target audience and by reaching out to influencers in your space and seeing would they share the content.

81% of people play videos on mute, so social media platforms are designed to play videos without sound automatically to ensure an enhanced user experience. This is why including closed captions will boost shares up to 15%.

Social Media Ad Campaign

If the post is successful organically, it might be a good idea to turn it into a paid ad and scale your audience. You can do this on almost all of the major social media platforms. Each of them can target specific audiences around demographics, interests and occupations.

Use a Pixel to Track Leads

A pixel is a piece of code running on your website, linked to your social media account, that checks when people are coming from a specific platform and captures their details. Before running your campaign, set up a Pixel on LinkedIn and Facebook. Then, at the end of each campaign, you’ll have an interested audience that you can retarget.

Create a Corresponding Blog Post

Now that your video is done, you can turn it into other forms of content to multiple your leads. One of the best ways to do this is by turning your video script into a blog post. When placed on your website, the written content will boost your search ranking for the queries that the video relates to.

Remember that ranking on the first page of Google for any query will 10x your traffic compared to being on the second.

Gated Videos

If your content is good enough and considered a “must-see” by your audience, consider making it a newsletter-only viewing experience. Get people to sign up for your email before they can view it. This way, you’re creating a list of potential leads. Product demos are a great video type to use this with as someone’s interest in seeing it indicates that someone is in the market for your product type.

CTA

The goal of content marketing should be to encourage follows – to get them to tune in again next week. The purpose of an explainer commercial could be to take the first non-paid action towards a purchase, i.e. a free trial.

Whatever you ask for, make sure it’s singular. Audiences are fickle. Giving them multiple things to do will likely lead to no action taken at all.

As every industry’s audience is different, it may also be worth split testing your CTAs to see which variation produces the best results. Split testing is where you show half your audience one version of a video and half of the audience another. Then, you crunch the numbers on which performed better and double down on the one that works. More on split-testing videos here.

The way you write your CTA will also impact how effective it is. More on call-to-actions here.

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