In today’s sales world, it is essential to generate and follow leads to the right sales prospects to yield more sales of your products and services. B2B marketers have also embraced the use of online video publishing services such as Youtube as potential channel for their marketing strategies. On the one hand, public video hosting sites empower anyone to create videos with millions of views using simple tools like video converter or Windows Movie Maker, on the other – even Hollywood producers can’t guarantee that their product video made exclusively for your business would blow up YouTube audience. Also, technology of smart phones and tablets have enabled prospect to access, watch and share videos from wherever they are. This has in turn helped the sales companies to generate more leads through this distribution channel. And it also causes technological challenges for marketers at the same time. Well-done product videos must be optimized for playback on small screen. Anyway, the chances are high that you overcome all techie perplexities and focus on business value of your video. Below are 10 smart ways which may generate leads through a good product video on YouTube:
1. Email Gating
This is a simple and efficient way to capture your prospect’s data. Email gating works by asking users to enter their email addresses before viewing your video. By this way, a new lead is created even before your video is viewed by the prospect. Sales companies usually auto inputs this data into their CRM system. So, the customer even doesn’t know that his information has already been captured into your database.
To use this approach, you’ll need to embed YouTube video onto your site and to insert special request form where leads can fill in their email to watch your product video.
2. Call to Action
The best time generate a lead via a video content is when the viewers are most engaged. This avenue is an important to collect a viewer’s data while the video is discussing a specific feature of your product or service. Video distribution channels like Youtube uses annotations to connect videos to links. Salespeople and marketers pay great attention to this aspect as well-placed annotation links the content of your video channel to your website, blogpost or landing page. This method is only efficient when planned accurately to capture the audience attention at the right time they are looking for more while watching a video. It can work by enabling a pop out to collect your information while the video is playing and/or provide more data collection content at the end of the video.
3. High Production Videos Doesn’t Equal to Success
To generate sales, organizations try to avoid homemade videos and go for high quality professional content. B2B and B2B videos are aimed at generating sales; hence they should reflect your brand and convey authority. The videos can include graphics, animated charts and other images to help illustrate key points to the audiences. However, professional videos don’t promise 100% success in terms of views. If you’re just opening YouTube as a marketing channel or your product has unique features that look better without professional touch, then don’t waste your budget on expensive Adobe Video Suite or video production company. YouTube is famous for thousands of so-called “unboxing videos”, where average users demonstrate how they open new product and share their emotions about it. Probably, such video testimonial recorded on good video camera and uploaded to YouTube via Freemake Video Converter, which was mentioned above, is a more native marketing step.
To cut the long story short, if your product has unique design or some peculiarities, encourage your customers to record their videos and post them to your YouTube channel.
4. Easy Sharing
One great characteristics of a video content is that viewers can share, comment and re-embed their experience of watching your video on their social media and website. Viewers who find your video interesting can embed and write a review about your product and service, comment on it and share on their social media platforms. This will indirectly create a whole network of the prospect friends and acquaintances been aware of your products there by generating leads. If you have an annotation to your video, it can travel a long way to wherever your video is embedded online. This way makes it easy for other viewers to provide their own data when they like your contents. From a sales perspective, anytime a video is embedded to another page, a person’s data can be collected for leads no matter which webpage it has been posted.
To make the most of this method, put your product video onto your website page and integrate various social buttons. Pro tip: insert ready-to-use phrases and links into social buttons, so the only thing that user needs it to tweet a prepared message. Please make sure that the message is suitable for your leads and prospects.
5. Test Tagging
This enables it easy for the prospects to find videos which you post online. Hashtags are like keyword that video site uses to organize its content. Assigned hashtags allows prospects to find your videos and other related contents as well. Hashtags became a phenomenon on Twitter and Instagram. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine any message on these platforms. Recently, YouTube followed the hype around tags and you can find tons of the hashtags in YouTube comments. Remember that modern YouTube uses Google+ styled comments, so anyone can reply to you or address you a message, thus hashtags streamline the process.
To apply this way to your outreach plan, think of several key things: your hashtag should be readable, easy to copy and paste on mobile, quite popular and unique at the same time. Think of a tag as a form of search query. For example, if you place the name of your product, it might be not enough. It’s good in terms of branding, but if your product is new, it won’t help you to increase your reach. Another aspect to keep in mind, if your product name is long or consists of several words, then a hashtag that gums up all the words into a messy long phrase won’t be comprehensible. Sometimes, a hilarious situation might happen if several separate words are OK, but together they turn over the meaning. In simple words, all sales persons know that business should be cautious with words in social media.
How to Get More Leads from YouTube? [7 Step Action Plan]
By using the tips mentioned above, a salesperson can generate more leads using a YouTube video and increase his/her sales margin. Do you feel convinced and ready to get started? Here’s the short action plan for you:
- Brainstorm an idea for your first video. What would you prospect look for? What are their intensions? What insights may they get from your video content?
- Prepare a video scenario. Check similar topics on YouTube. Compare video quality, complexity and length.
- Equip yourself with useful software or find a video production agency.
- Make your video and upload on YouTube.
- Apply one or all 5 ways to boost leads from YouTube that we mentioned above.
- Get analytics and gather feedback.
- Get leads. Repeat again.
What secret sauce do you use to generate leads from a YouTube product video? Tell us in comments.
