As a marketer, you often need to achieve two main goals: to create beautiful content that builds your brand awareness and tells your story … and Generate qualified leads that you can use to grow your business.
The traditional marketing ethos may view these as two separate workflows – creating impactful video ads and digging out lower funnel users – but it doesn’t have to be. If you don’t use video as part of your lead generation tactic, you are missing out on a serious opportunity to create impactful content that directly leads to more leads for your business.
Megha Muchhala, Product Marketing Manager at Vimeo, shares some key insights into integrating your video efforts with your lead generation tactics.
Vimeo’s tips for generating leads straight from video
We all know how useful adding video to a landing page or email campaign can be to increase your conversion rates. However, you can also tweak your videos themselves That gives you a marketing advantage.
1. Add customizable contact forms.
Instead of simply relying on CTAs to increase your followers or website traffic, marketers should use in-video contact forms to collect specific information from leads. It can be as simple as collecting emails, or more detailed to gather demographic information, brief responses to gather personal insights, or other actionable data.
Paste these forms into videos embedded in your digital ecosystem on your website, landing pages, and even blogs to quickly and passively create qualified leads.
2. Use a tiered format.
While you’ve probably heard of multi-step forms before, it’s possible you don’t need to use one just yet. This is a shame because this format has been shown to increase form conversion by up to 52.9%.
A multilevel form breaks down a longer contact form into an easy-to-understand series of questions designed to improve the user experience and, in turn, increase conversions.
Using a multi-step form reduces friction and helps you wait until the user has already completed a few steps in the process to request more user-protected information (like an email address).
3. Optimize it for each platform.
You always want your user experience to stay updated no matter how they are viewing your video content. We know that you take care to create videos in different formats and aspect ratios depending on your hosting plans, and your contact forms shouldn’t be any different. Use a contact form that appears on mobile devices and Desktop to make sure you are capturing all potential leads.
4. Get creative with your placement.
Deleting contact forms at any point in your video has advantages and disadvantages. The right choice generally depends on what type of content you are sharing.
If you offer premium or long-form content, you can link your video to a contact form right in advance to drive leads. If you’re telling a shorter form story, placing a contact form in the middle or just before a climax can be incredibly effective at creating incentives for information sharing.
And while placing your contact form at the end of the video, it can be riskyg 50% of viewers stop seeing video after one minute) it can generate the most qualified leads as well: Those who watched until the end are most likely to be preoccupied with your brand or story anyway. Regardless of your choice, we recommend doing some A / B testing to determine the best placement. A little testing can go a long way!
When talking about placement, consider your video distribution when deciding on your form messages and placement. Viewers who watch a video on your blog are likely to be far more invested (and therefore likely to share some honest information and opinions) than those who watch a video on your homepage. Change your messages accordingly!
Some final tips
Now that you know the joys of in-video lead capture, let’s read some final tips to get the most out of your tactic.
1. Don’t ask too much too soon.
Make sure to keep the sales funnel in mind when optimizing your contact forms. If you know that video is your primary acquisition tool (i.e., your branded consumers’ first piece before they become fans), you know that they may not be that willing to share a lot of information with you in advance.
Customize your inquiries to relate to steps in the funnel: users who are branded loyalty are much quicker to submit information than users who just discovered you through a sponsored ad.
2. Remember to nurture your leads.
Leads are great, but if you don’t hire them, they’re pretty much useless. If you’re capturing leads through contact forms, sync them with your email service provider for easier maintenance. (Just so you know, Vimeo users can automatically sync their leads directly to their HubSpot account, making connecting with prospects easier than ever.)
Then employ them! Develop follow-up email campaigns on specific key demographics and use your collected data to make them even more attractive. Boost your click even further by embedding GIFs of your videos in your subsequent email campaigns to get noticed and noticed by leads.
3. Always think about SEO.
Your ability to generate leads in your video doesn’t mean a lot if no one is viewing your content. SEO can be an extremely helpful organic discovery tool to send users to your business. Take the extra time to tweak your website, landing page, and video yourself for maximum visibility.
