Ever wondered what magic you can achieve by having animated videos in your sales process ? Animated online videos are an ultimate game changer and can play a significant part in engaging with your potential customers, talking about your products and services in a super simplified illustrative way.
Animated videos in your sales process is a game changer
Online video is a major asset for business marketing. Video delivers better engagement, sharing, and SEO momentum with its unique ability to cut through the digital noise of our preoccupied society. From a budgeting standpoint, video yields some of the best ROI of any content marketing initiative. But it’s not enough to post random videos on YouTube or your website, sit back, and wait for the leads to roll in.
Marketers should ask themselves— and this post will attempt to answer—pragmatic questions like:
- How and where is best place to use animated videos in your sales process ?
- Which types of videos work best, and at what point in the sales funnel?
If we look at videos “BY THE NUMBERS”
- More than 6 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube every month—an amount that increases 50% each year.
- A single minute of video is worth 1.8 million written words
- 95% of senior marketing professionals have used video for online marketing, up from 81% in 2016.
- One study found that 60% of marketers find video effective, behind only in-person events and webinars
And now coming to the most important question: Why animated Videos are so effective?
By engaging multiple senses, video commands a viewer’s full attention. A video effectively conveys—in seconds—a complex message that would require paragraphs in a blog post or text-based email.An explainer video is just what it sounds like: a one- to two-minute video explaining the problem the product solves, and why the viewer should want to use it. It’s like a visual elevator pitch.An animated video gives much more flexibility when explaining complex products or services. A whiteboard animation, for example, applies a light look for heavy concepts, while the constant drawing motion keeps audiences engaged.
Animated video lets you re-emphasize the main value proposition of your product or service in a way that’s easier to retain than paragraphs of text. You can clearly demonstrate the steps in a process or provide animated infographics demonstrating ROI. It’s also a strong signal of your company’s culture; through animated video, potential customers will get a good idea of the type of company they’ll be working with.
Online video improves organic traffic via search because, though Google is displaying them 27% less than they did in 2016, video thumbnails remain very attractive for clickers querying information. This added visibility attracts a new segment of potential customers. Search listings with videos are 41% more likely to be clicked on than those without videos. Of course there are more Ways you can ensure that marketing is supporting the Sales Process
With animated video, what can marketers do?
With animated videos, marketers can create almost anything, With its ability to bend the laws of nature, animation can bring product benefits to life in a form that really enforces the value proposition.[irp]
- Give context to ideas
Animated video can easily show products from different perspectives. Start on a close-up of a tree, and then zoom out to show the entire forest.
- Transform thoughts and data into visuals
Animation can demonstrate the steps in a process or present data in a way that’s fluid and dynamic.
- Explore different ways to communicate messages
Animated video isn’t constrained by existing video footage. You can switch backgrounds, move characters, or add props to get your point across.
- Strike the right tone
Animated video isn’t limited to portrayals of real individuals, so you can strike a wider range of emotional tones and cover difficult subjects effectively.
How, Where, and When to Use Animated Videos
When should marketers use animated video? If all you need to do is aim a camera at your product—if you’re selling a pair of shoes, for example—live action is the way to go. But if you’re trying to describe anything very large (global logistics), very small (microprocessor architecture), or very abstract (BitCoin), you should strongly consider choosing animated video. Marketers who effectively incorporate animated video as part of their marketing strategy deploy it at every point in the sales funnel. Animated video can draw leads into an initial website visit; nurture them as they become serious prospects; and help convert them into paying customers. What’s more, it can also help brands build ongoing relationships and retain those customers.
What are the types of Videos, Marketers can think of investing on?
Explainer videos
An explainer video is just what it sounds like: a one- to two-minute video explaining the problem the product solves, and why the viewer would want to use it. It’s like a visual elevator pitch. Explainer videos have several advantages over traditional text explanations and descriptions. For one thing, 60% of site visitors will watch a video before reading text.They also tend to recall videos better. A well-made explainer video can increase your conversion rates by 15% to 50%.
Explainer videos can be linked to sales soliciting emails. If your message in the email does not do the job, the video will do that more efficiently. Explainer videos are also increasingly used at events and trade shows. It helps communicate your unique capabilities in 30-45 seconds and keeps the audience engaged, some of the objectives that you want achieved from your events presence.
Explainer Videos are short (usually less than 2 minutes), imaginative, and succinct and can be used to communicate a business, a product, a service, an idea or a value proposition quickly and effectively. These videos can use real people, places, and objects, or 2D/3D animations, or a mixture of these to communicate some aspect(s) of your business, and create an engagement with your potential, or current customers, partners, or other stakeholders.The use of animated characters (or real people, if you have a larger budget) and story is to create emotional bonds, trust and empathy with your viewers. Using Explainer animated videos in your sales process will enable you to communicate information, feelings, and emotion to your audience, by using motion, images and sound.[irp]
Video infographics
Infographics present data in a format that’s interesting and help people understand complex ideas. In addition, people share infographics much more frequently than they share text-based articles. Unfortunately, as infographics have proliferated, their quality has dropped. Infographic fatigue is here, and it’s real.But animated video infographics let marketers stand out from the crowd and get back to the essence of data visualization. By animated video infographics, we don’t mean putting graphical data on a series of PowerPoint slides with a bit of movement. It’s hard to know how much a viewer reads or retains of a static infographic. With videos, you can track the number of views, the number of completions, and even where falloff occurs.
I hope this post was able to give you some clear ideas and advantages of having animated videos in your sales process. A video strategy done right can significantly help the sales process and help engage with potential customers more effectively and faster.