Rishabh Bhandari is the CEO and founder of Content Beta, a multimedia content agency for B2B SaaS companies. Video is something he knows a tonne about so in this episode, Rishabh talks me through where and how to use video at each stage of the funnel. This includes awareness, conversion and customer success videos.
How does video fit into the marketing funnel at each stage?
OK so the CTA and objective is different for each stage of the funnel:
TOFU, at the top of the funnel you want to educate your customers. You don’t want to focus so much on hard selling your product.
MOFU/ BOFU, at the middle of the funnel through to conversion, you want to focus on how your product solves problems for the user.
Post conversion, here it is about customer success. You want to see more loyalty and adoption of your product
So then, if your goal is to prove the brand of your product, then focus on top of the funnel video. On the other hand, if your goal is to improve adoption and get more renewals, then focus on customer successful content.
What’s the biggest video marketing opportunity for SaaS products?
There are two big areas of opportunity for SaaS products; middle of the funnel and customer success content.
For the middle of the funnel, a lot of products are pretty familiar with top of funnel content, and they are doing OK on SEO. But when it comes to making your product compelling enough to convert from a trial to paid user, there is more opportunity to invest more in video.
You can do this by demonstrating use cases, key features, and even showing social proof. These types of angles will help improve the speed of the lead from top of the funnel to conversion.
For customer success, this is because most need to be as products are fairly high touch an require one to one or one too many onboarding. So if you want to scale, at some point you can’t simply add more customers success people. You will need to leverage content.
Right now I see mostly medium to large SaaS products investing heavily in this. Generally, about 20% of your content should be customer success content, which can also be used for marketing.
For middle funnel topics, what are the best practices for creating these?
When talking to prospective users, you need to talk through a story.
You can use any storytelling framework, but a basic one is 2 do this:
Identify and talk about a pain
Build an aspirational picture
Then show your product as being the bridge
When you show your product, focus on just a couple of features that fix this pain point. Don’t try to show too many features or you will lose focus in the video. Think about 2 to 3 max.
For the video itself, get someone talking like the founder, head of product, or someone senior on the marketing team. Or you can leverage your customers to do it. In any case, it is best when there is a real person answering a real problem. It helps build trust in the mind of the user and will improve lead velocity.
How do you make your videos stand out against the competition?
Don’t forget to tell a story. There’s no shortage of videos out there about similar topics so this is one big way that you can stand out. Improve your production quality more than your competitors.
Two companies can cover the same topic, but the one with a better story and production quality can inch ahead.
How does video production quality change across the funnel?
You can think about creatives with the user's attention span in mind.
At the top of the funnel, they’re not yet interested enough in your product and they don’t even know you. They're going to have a very short attention span.
So for the top of the funnel, your video should be short and higher production quality.
Post conversion, on the other hand, they’re going to have a much bigger investment in your product so they’re gonna have a longer attention span and be more willing to watch longer videos with less production quality.
How long should your videos be?
Here’s a quick guide to how long your videos should be in your marketing funnel:
Top-of-funnel videos should be less than 1 minute long.
Middle and bottom-funnel videos should be less than 2 minutes in duration.
Post Conversion and customer success videos should be less than 3 minutes.
How do you measure video performance across the funnel?
In short, these are the metrics you want to be watching for video performance at each stage of the funnel:
Top of funnel/awareness videos: how many views were generated.
Middle and bottom-funnel videos: Time spent by the audience consuming the content, number of CTA clicks, and number of signups.
Post conversion and customer success videos: Product usage, time to value, and feature adoption.
Where are good places to promote your video content?
The most common places to use social media and PPC retargeting in general to promote your videos.
But another good place to use video is in your email follow-ups. When you have a lot of meetings, particularly for high-ticket SaaS products, you can use the middle funnel content to help promote conversion.
If the middle final video content speaks to a particular pain point or shows features/benefits that are relevant to the person, it will improve the chance for adoption.
How do you work out what videos to create for customer success?
A good place to start is to go to your chat platform or help center, wherever you store your product documentation and look at the analytics. Find what your customers are searching for and then attack those topics and areas with video.
What makes good customer success content?
To make really good customer success content, you need to go beyond the basics. You need to help the user get good at their craft.
For example, MailChimp might offer some content on creating lists and how to personalize emails. But great customer success videos will help them learn how to create great subject lines or increase open rates, role build their list.
Customer education is both product education and helping your users improve their craft or get better at their job. These focuses are both equally important.
How can you create videos with a lower budget?
Founders speaking on Loom can work to create video content without a big budget. However, you don’t want to be speaking without any preparation. You’ll need a basic script about what you’re going to go through.
You can increase the production complexity a bit by going with something like Camtasia.
One mistake to avoid here though is don’t make your videos too long. A lot of people their videos far too long, when they need to be very short. Break up your topic into smaller videos.
What are some companies to use as video marketing references?
Hubspot have played the content marketing game very well.
Airtable also does great work on product education.
BombBomb and Ahrefs are great at teaching with their product, using courses. They don’t promote their product directly, but they make sure the audience would be interested in making use of it.
Monday.com is very good at teasing its audience on social media through video.
Where should people start with using video for their product?
An easy place to start is at the top of the funnel with more SEO-friendly content.
If you find that you have blogs ranking for particular keywords, then it would be a good idea to create a video for those pieces. It will help you defend your position. You can start with the first four to five highest-ranking articles.
Where and how to use video for SaaS marketing with Rishabh Bhandari