As a marketer, you're often tasked with accomplishing two main goals: making beautiful content that builds your brand recognition and tells your story ... and generating qualified leads that will help you grow your business.
Traditional marketing ethos may consider those to be two different streams of work — crafting impactful video ads, and digging up lower-funnel users — but it doesn't have to be that way. If you're not using video as part of your lead generation tactics, you're missing out on a serious opportunity to create impactful content that directly translates to more leads for your business.
Megha Muchhala, Product Marketing Manager at Vimeo, shares some key insights on how to integrate your video efforts with your lead generation tactics.
Vimeo's Tips for Generating Leads Straight from Video
We all know how useful including video on a landing page or an email campaign can be in boosting your conversion rates, but there are also optimizations you can make to your videos themselves that will give you a marketing edge.
1. Add customizable contact forms.
Rather than simply relying on CTAs to boost your follows or website traffic, marketers should utilize in-video contact forms to capture specific information from leads. This can be as simple as gathering their email, or more detailed to capture demographic information, short answers to collect personal insight, or other actionable data.
Include these forms on videos embedded throughout your digital ecosystem across your website, landing pages, and even blogs to passively build qualified leads, fast.
2. Use a multi-step format.
While you've probably heard of multi-step forms before, it's possible you have yet to use one. That's a shame, because it's a format that's been shown to increase form conversion by up to 52.9%.
A multi-step form is one that breaks a longer contact form up into a more digestible series of questions, which should boost user experience and, in turn, increase conversions.
Using a multi-step form reduces friction and helps you wait to ask for more user guarded information (like an email address) until the user is already a few steps into the process.
3. Optimize it for any platform.
You always want your user experience to stay tip-top no matter how they're viewing your video content. We know you take the care to create videos in different formats and aspect ratios depending on your hosting plans, and your contact forms should be no different. Utilize a contact form that displays on mobile and desktop to ensure you're capturing all potential leads.
4. Get creative with your placement.
There are pros and cons to dropping contact forms at any point throughout your video, and the right choice generally depends on what kind of content you're sharing.
If you're offering premium or long-form content, gating your video with a contact form right up front is a great way to boost 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 in terms of incentivizing information sharing.
And while placing your contact form at the end of the video can be risky (considering 50% of viewers stop watching a video after one minute), it can also generate the most qualified leads: those who've watched all the way to the end are the most likely to be engaged with your brand or story anyway. Whatever you choose, we recommend setting up a few A/B tests to determine the best placement. A little testing can go a long way!
And speaking of placement, consider your video distribution when deciding your form messaging and placement. Audiences watching a video on your blog are likely far more invested (and thus likely to share some honest info and opinions) than those catching a video on your homepage. Alter your messaging accordingly!
Some Final Tips
Now that you know about the joys of in-video lead capture, let's review some final tips to make the most of your tactics.
1. Don't ask for too much too early.
Make sure to consider the sales funnel when optimizing your contact forms. If you know video is your main acquisition tool (meaning, the first piece of your brand consumers see before becoming fans), know that they might not be so willing to share lots of information with you upfront.
Customize your asks as they relate to steps in the funnel: users who are brand loyalists are a lot quicker to give up info than those who've just spotted you via a sponsored ad.
2. Remember to nurture your leads.
Leads are great, but if you don't engage them, they're pretty much useless. When capturing leads via contact forms, sync them to your email service provider to make it easy to nurture them. (Just so you know: Vimeo users can automatically sync their leads directly into their HubSpot account, making it simpler than ever to connect with your prospective customers.)
Then, keep them engaged! Develop follow-up email campaigns around specific prominent demographics and use your gleaned data to make them even more engaging. Even better, further increase your click-through by embedding GIFs of your videos in your follow-up email campaigns to stand out and get noticed by leads.
3. Always keep SEO in-mind.
Your ability to generate leads in your video doesn't mean a whole lot if no one watches your content. SEO can be a massively helpful organic discovery tool to send users to your business. Take the extra time to optimize your website, landing page, and video itself for maximum discoverability.
