Discover how to reach the right audience in a crowded market. This guide will show you how SaaS marketing is different — and which strategies produce real results.
SaaS video marketing can help you drive traffic, boost audience engagement, build relationships with prospects, increase your content marketing ROI, accelerate the sales cycle, and improve customer loyalty.
Wondering how to reach the right audience in a crowded market? We created this guide based on our industry experience guiding SaaS clients like you to success.
Video marketing is all the rage among SaaS marketers and for excellent reasons:
However, as most (if not all!) SaaS companies are using video in their marketing mix, it's becoming increasingly challenging to capture your audience's attention and drive conversion.
What can you do to cut through the clutter?
The best SaaS marketers leverage a variety of video formats, depending on the audience and objectives. Here are the five most effective ways to use video marketing for SaaS companies:
The best way to demonstrate how your software can help your prospects is to let them see it in action. In fact, 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
Demo/explainer videos allow you to make abstract concepts tangible in a more straightforward way than text alone. They can showcase key features in just a few minutes, so your audience doesn't have to read through paragraphs of text (they won't!)
Your demo videos should be succinct and engaging since videos under 2 minutes get the most engagement. They should speak to your audience's challenges and highlight critical benefits that are most appealing to your target market.
You can create multiple demo videos, each focusing on one or a cluster of related features, so viewers can choose to watch the most relevant content. These videos can also be embedded in your product pages to augment the purchasing experience.
Social proof boosts conversion rates by demonstrating how your solution has helped real-world customers achieve results. Meanwhile, the visual component augments the power of storytelling to help deliver an engaging experience.
To create compelling videos for case studies and testimonials, you should tell a compelling story (e.g., "before" and "after"), keep the videos short, highlight results with specific metrics, add text or graphics to emphasize key points, and edit the footage to create a focused piece that keeps the audience engaged.
People like to hear stories from users "just like them," so choose case studies that are most likely to resonate with a specific audience and highlight pain points that will resonate with the intended viewers.
Research shows that social videos get 12 times more shares than text and images and video posts on social media get 48% more views. As more B2B decision-makers are using social media research products and get peer recommendations, social videos should be part of your content marketing strategy.
In particular, LinkedIn videos are highly popular among B2B buyers. They can help you reach a larger audience, deliver targeted messages, generate more leads, educate prospects about your products, and grow your revenues.
Use social videos to spark conversations so you can increase engagement and reach of your posts. In addition, Facebook videos are a great way to communicate a large amount of information about your brand in a short amount of time and boost awareness about your solutions.
To increase the effectiveness of your social videos, post native videos to your newsfeed (i.e., upload the videos directly onto the platform instead of embedding a link.) Use the appropriate hashtags to increase visibility, grab viewers' attention within the first few seconds, optimize the videos for mobile (e.g., by using a square format,) and get the point through without the sound on.
Outstanding support is the key to customer retention and, therefore, improving profitability. You can post how-to videos on a searchable knowledge base to enhance customer self-service so users can get the information they need when they need it to improve the user experience and minimize frustration.
Also, your customer service team can quickly share the video links with users to answer their questions, facilitate troubleshooting, and streamline the support experience to improve customer satisfaction while lowering costs.
In addition, you can create exclusive, high-value video content for your subscribers to add value and increase customer retention. For example, by sharing industry best practices and how to use your products to execute the strategies successfully.
B2B customers appreciate content that can help them advance their careers and do their jobs more efficiently. By sharing educational content and relevant knowledge, e.g., through expert interviews or analyses of industry trends or news, you can build credibility and establish an authority status to cultivate trust and stay top of mind.
Webinars or live streams (e.g., LinkedIn Live) are great formats for such long-form content. Use videos for event promotion and recap to drive traffic back to relevant landing pages for lead generation. You can also turn the event recordings into evergreen video content to optimize your investment.
Whenever appropriate, show how viewers can use your products to implement what they have learned in the video effectively and include a call-to-action to progress them along the buyer's journey.
Adding videos to your B2B content marketing mix is crucial to boosting engagement, increasing conversions, and improving SEO. Not to mention, videos can increase email open and click-through rates to boost the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy.
Ready to use video marketing to grow your SaaS business? Schedule a time to chat with us and see how we can help you implement various video formats to grow your business.
