How to Use Explainer Videos as Part of Your Sales Strategy

Barring the occasional exception (involving someone who knows exactly what they want and just can’t wait to place an order), making an online sales strategy takes work.

You need to convince the prospective customer to part with their money, and they might have various reservations (or even objections) that are holding them back.

Now, how do you manage it?

You can polish the persuasive powers of your product copy, of course — that can certainly help push the reader towards converting. You can improve the clarity of your page layout. You can even throw in some appealing imagery to catch the eye and clarify some elements.

But if you really want to make an impact, you should try using explainer videos.

Explainer Videos and the Sales Funnel

Explainer videos – they’re the modern version of a how-to manual and a staple method of communication and instruction.

Instead of throwing videos around the net at random intervals, treat your video launches as you would any other part of your marketing campaigns; in a methodical, logical, and organized fashion.

Let’s take a look at what stages of the sales funnel you should launch different types of explainer videos.

What is The Sales Funnel?

If you’re involved in marketing, either for your own business or someone else’s, chances are you’ve heard of the sales funnel.

In short, the sales funnel consists of different stages of your buyer’s journey.

Your job is to guide your potential customers through the sales funnel and out the other side.

The sales funnel can be represented in different ways and with different amounts of stages. For our purposes, we are using a 6-stage funnel, which are:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration
• Intent
• Evaluation
• Purchase

It’s worth noting here that not everyone who enters the sales funnel makes it to the bitter end.

Expect around a 50% drop-off at each stage. Every stage of the sales funnel has its own purpose and your marketing techniques should alter for each stage, including what videos to launch.

Stage #1—Awareness and Interest

Awareness and interest are the first two stages.

They consist of people who are being introduced to your brand or product for the first time.

These types of explainer videos are intended to draw in a new audience and as such you need to concentrate on those who don’t already know about what you have to offer.

Your sales videos at this point should consist of broader information to bridge the gap between awareness and interest.

Highlight the benefits of using your product or services and how they can help your audience get past a particular pain point or problem.

You are effectively offering a solution.

Call-to-actions in these first two stages need to steer your audience towards the next stages of the sales funnel. Use phrases like “watch [next video] to learn more”, or “click here to see how it works”.

When to launch: Launch these types of videos when you are working on building brand awareness or are launching a new product or service.

Where to launch: These videos should be launched as video ads for the likes of Google and social media channels.

Stage #2—Consideration and Intent

The middle two stages are for those already passed through the awareness and interest phases.

Those people are already interested and considering purchasing, before moving through to intent.

You need to include videos that are specific to their information.

Videos showing how to use your product (product demo) will be useful here. Your video needs to showcase everything great about a specific product in a specific way.

Call-to-actions in these videos should be encouraging your audience to take an action such as ordering a free sample, downloading a free e-book, or signing up for a free trial or newsletter.

When to launch: When you’ve built up a following.

Where to launch: Place these videos on your social media channels in front of your followers and on your blog posts. Additionally, create video ads to retarget those who have already shown an interest in your brand.

Stage #3—Evaluation and Purchase

The last two stages are where the magic happens. These are where your focus should be on selling.

After passing through the first four stages, you should already have contact information like an email address.

Use the opportunity to email the explainer videos in the form of FAQs and testimonials to relieve any last-minute doubts your audience may have before purchasing.

You can also invite them to ask any questions they might have.

Call-to-actions at this point should be to make the all-important purchase, such as “Click here to purchase”, or “Here’s where you can buy one for yourself”.

When to launch: When your audience has given you their personal information.

Where to launch: Send these videos through emails as part of your email marketing campaigns.

3 Powerful Ways to Use Explainer Videos to Boost Sales

An explainer video is essentially what it sounds like: a video that neatly and efficiently explains something, typically in an entertaining and compelling way.

If you use them for your sales strategy, they can prove highly effective and boost your conversion rates and increase sales.

Here’s how to do it:

Decide What You Can Usefully Explain

There’s no sense in creating videos for the sake of it. What’s the use in an explainer video if there’s nothing to explain?

Before you start, then, you need to think carefully about what you’d benefit from presenting to people.

A good way to start is by thinking about frequently-asked questions: what do your prospective customers tend to be confused about?

If you’re selling a product with a practical purpose, for instance, people might want to know more about how it works and how they can use it — so creating an instructional video detailing the principles and showing them how to set it up would be extremely valuable.

You should also think about the different concerns at different points in your sales pipeline.

Someone who knows very little about your company would benefit from seeing a video introducing your brand identity, while someone who’s made it all the way to your about page would probably be looking for reassurance about the quality of your company.

Explainer Videos: The QnA

Let’s look at some examples of questions you can answer with your videos:

What problem do you aim to solve?

Some businesses offer products that solve common problems, only prospects don’t always know those problems exist — which is to say that they’re not consciously aware of them. Once they’re explicitly pointed out, those people realize how irritating they are, and are driven to address them.

What makes your brand exceptional?

Of all the businesses in the world, why should someone buy from you in particular? There must be something exceptional about you, so explain it here. It could be your culture, your passion for what you do, your commitment to quality, or something else entirely.

How does your UVP work?

Your unique value proposition might involve fresh, unknown, and/or unusual technologies or methods, and explaining why they matter is vital for getting people to value them. Think about Apple’s famed machine engineering quality: the company has created numerous videos over the years to explain the incredible precision of its process and the amazing durability of its materials.

Why should people trust you to deliver?

Particularly if you’re working in the B2B realm, the core of your operational model might involve the provision of products over an extended period. Explaining why you’re so trustworthy (throwing in testimonials and case studies in the process) can be hugely productive.

What are your core business terms?

Not every sales deal is as simple as completing a one-off exchange. Sometimes there are multiple payments over time, or there are multiple parties involved for whatever reason, or there are specific privacy concerns that must be met. If you often get queries about these things, creating a video to explain your core business terms is worth doing.

What are you doing to support sustainability?

This has become an important issue across the board, even for companies that don’t work indirectly in relevant sectors such as energy. By explaining your approach to recycling, cutting energy costs, and investing in green infrastructure, you can earn some much-needed support.

How has your company changed recently?

Great companies never stop growing, and the need to avoid churn should fuel your continuing development. By occasionally making progress videos (detailing how you’ve grown and changed recently), you can prompt lapsed customers to consider your value once again.

Invest In High-Quality Production

Once you know what video types you’re looking for, you need to think about production.

What needs to go into the writing? What style would you like (e.g. talking head interview, animation, slideshow)?

You also need to think about the elements that you want to be included: should there be crisp graphics? Do you want vibrant colors or something more subdued (color really matters in retail)? And what about the intro and outro?

Now, you definitely can tackle all of these things yourself, but you’re unlikely to want — or be able — to manage the production (yes, a phone camera these days can take solid footage, but it won’t come close to reaching a professional standard).

The best thing to do is reach out to a dedicated company — get the right video package and you can have almost all of the creative process handled on your behalf by experts.

Yes, you’ll need to set aside a decent budget for a decent video… but it’s worth it.

If done well, your explainer videos can help push conversions for years to come, and they reflect your business.

If they look mediocre, they’ll make your company look mediocre too (after all, don’t you judge a business by everything it produces, including its content?).

Think about it this way. If a top prospect reached out to you and asked for some kind of presentation that would most accurately and usefully encapsulate your business, would you feel completely confident linking them to one or more of your explainer videos?

If you wouldn’t, that would be a clear indication that you hadn’t reached the necessary level of quality. Only when you have total faith in their power and legitimacy will they stand on their own.

Embed the Videos in All Suitable Locations

Let’s say you’ve picked out the topics you need explaining and had some exceptional videos made. What do you do with them?

Well, it’s simple: you embed them wherever you think they’ll be useful, whether on your site or elsewhere.

Videos explaining products should go on those product pages, linked from YouTube (to increase exposure, speed up page loading, and provide valuable analytics), but also be used in relevant marketing emails.

Videos explaining your brand, meanwhile, can be used not only on your about page but also throughout your social media profiles (since people will often find you through them).

And if you create videos explaining topics in your industry to demonstrate expertise and encourage people to trust you as a retailer, then don’t just share them in that way: send links to relevant blog sites that might be interested in reposting them.

Here are some specific suggestions for where you can deploy your videos:

Offer Broad Summaries to the Unfamiliar

When you’re aiming for initial exposure, reaching out to audiences that don’t know anything about your brand, you should focus on the core of your business: what your company does, what clients you’ve worked with, and other things of that nature.

The idea isn’t to sell anything. It’s simply to plant the seed of brand recognition so you can build on it later.

Use Demonstration Videos for Product Pages

If someone has reached your product page, there’s a solid chance they already understand its value, so you shouldn’t put too much time into that.

Instead, take the opportunity to show the product in use, helping to bridge that gap between the abstract notion of a product and the thing itself as a practical reality. If it looks easy and/or fun to use, it’ll really help sell it.

Run Content Marketing With UVP Videos

Content marketing is all about offering value and establishing expertise, hoping that the grateful recipients will eventually find their way to your website.

Because you get the chance to establish your brand through the content, you shouldn’t stick to that with your video embeds: instead, feature the unique elements that make you noteworthy.

That will give you the best chance of being remembered at the end.

Retarget Old Customers With Progress Updates

Let’s say you’re carrying out email marketing, and one of the threads of your campaign involves trying to bring back lapsed customers: people who bought from you once but then seemed to lose interest.

By looking at when they placed their last orders, you can figure out what might have changed to sour them on you and highlight relevant changes you’ve made since then — changes that might draw them back to you.

In short, if you’re really proud of the quality of your videos, you need to distribute them as broadly as possible to maximize the value they return — and remember to add details and annotation links leading to your website so that anyone embedding your video without mentioning you can still end up sending some traffic in your direction.

Confusion is rife in online shopping, with vague product descriptions and misleading navigations leading shoppers to wonder what they’re looking at.

Explainer videos are incredibly powerful for overcoming this confusion and earning conversions — so if you haven’t used them before, now is the best time to do it.

Sales Videos Example

Take a look at the sales video example for Aktive Apparel. You can also watch the other samples on our Sales and Marketing playlist.

Does a Homepage Explainer Video Boosts Sales?

The answer: Yes. It can.

It’s a great idea to add videos to your website’s homepage, and this can be done quite easily with many website builders.

Adding an explainer video to your homepage encourage people to stay on your site longer, thus reducing your bounce rate and increasing your SEO.

However, as it’s a static page, you wouldn’t necessarily have a video “launch” as such, and you can’t assume where in the sales funnel every visitor will be.

So what type of explainer video is appropriate to add to your homepage?

Your homepage video should be a broad one, explaining in simple terms what you have to offer. Make it an overview of your company, services, or your product range, while briefly highlighting the benefits of it/them.

It’s a similar concept to marketing to those in the first two stages of the sales funnel, but a bit broader.

For example, if you’re offering website hosting services, you can explain how your visitors can benefit from your services and sign up in 3/4 easy steps. Also, make sure to include a call-to-action at the end.

Pro Tip: Focus on Guiding Your Visitors

When your audience enters the sales funnel, you are guiding them on a customer journey.

Don’t assume that each person who sees your product is going to jump from one step to another seamlessly.

Your call-to-actions are important so you can guide your audience through each stage.

One possible journey could go as follows:

• You launch a video ad highlighting the benefits of your company and/or product. You invite your audience to learn more about it.
• Through your call-to-action, you guide your audience to a video that shows them specifically how to use a product. You then invite them to sign up for a free e-book, trial, or newsletter for further learning. This builds trust and enables you to gain their email address.
• Send your audience an email containing a video that will answer any questions they may still have about your product or service. Include testimonials from existing customers to reinforce your claims. You can now encourage viewers to make a purchase.

Lastly, ensure your ordering and check-out process is smooth and easy to minimize shopping cart abandonment!

At Breadnbeyond, we offer a wide range of animated explainer video packages that are tailored for companies looking for affordable yet high-quality explainer videos. Click on the banner below!