Where Should I Use Video in My Sales Funnel?

You don’t need to completely re-make your entire funnel to incorporate video. Video is more often about supporting your existing sales funnel and already established sales efforts. It’s about making what you’re ALREADY doing more effective.

Because that’s the thing about video: it makes every stage of your sales funnel MORE effective.

Welcome to our guide on strategically integrating animated videos into your sales funnel. In this detailed exploration, we'll empower you to make informed decisions about where and how to leverage animated storytelling to maximize ROI, increase sales, and improve the client experience.

Pre-Sales/Marketing

• Issue: Low Website Engagement and High Bounce Rates

• Use Video for: Homepage or Landing Page Introduction
  

Your website is your only 24/7 salesperson. If you're spending money on driving traffic, make sure it's working for you. Prospects won’t sift through text. Use video to immediately convey what you do, how you do it, and why it matters.

• Explanation: This video should concisely introduce your product or service, highlighting what you do, how it benefits your audience, and why they should choose you over competitors. Place this video prominently on your homepage to captivate visitors immediately.

• Boosted ROI: Compelling homepage videos significantly increase conversion rates (up to 65%), translating visitors into leads and maximizing the return on your website traffic investment.

• Issue: Email Campaigns Not Generating Enough Responses

• Use Video for: Email Content, Especially for Initial Outreach

Especially for companies without brand saturation, using video in email introductions is key to establish credibility and industry authority, capture attention, and provide a compelling reason to engage further.

• Explanation: Videos should be short, engaging, and communicate key messages. Highlight key product features, customer testimonials/case studies, or valuable benefits to drive immediate action.

• Boosted ROI: Higher open, click-through, and response rates lead to increased lead conversions and sales opportunities. Emails with video are 8x more likely to receive a response.

Sales

• Issue: Prospects Struggling to Understand Product/Service Value

• Use Video for: Product or Service Demonstrations

Create a product demo that speaks directly to your ICP's challenges. Make it relevant, relatable, clear, and impossible to ignore.

• Explanation: Use video for visual value propositions that clearly articulate unique benefits and address common pain points in an engaging format. Highlight product usage scenarios that demonstrate real-world applications relevant to their needs and loss from not taking action.

• Boosted ROI: Prompt prospects to make informed decisions quickly, reduce lead nurturing time and improve conversion rates. Less time spent on unqualified prospects.

• Issue: Decision Makers Need Convincing

• Use Video for: Supporting Sales Presentations or Proposals

Ever had a prospect who seemed sold but struggled to convince the higher-ups? Animated videos can be your silent sales rep, making your case when you're not there. You can't expect your prospect to sell for you, but you can provide the tools they need with animated videos that convey your value proposition, address objections, and differentiate you from competitors.

• Explanation: If your prospect loves your product but a decision maker needs convincing, provide the prospect with animated videos that articulate your value proposition clearly and persuasively.

• Boosted ROI: By equipping prospects with persuasive video content, you empower them to advocate for your product or service within their organizations, increasing closing rates.

Employee Training

• Issue: Inconsistent or Ineffective Onboarding Process

• Use Video for: Employee Training Modules

New software? Complex protocols? Animated training videos save time and cut costs. Empower employees with visual learning tools that they can revisit anytime, anywhere.

• Explanation: Use video for training modules covering onboarding processes, product knowledge, or company policies. Animated training videos deliver consistent messaging, streamline onboarding, and improve knowledge retention. Material can be re-visited as needed.

• Boosted ROI: Reduced training and HR costs, faster employee proficiency, and improved productivity and employee retention. Consistency in regulatory compliance. Animated videos can be easily updated as needed.

Customer Service

• Issue: High Support Costs and Unsatisfied Customers

• Use Video for: Self-Service Troubleshooting and FAQs

Animated videos in customer service significantly impact repeat purchases and referrals. Exceptional post-sale service turns customers into loyal advocates.

• Explanation:  Anticipate common questions and issues. Address queries related to product features, compatibility, warranty, and common troubleshooting steps. Animated walkthroughs provide clear, simple instructions that empower customers to resolve issues independently.

• Boosted ROI: Visual guides reduce support inquiries, lower operational costs, and improve customer satisfaction, resulting in increased customer retention and lifetime value.

Overall Impact on ROI

• Repurposability: Animated videos can be repurposed across various touchpoints, maximizing content ROI.

Don't limit your videos to a single stage. Repurpose company overview videos for email marketing or product overview videos for trade shows. Maximize the impact of your content across multiple touchpoints.

• Engagement Advantage: Videos captivate better than text, leading to increased brand authority and accelerated purchase decisions.

Prospects are more likely to watch videos than read text. Leverage this preference to provide customers with the information they need to make a purchase decision. Informed prospects lead to more sales, shorter cycles, and less time spent nurturing unqualified leads.

• Long-Term Value: Strategic investment in animated videos enhances brand perception and customer engagement, driving overall ROI.

Videos are a tangible asset. And because animation is easily updated as your company grows and changes, any video you make today will continue to serve you for years to come.

Visual Learning Impact:

• 65% of the Population are Visual Learners

• Animated videos effectively communicate complex concepts, making information more accessible and memorable for visual learners.

Action Step:

Evaluate your current sales funnel and identify key touchpoints where animated videos can enhance communication and drive conversions. Implement animated video strategies today to transform your sales funnel into a powerhouse of engagement and conversion.

Use this guide as your roadmap to identify where videos can make the most impact. Animated videos strategically integrated into your sales funnel address common business challenges and directly contribute to increasing ROI by improving engagement, accelerating sales cycles, reducing costs, and enhancing overall customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Each video represents an investment in revenue growth and optimizing customer interactions throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Need To Explain a Complicated Product? How Animation Can Help

Some ideas are communicated so much better via animation. Some concepts can only be explained effectively via visuals.

And when you consider that 65% of the population are visual learners, you need to seriously consider if concepts and ideas about your business, service, or product, are better communicated visually.

Let's take a look at an example from a video MOGRAPHWORKS created in partnership with Kansas University's Center for Research on Learning.

We created a series of videos for KUCRL's Learning Strategies that teach students how to write. These Learning Strategies have incredible student success rates-- which honestly, makes sense. What makes KUCRL and their learning strategies so special is that they first research how students learn and absorb information best, and only then create their strategies based on those studies-- not the other way around, like most learning programs on the market do. That's why their product is so unique, so effective, and has such positive outcomes for students.

We wanted to use the video to not only highlight KUCRL's product but also use the video medium itself to show how KUCRL makes learning easy.

Video is a great opportunity to not just tell viewers how your product is effective but also show them.

We wanted to highlight a large component of KUCRL's Sentence Writing Strategy: teaching students to fluently write and compose a wide variety of sentences, improving their writing ability, and making it easier to express their thoughts and ideas.

To do this, we needed to illustrate the main different types of sentences: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.

And we wanted to do it in the way that only animated video could.

Here is the line from the script:

"Students learn to identify the requirements of simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences."

It would've been easy for us to just list the types of sentences on screen and call it a day. But we don't do that at MOGRAPHWORKS.

When I spoke to our key contact point for this video project, I asked a question I often ask during production: "Will the audience for this video understand what we're talking about?"

According to her experience in coaching and development sessions with teachers, many weren't able to easily explain the difference between these sentence types. So we thought it would be a great opportunity to use visuals and animation to clearly illustrate the distinctions.

After all, if we're telling the audience that this teaching program works, what's a better way to prove that it works than by teaching something in the video?

Here's a text explanation of the differences between these sentences, so you can understand why it's hard to explain verbally, and how much better it is to have a visual example.

• Simple: A simple sentence is also called an independent clause. It contains a subject and a verb and expresses a complete thought.
  

• Compound: A compound sentence contains two independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet).
  

• Complex: A complex sentence combines an independent clause with one or more dependent clauses. A complex sentence always has a subordinating conjunction (after, although, because, since, when) or a relative pronoun (that, which, who).
  

• Compound-complex: A compound-complex sentence has two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.

This text is very clear... if you understand these sentence types already. If you're first learning them, it's really confusing!

This is the visual we came up with to visualize the sentence types instead:

The way we thought to best explain these sentence types was to illustrate them as "colored building blocks" where yellow represented an independent clause, and blue represented a dependent clause. Depending on which blocks you used, you built a different type of sentence.

But because those words (independent and dependent) can be confusing, we omitted them completely, and let the visual communicate that yellow was a complete sentence, and blue was an incomplete fragment of a sentence.

Like so:

Simple sentence: yellow

Compound sentence: yellow + yellow

Complex sentence: yellow + blue

Compound-complex: yellow + yellow + blue

And with the use of these colors and visuals, the concept suddenly became very simple to understand.

Is there something about your product or business that can be better communicated with animated visuals?

I'm sure there is!

Examples: how your product helps clients, differences in product line, product/service use cases, benefits to clients, breakdown of customer onboarding process, product troubleshooting, how to use new software, employee training, service process, highlighting special promotions, benefits to specific industries.

Imagine the impact it would have on your sales goals and bottom line if you knew prospects, clients, and employees were absorbing this important information.

Have questions about a video project? Click here to contact MOGRAPHWORKS today.

How to Create a Perfect Pitch

Do you have a perfect 60-second pitch?

I've done a lot of networking at expos and trade shows, where the most common question is: "So, what do you do?"

What do you say?

We've all experienced a few bad pitches:

• The blabbermouth that didn't realize he'd be asked this question dozens of times and fumbles over his words before going on for 10 minutes about details that don't really matter.

• The guy that recites his sales script that's irrelevant to you and filled with industry jargon.

• The person that's completely unclear, and when they walk away, you ask "Did you guys understand anything that person was saying?"

(Here's a secret: people won't usually ask for clarity if they don't understand something. They'll just politely smile and nod, and move on.)

So you better have the pitch nailed down.

But it's hard to succinctly summarize EVERYTHING your product or service does for your clients in 1-2 minutes.

When it comes to my turn, I say this:

"You know how you just gave me your 1-minute pitch? We make a video for your product or service that's the perfect pitch-- 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲. 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞. 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞."

Because that's what an animated B2B video is.

When we make any type of animated explainer video, whether it's an "overview video," "company introduction video," or "product video," what we're really making is a perfect pitch.

Ideally, a perfect pitch is a 1-2 minute summary of the most compelling aspects of your business, product, or service. After listening, your prospect should completely understand what you have to offer and why they should work with you.

That's why video is an incredible medium for your "perfect pitch." It's the perfect pitch, delivered flawlessly, every. single. time.

And when it's done right, a perfect pitch video doesn't just spark interest-- it drives action.

So, what are the ingredients to a perfect pitch video?

After watching, your prospect should know:

1. What you do

2. How you do it

3. How you can help them

4. Why they should work with you over a competitor

5. and why they should do it NOW

PLUS, it should be clear, concise, professional, and properly branded.

All in a 1–2-minute package that's entertaining, engaging, and highly watchable.

It's not a coincidence that these are also the ingredients for high conversion rates.

It shouldn't be surprising: when you make it easy for your prospects to understand what you do and how you help them, your conversion rates go up.

Because of this perfect pitch -> high conversion rate combo, animated explainer videos are hyper-effective for:

• landing pages

• home pages

• email campaigns

• cold outreach

• trade shows or expos

• pitch meetings

• social media

• ad campaigns

You're killing 10 birds with one stone.

And when you consider that your website is your only 24/7 salesperson, and you're paying money to bring people to it, you better make sure it's armed with the perfect pitch-- in highly persuasive and watchable video form.

Contact MOGRAPHWORKS to get started on your perfect pitch!