How to develop a sales video strategy

From passive viewer to active customer

Videos have the power to convey your brand's message in ways no other type of marketing or sales asset can. Simplify complex information, showcase product benefits, tell a compelling story—the flexibility of sales videos lets you drive engagement and encourage customers to purchase.

Crafting a sales video strategy that drives engagement and conversions

Step 1: Set your objective before you create your first video

The first step in developing an effective sales video strategy is setting clear, measurable objectives. What do you want your video to achieve? Are you creating sales videos to follow-up with old customers or reach new ones?

If you’re launching a new product or service, your initial focus might be increasing awareness, followed by content engagement, before you even begin to focus on sales.

Step 2: Pick video formats that work for the information you’re sharing

Different video formats serve different purposes. For example, a pitch video is different from a video highlighting the features and benefits of your product.

Animoto shared a comprehensive list of video formats in How to Create Sales Videos that Converts, but we’ve selected a few to highlight from beginner friendly to experienced video creators.

Depending on the channel you’ll be sharing your videos, optimizing video titles, descriptions and tags for keyword searches should also be considered as part of your sales video strategy.

Step 3: Revisit your audience, objectives and metrics

Once you’ve selected your ideal video format(s), evaluate your choice with your customers and objective in mind. How will your call to action (CTA) help you reach your target objective? Will the videos you plan to use in your strategy appeal to your target audience?

Personalized content significantly increases the relevance and effectiveness of your sales videos. Consider factors like customer behavior, values, pain points, etc, before finalizing your script, so you can personalize language, tone of voice and any examples you’ll share for that specific audience.

75%

of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that uses personalization strategies.

Source

Another thing to consider is how you’ll measure the success of your sales video strategy.

Success indicators that indirectly impact sales could be video views, comments or shares. Whereas more direct measures of success could be clicks, new subscribers and of course, revenue earned.

Step 4: Share your video with real customers

Sales videos are a lot like product testing—you won’t quite know what works until you start sharing what you create with real customers.

Whether it’s social media, your email newsletter or 1-1 contact with a business lead, set a date to release your first sales video and stick to it. The sooner you start collecting data on how people engage with your video, the sooner you can improve subsequent videos to maximize your impact.

The greatest barrier to sales videos isn’t creating a strategy, it’s creating the videos. But, now that you have an idea of how to be more strategic about your videos, have a look at these templates and examples from Animoto.