1. Define your objective
Your ‘gains’ objective will be a result of your business and content goals e.g. revenue from sales, using personalised videos for prospective customers. Depending on whether you’re in B2B or B2C, your ‘gain’ metric may be leads or sales; but either way, outlining your video objective will inform the content you create, as well as how to measure its success.
It also helps to think about your prospect’s sales funnel stage in their buying journey. For example, if your video is for cold outreach, you’ll want to hook attention quickly, and ensure you introduce yourself, your company and product, and how it can help your prospect. Here, additional video metrics like percentage watched can be useful to see where people drop off, so you can adjust your script accordingly for better ROI.
2. Define your target audience
Knowing who you need to communicate with is key to creating effective video content. No matter how much time and effort you put into a video, if it’s not hitting home with your viewer/s as relevant, helpful information, you’ll never see results. So think about who’ll be viewing your video, and what they’ll want to get out of it.
Pro tip: if your audience is senior management short on time, keep your video as short as you possibly can, without sacrificing context.
3. Plan for distribution (and promotion)
Following on from #2 above, once you’ve created your video content, don’t just ‘spray and pray’. Get strategic and ensure you know where your audience lives online, so you can prioritise those channels when publishing your video. If possible, think about key words or phrases that’ll help flag your content is for them; short and sweet is good general advice for posts.
From a promotion standpoint, the sad fact these days is organic promotion on social media e.g. you posting on LinkedIn, may not get the volume of attention you need — so you may want to boost your content with a little paid promotion (in which case, it may be time to chat with marketing).
4. Use calls-to-action (CTAs)
If you’re sending a video to a prospect or lead, they need to come away knowing what to do after watching your video, as guided by you; this is your call to action. For the top of the sales funnel, this will likely be simply getting in touch, whereas at the middle of the funnel, you may be asking for a follow-up meeting to walk through in-depth questions (or obstacles), and for the bottom, it’ll be about making the sale.
For your audience to follow this direction, make sure you outline next steps at the end of your video, as well as how they can get in touch with you — making it both clear and easy for your viewer/s to take action.
5. Measure your results
Having defined your objective and how to measure it via ‘gains’ when calculating ROI, you can not only determine ROI for your video/s, but also get insight into performance by measuring your videos. This analytics data can be invaluable in terms of simple KPIs like reach, views, audience engagement and conversion rates.
If you really want to dig into the numbers, watch our YouTube video guide on ‘How to read your video analytics’.
6. Repurpose your video content
Lastly, the biggest tip we can give you is: save yourself time and effort by recycling your videos. Let’s look again at the example of personalised videos for prospects from earlier. Don’t have time to record bespoke videos for every single lead? That’s okay — think about where you can repurpose content for productivity e.g. filming one cold outreach video, and simply changing the overlay text for each prospect’s name; this is a simple, scalable way to leverage video for sales, while making the time invested work for you. If you’re making videos for specific industries, you could try slicing short segments to share on social media, or even share a high-performing video you’ve made with marketing so they can write an accompanying blog.
When it comes to getting return on investment for sales videos, the possibilities are endless. Got a great example video you’d love to share with us? Tag us on LinkedIn to loop us in — we’d love to know how you’re going about creating content!
