I’m talking about actual nurturing here, not creating leads or tipping them over the lip of the sales funnel. According to SiriusDecisions, 80% of unqualified leads today — understandably ignored by sales — will go on to buy from someone within the next 24 months. According to Jeff Cohen, a blogger for Oracle Marketing Cloud, nurturing is making sure your brand is in front of them when that happens. Cohen recently posted a five step plan for lead nurturing that struck me as comprehensive and useful. He never mentions video — so here’s an outline of the plan, with the some ideas about videos for lead nurturing filled in.
1. Understand your buyer
That’s the hard work that goes into developing personas, mapping the buyer’s journey, discovering the pain points, creating the messaging and all that. It should all be done before you make your video.
But it never really is done. Videos can help you better understand the people who watch them — good leads by definition. Just add some clickable objects to the video and capture data on what gets clicked — easy!
2. Pinpoint what motivates your buyers
This is a great opportunity to zero in on which pain points matter and which features matter most. Simply repurpose old videos with chapter headings and count which ones get clicked. Old videos in new bottles? Surely worthy of a spot in your lead nurturning plan.
3. Whiteboard the ideal user experience
The idea here is to adapt the flow of communication to the customer’s behavior and engagement with your content. Your video library covers a lot of subjects, right? Short segments of videos — but probably not 40-minute webinars — surely fit into the ideal user experience. You can make them available by editing, by including start and end points in hyperlinks, or by making them interactive with chapter headings.
4. Plan your lead nurturing process
“Determine the campaign goal, message flow, content offers, communication channels.” Many missed opportunities here — think short bursts of video. Supercharge white papers with animated graphics that bring diagrams to life. Think about how much email is read on video-friendly mobile devices.
5. Automate communications
This is about “delivering educational information.” I would add that for tech products, it’s delivering that educational information to people who don’t want be marketed to. This is another opportunity to nurture leads — and generate response data — with short bursts of repurposed old videos and simple new videos.
Data. The key to videos for lead nurturing.
It’s well established that simply including the word video in subject lines increases email effectiveness. Hopefully, your data on lead nurturing campaigns will reflect that. You’ll be able to collect a lot more customer behavior data to guide your campaigns by tracking click-throughs on the videos themselves. (Here’s more about generating video click-throughs)
