[Update] 5 reasons to add video to your marketing and sales activity

Does your sales team use video as a tool? What about your marketing department? If your answer is no, or: ‘only intermittently,’ you could dramatically increase customer and prospect, winning more business with regular video use.

For years, face-to-face sales have been on the decline. Then came COVID-19 and hastened that decline.

Yet the old-fashioned ideal of face-to-face is still the gold standard in sales. There’s an intuitive appeal to the principle of doing business in such a way that a customer is able to look a supplier in the eye as a deal is struck.

Closing a deal in this way taps into deep communicative processes that go beyond language. When money changes hands and a customer ‘buys in’ to whatever it is your company is offering, trust plays a vital role.

The challenge: replicating human sales in a digital world

Behavioural cues have, for millennia, helped humans ‘read’ one another and build trust. It’s why the best salespeople are charismatic with an inbuilt ability to tune into their customers, creating a rapport by ensuring others feel understood and prioritised. When a salesperson is good at this, it doesn’t feel like manipulation, it feels real.

At ESM Inbound, we use video for a range of functions but for us - to keep Everybody Smiling More - it's most importantly about delivering a personal, quality, value-add experience for prospects and clients.

Our Chief Executive, John Kelleher, has recognised the power of video for a long time, encouraging the wider team to give it a go until it became a core part of our client care. Thank you messages, welcome messages, step-by-step walk throughs and detailed explainers are just some of the ways we use video in our sales and marketing processes at ESM Inbound. 

We know that, with demanding targets, larger sales territories and restrictions on movement for most businesses, face-to-face sales are no longer a viable option. Technology stepped in for us, so maybe it's time it did for you, too?

This has created the potential danger of a more impersonal sales experience. Even if your sales team’s people skills do translate across email, customers can easily choose to disengage or may get distracted, however relevant your rep’s communication may be. Opening and properly digesting a sales email with links or attachments, even a helpful one, is a big ask at a time when customers have a lot on their plates.

Here’s why video is such a game-changer in sales:

#1. It’s the next best thing to IRL

When you can’t meet in person, personalised video is the next best thing. Video can provide a personal, holistic and engaging connection quicker than other mediums.

Our Director of Marketing, Anna Kaine, uses Vidyard to create a friendly introduction to her client videos, ahead of minimising the video to the bottom corner and sharing her screen to walk clients through a new proposal or a piece of work:

The whole concept of inbound marketing is based on trust and creating long-term relationships, and by using video, you can add a more human element to your sales and marketing activities. Putting faces to names can make you more relatable, authentic and trustworthy in the eyes of your prospects and customers, and will enable them to feel a deeper connection with you.

#2. Video mailers are more likely to be opened than text ones

Every day, the average office worker receives 120 emails. We all have inboxes groaning under the weight of too many marketing mailers. Research by Mailchimp, drawing on data taken from hundreds of millions of marketing emails across a range of sectors, revealed that the average open-rate of marketing emails hovers around the 20% mark. For some businesses, the open rate was far lower.

Adding video, on the other hand, means your mailer is more likely to get read. Specifically, it improves the open rate by 6%. Why is this? Customers know videos are likely to be short, to the point, and more entertaining than plain text, and with a video there’s a feeling of immediacy that is more engaging than reading alone. Video communications also earns 3x more responses than non-video. In other words, the extra effort, pays off. 

Our Business Development Representative, Bobby Chahal, also uses Vidyard to create individual, engaging and personalised sales videos to send out to each of his prospects, to help him stand out in their inboxes:

#3. Video is a great medium for educating customers

Explaining something complex is much easier over video. A report from WYZOwl shows that 94% of marketers say using video content has helped increase their users understanding of a product or service.

Our Director of CRM, Jemma Legg, is the Share-Screen Queen! When she's exploring a client's HubSpot portal with them, she shares screen, clicks record and sends video walk throughs of exactly what she's talking about so clients can watch back later at their own speed - you can't get much more personal than that:

Video enables you to show, rather than tell. Research shows that particularly when it comes to teaching practical, procedural techniques, video outperforms text-based learning.

Customers can replay your video until they’ve embedded the knowledge they need, whereas they may not feel so comfortable asking a salesperson to explain something multiple times. And because your customers are likely to ask similar questions, over time, you can build up a bank of video content that you can re-purpose.

#4. Video is a huge time-saver

Not only will video speed things up by improving response rates and reducing your sales team’s time on calls, it could also significantly shorten the sales cycle of your business, enabling you to do away with any overly time-consuming processes.

In a HubSpot blog post, one customer shares an example of using a 70-second video to achieve what it would have taken almost 4 hours to achieve with a more traditional prospecting approach.

At ESM Inbound, we use video to save time with our colleagues all the time - why tell when you can easily show instead? Our Senior Strategist, James Mulvaney, often improves internal processes with quick training videos for team members, rather than getting them on yet another Zoom call:

#5. Video is more memorable

Because video is a visual medium, the brain processes it significantly faster than it does text. Customers are also more likely to retain information they have absorbed over video than by reading. Video has the power to captivate in a way that the written word rarely does.

It’s also a more passive medium: it requires less effort on the part of the customer than reading does. And because it forces marketers to condense essential information into soundbites, it’s a great way to force your salespeople to cut their patter and focus on the essentials of what the customer really wants to understand.

It’s no surprise that HubSpot stats show 80% of video marketers have noticed video has directly increased sales. If you’re looking for a way to personalise your sales process whilst saving time, talk to us today and find out how we can help you with your video marketing.