Companies that put the customer at the heart of their marketing strategy are more successful than those who do not. One of the biggest predictors of success is having the customer journey mapped out and having a plan to move customers through each stage.
The customer journey follows an individual’s complete interaction with your product, from awareness to loyalty. Savvy brands understand each of these stages, the characteristics of the people within each stage, and the content and campaigns needed to relay the right messages at the right time.
You’re likely familiar with the customer journey for your own organization, but as a refresher, here’s an overview:
Awareness – This is a ‘pre-sale’ stage of the buying process. In this discovery stage, people are just realizing they have a problem or a desire and that there is likely a solution out there to help. Their focus is on gathering information, research, and problem solving.
Consideration – Another “pre-sale” phase, potential customers in this stage are comparing products and looking at things like price, company credibility, features, and benefits. They have bought into the general solution to their challenge, and are looking for the right fit in terms of where to obtain it.
Purchase – In this stage, customers have made their decision and are moving ahead with the purchase. Here, you need to make it easy for your customers to buy, by providing a smooth checkout process and answering any questions that they may have about the product.
Loyalty – As you likely already know, the customer journey is not over once the sale is made. Engage with your customers and continue to give them support so they keep coming back and say good things about you.
Mapping Video to the Customer Journey
Developing content that is unique to each phase of the customer journey is essential if you want to see results.
When it comes to content, video is becoming increasingly more important. In fact, 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as their best source of marketing ROI, and marketers who use video grow revenue a whopping 49% faster than non-video users.
Video is critical for effective marketing in today’s world – but not all video is created equal. For many companies, when they think of “video”, they think of high production, brand videos. If your marketing strategy focuses only on scripted, produced, and informational videos, you’re missing out on opportunities to engage with your customers in the consideration and purchase stages of their customer journey. In 2020, brands require a mix of high production and user-generated video content to drive top, middle, and bottom of funnel results.
High production videos are great for the initial stage of information gathering. They can do a good job of sharing your brand promise, demonstrating features, and conveying your overall marketing messaging.
However, once people move past that awareness stage and into the consideration and purchase phases, they are looking for a different sort of information. In these phases, your marketing needs to focus on messaging that will push people to the next step.
To make the decision to move forward with your company, future customers will be looking for proof of your brand promise. While the videos you share at the beginning of the customer lifecycle probably do a nice job of highlighting your brand promise, before most people pull the trigger they’ll want to see proof of that brand promise in action.
Authentic experience storytelling on video (video product reviews and video Q&A) is one way to delve further into the ways in which your brand promise has been kept and builds social proof. Studies show that 83% of people trust reviews over advertising, and that testimonials can increase conversion rates on sales pages by 34%.
Without experience videos, you miss out on an opportunity to build brand trust. Additionally, you run the risk that people search off your site to answer their questions, or go elsewhere and buy a competitors’ product.
Additionally, user-generated videos can be shared on product, category, or FAQ pages, and offer SEO benefits that increase site traffic.
Here’s an example of high production and user-generated videos working in tandem. Take a look at these two videos for a Canadian Tire barbeque. In this first video, the company shares marketing information about their Napoleon series grill.
This video does a great job of highlighting key features and getting shoppers interested in the product. However, it does not really convey a genuine experience of what it is like to use the barbecue or answer any technical questions about using it.
This next video, however, shows an actual using sharing his positive experience with the grill. It is more likely to interest a customer in the “consideration” or “purchase” phase – their interest has been piqued, and now they want some social proof to determine if the product lives up the promises from the first video.
There are two different purposes being served in these videos, and both are powerful when it comes to connecting with customers within their buying journey. By having both of these types of videos, Canadian Tire has content to move customers through each stage of the customer journey.
It’s also a good idea to show visitors videos from a diverse set of customers and use cases, so that visitors can find relevant videos of people who look like them. You can also use personalization to show specific videos to certain visitors and serve up content which is most likely to make them convert.
Ready to Master the Customer Journey with User-Generated Video?
StoryTap’s video platform allows enterprise brands to produce, curate, and distribute authentic videos for their products and services, increasing customer confidence and online sales. That means that your company can quickly and easily produce trust-building videos at scale.
If your company wants to drive more sales using authentic video content, set up a demo of StoryTap today.