Six Ways to Use Video for Your Marketing Campaigns

We all learned in the late ‘70s that "Video Killed the Radio Star," but it would take several more decades before brands were able to consistently leverage the use of video in their marketing strategies. Now well into the 21st century, video is creating marketing rockstars!

We all know that using video is now an absolute necessity, and thankfully it’s more accessible and cost-effective than ever before. You likely have a high-quality camera with you right now—your cell phone!

Video marketing works so well because video allows you to connect and engage with your audience on a more human level. People trust video, are drawn in by more visual mediums, and find it easy to consume (who doesn’t love a binge-worthy experience?! 😍). 

An integrated video strategy will help you meet your marketing goals, and reach business objectives. It’s not just a brand-play anymore. Video helps drive traffic, boost engagement, and increase conversion rates! 

There are so many ways that you can use video within your marketing and sales campaigns, but today I’ll give you a rundown on our most innovative so you can get inspired when building your next content experience! 

Product Explainer Videos: Explain it to me like I’m...

Using video to explain your product or service to your audience might at first glance seem like Marketing 101, but explainer videos are critical to reaching more people and literally explaining to people what your company is made of.

Our team wanted to put an innovative spin on our own explainer videos, and because the power of our product is complex we knew that video would be the best medium to use to explain it. At Uberflip we love taking risks and we love analogies even more. So with that in mind we put on our creative pants, and partnered with an awesome agency, to make our explain videos entertaining. 

The result of our effort is four different videos. One explaining Uberflip overall, and three subsequent videos explaining Uberflip’s three key capabilities. These videos are done in the style of popular internet phenomenon “Explain Like I’m Five.” In each we explain our product in a different way like a parent packing lunches, or like a contestant on a reality dating show!

By using video as a strategic tool, explaining your product or services to your audience will never be easier or more entertaining. 

Event Recap Videos: Rethink Your Content Experience

Event marketing is a big part of the B2B marketing puzzle. Events can drive lead generation, opportunity creation, and customer engagement, so it’s easy to see why they’re so crucial to your strategy. 

A lot of work should go into your event-marketing strategy, and it will be your most expensive line item on your marketing budget. We have a whole post on Six Ways to Use Content Experience for Event Marketing that will help you plan your next event, but it’s important that you don’t forget about your post-event strategy too!

Video can be leveraged for multiple parts of a marketing event, and we use it all the time to make the most of the events we host and attend! If you don’t know (now you know), we host a huge content experience conference annually called Conex. For Conex 2018 the content team here repurposed footage of our speaker presentations and created 90-second videos for a series called Rethink Your Content Experiences that we shared on our brand channels, and used as thought leadership content in our content hub. 

The Rethink Your Content Experience video series was so successful it even won a 2019 Killer Content Award for Bundled Content. Videos make for great follow-up, as they’re super accessible, easy to consume, and allow you to extract more value out of the content you’re producing, while sharing even more content with your entire audience. 

Educational Videos: Transforming Businesses with the Academy

Your video strategy should span across the entire buyer journey and customer lifecycle! Customer experience is incredibly important, and you should be already creating high-quality content for customer education or your knowledge base. Happy, well-informed customers lead to higher overall satisfaction, success, and retention!  

Offering-up a self-service customer support portal is by no means a new concept, but with the addition of short-form, engaging videos to complement knowledge base articles you can completely transform the experience your customers have. By using videos within your knowledge base you’ll be meeting the expectations of today’s customers, whose preferred medium is now video content. People want to watch and listen, rather than sit and read, so now’s your chance to show and tell!

We recently launched the Uberflip Academy, our new customer educational center, where customers can find everything they need for onboarding onto our platform, get news on product updates, find customer stories, and even read inspirational experience articles like this one you’re reading right now. Along with platform training-specific articles, we also filmed short videos that customers can follow along with to make their onboarding experience as seamlessly self-serviced as possible. These videos humanize the onboarding process, by introducing customers to actual members of the Uberflip team, who explain to them in detail everything they need to know to get started on our platform. 

Using video strategy within your educational content will guarantee your customer base feels empowered to get the most out of your product or service. That’s a win-win!

Promotional Videos: Content Recommended by a CMO

Have you met Randy Frisch, Uberflip’s Co-Founder and CMO? Even if you’ve never met him IRL or seen him speak at Conex, you’ve more than certainly seen his amazing videos on Linkedin. That’s because Randy, and our incredible content team at Uberflip, recognize that social media and social platforms are basically dominated by video. 

According to a report by Hubspot, four of the top six channels on which global consumers watch video are social channels. Social content = video content. Distributing your personalized content across platforms is a vital component of a great content experience, and integrating video with your social strategy is the best way to promote all the content you worked so hard to produce. People prefer to engage with video as it’s an easy way for them to quickly digest new information, and social video helps to create an authentic and personalized experience around your content. 

We’re not just talking about taking the videos you’ve made for your content hub then re-uploading them for social distribution. Take a look at Randy’s Linkedin update feed and you’ll see timely social-first video content created specifically in response to new content, trends, or updates, meant to spark a conversation, increase engagement, and promote content that links back to our content hub. 

This short-form thought-leadership social video content is a great way to be strategic in your promotional efforts, and all it takes is an iPhone and five minutes to create! 

Sales Videos: Customer-Centric Selling Starts with Video

Video isn’t just great for driving inbound traffic. You can leverage video throughout the sales process for a personalized experience that’s sure to surprise and delight prospects! Your sales teams are most likely using video conferencing tools like Zoom to meet virtually with their accounts, but take it one step further by adopting one-to-one videos in your sales strategy.

Video is a great way to connect with the prospects your team is talking to, because it humanizes the entire sales process, creating a more authentic experience that will stand out amongst the flooded inboxes of prospects everywhere. Sales reps can easily shoot video on their laptops or with their cellphones to introduce themselves to new accounts, or even dive deep on more complex topics, and show exactly how they can help prospects solve their problems during the discovery stage. 

At Uberflip our sales team loves using video in their day-to-day communications to provide more value. Our sales reps take the videos that they create and upload them to the hub, and then create private sales streams filled with relevant topical content including the video they just created to feed the conversation at all stages of the buyer journey. Using the Uberflip Extension for Gmail or Outlook they can then send this personalized stream to their prospects directly within an email message. 

Sales teams that use video to fuel the conversations they’re having with prospects are empowered to succeed. One-on-one content experiences that include video are a personal touch that can help drive conversion! 

Thought Leadership Videos: Unlocking a Wealth of Knowledge

Do you want to increase your visibility and build your company’s reputation as a thought leader? Well, look no further than your video strategy! As I’ve highlighted so far, video content is the best way for your team to connect with audiences across the buyer journey and customer lifecycle. So if you’re looking to put your expertise in the spotlight, video will be your main tool to do so. 

Video enables you to explain complex ideas or even answer some common questions your audience may have in a format that’s proven to boost engagement. And by using video on your website for thought leadership you can hit all your marketing team’s goals, like driving more inbound traffic and improving your conversion rates. 

Need some inspiration? We recently launched our new exclusive subscription-based content stream called Uberflip Unlock. This is a stream of all kinds of thought leadership video content that focuses on sharing the cool ways our marketing and sales teams use Uberflip and how our audience can impact the ROI of their marketing campaigns with a focus on experience. If you haven’t already, you can sign-up for it here.

We strategically decided to create video content for this thought leadership series because we wanted the experience around it to be as personalized and engaging as possible! Check it out for yourself and let us know what you think ;) 

Creating this type of thought leadership-style video content is easy to shoot with just an iPhone, or, if your budget allows for it, I highly recommend hiring a videographer and professional editor to help you out. This is extremely high-value content, so the production level should match that. Recruiting talent for these types of videos is a breeze. You already have subject matter experts on your team who are keen to share their knowledge with your company’s audience, and maybe one day turn into viral sensations!

Lights, Camera, Action!

Are you feeling inspired to take your video marketing strategy to the next level and create even better content experiences? I hope these examples of how we’re using video at Uberflip kickstart your creative juices, and have shown you why it’s important to incorporate video into your marketing strategy, and how easy it is to execute at scale.

Video is everywhere, so it’s now expected. Use video marketing to meet the expectations of your buyers and customers, and drive results for your business. 

Time to get ready for your close-up!