It’s no secret that video plays an important role in the consumers' decision making process.  For a vast majority of people, video is the first port of call when they want to learn how to do something, solve a problem or research a product they want to buy.  

Does your video marketing strategy make the most of the opportunity this consumer behavior presents?  Are you providing customers and potential customers with the video content they are looking for to help them make the decision to purchase, and importantly purchase from you.

In this article, we’re going to look at the videos that are being produced by brands & marketers, and the videos that are being consumed by customers, compare the two and perhaps see where potential opportunity sits.

The consumer path to purchase is segmented into 4 areas:
Awareness, where the customer becomes aware of the brand or solution.
Consideration, where the consumer knows what they want and are evaluating multiple options.
Conversion, the finalistion and closure of the decision making process, consumers also decide where and when to make the purchase during this stage.
Retention where a positive customer experience drives repeat purchases and brand loyalty.

The type of video content relating to each of these stages, generally speaking breaks down as:

Awareness:  Advertising and commercials, big budget content to produce and place, SEO and search driven along with explainers and promotional videos.

Consideration: Product demo’s, how-to videos, tutorials, case studies, webinar series explaining your products services and use cases and product reviews.

Conversion: About us, testimonials, brand and company stories, customer stories 

Retention: On boarding videos, video FAQ’s, Thank You message from the founder.

So…where are brands spending their money?

Brand is a key priority for marketers as you can see below, in these findings from Brightcove’s survey of top tier marketers across AU & NZ, brand awareness is the number one priority for marketers.  They doing a great job using video for this too - at the very start of the consumer journey, during the awareness stage, with big budget advertising, brand and promotional videos, and this is largely where they are spending the bulk of their budgets.

And again from the same Brightcove research - Advertising and brand promotions are the Top 2 ways video is being used by marketers. 

Brand awareness  is a critical part of a brand’s overall marketing strategy, and we’re not suggesting that should change, however, there is huge consumer appetite for video further along in the next 2 stages of the Path to Purchase: Consideration & Conversion. These are the stages of the path where consumers are actively making their purchase decision. Using video well here will help drive consumers to make the decision to buy, and to buy from you.

YourFilm recently ran research with the market research experts at Insights Exchange & Pure Profile, to understand how consumers are using video when it comes to making purchase decisions. Rather unsurprisingly, consumers, and people in general watch a lot of video - 85% of them are regularly consuming video, across a lot of platforms & devices every day. It’s having a substantial impact on their purchase decisions, with 3 out 4 people saying that video impacted their buying decisions.

At what point in the purchase pathway are consumers turning to video? As you can see from the chart below, it’s during the Consideration & Conversion stages, when consumers are researching, comparing, shortlisting and purchasing. This is where we see the largest appetite for video content. Interestingly, whilst not as much video still has an impact in the retention stage with 15-20% of people watching content post purchase.

What exactly are consumers searching for and watching? You can see in the graph below, it’s how to’s, product reviews, tutorials, explainers, product demos - all the ‘functional’ video content of the Consideration stage make up the top 5 categories, with the follow on Conversion stage video content of brand or customer stories, about us and testimonials, being the next most viewed group.

Consumers start their purchase journey, where all the big budget awareness activity is happening - and we know there’s a lot of that available as that’s where brands are spending and making an impact - spreading the net wide, creating loads of awareness. That’s working well.

As the consumer moves on from there and starts actively researching products and services they are looking for content and tools to support their purchase decisions and a big part of what they are looking for  is video.  As a side note, generally speaking video is more affordable to produce at this stage with a far more engaged viewership who are primed to purchase. Get it right, and by that we simply mean do the basics well, and you can dominate. 

 

Let’s look a bit deeper into videos in the Consideration stage (How To’s, Tutorials, Product Demos & Reviews - ‘functional’ video), at some examples.

Slack have a fantastic software tour video (product demo) used widely on their website and socials. Closer to home, here in Australia, Bunnings have an entire YouTube channel dedicated to How To’s videos - I doubt there’s a person in the country who isn’t familiar with these in one way or another.

Studies show that audiences retain 90% of a message from video versus 10% in text. This is why video product demos, webinars & even simple video FAQs can be powerful tools for ensuring people remember who you are and what you’re offering and how it helps them.

Let’s have a quick look at Conversion video examples. It’s during this stage you want to add a bit more emotion - and video is by far the easiest and fastest way to hit home with an emotional message. 

Brand & company stories; who you are, where you’ve come from, why you do what you do, your customer’s stories.  We’ve all got them, both personally and as businesses. And we all relate to them, they’re extremely powerful. They make customers and potential customers like you, support you, believe in you and buy from you.

An incredible example of this is the Apple Watch Real Stories, these are simple pice to camera videos with everyday people telling their stories, admittedly life saving ones about how their Apple watch saved their lives, they are, however, customer stories, and very powerful testimonials for their brand and product.

To sum up, if there’s one thing to take away from this article, video is a powerful tool. It’s being used really well at the start of the purchase pathway, however our customers are telling us that they are hungry for video further along in Consideration & Conversion. The sort of video we are talking about here at this point in the purchase pathway doesn’t need to be a big budget affair.  The basics done well can easily set you apart. 

If you would like to find out more about an affordable, professional video production solution to fit your video marketing strategy contact the team at YourFilm.  

YourFilm have video production packages to suit your requirements, an experienced team with a wide network of over 1,000 crew across Australia & NZ and partnerships with hosting and analytics providers such as Brightcove to help you with a complete video solution.