Identify Your Audience
There is no "typical" SaaS buyer.
SaaS products can target B2B buyers, B2C customers, extremely niche-specific users, or general-purpose users in large organizations.
Each of these users will have their own particular needs, interests, and priorities.
Before you start executing your SaaS video marketing strategy, you'll have to have a better idea of who your target user is. You'll want to determine things like:
- The specific pain points they're facing that you're solving
- The hidden needs they might not be aware
- The outcomes that are important to them
- What skill level they're at
- Their organizational or personal decision-making processes
- The communities they're part of and the influencers they follow
Four tools we've seen that are particularly effective for developing these customer personas are:
Surveys and interviews
This is the most direct approach, but also the most resource-intensive.
You'll need access to meaningful focus groups or email lists. You'll need the budget to develop, distribute, and analyze your research. You'll need to have the time to wait for the results.
But these results can be very high leverage.
By directly asking potential customers what they want and who they are, you can discover valuable information that won't show up anywhere else.
One word of caution: You can't always take these results at face value.
Just because someone says they would pay a good price for a product doesn't mean they'll actually pay for it. Don't bother asking survey respondents whether they'd pay for your SaaS offer—the responses just won't be reliable.
Instead, focus on asking about their needs, pain points, and communities to get a bigger picture idea of who they are.
Working with customer service reps and salespeople
Customer service reps and salespeople have the closest relationships with leads and existing customers.
Talking to them regularly about the conversations they're having with prospects and customers will give you insights into what really matters to users.
Even better, go one step further and implement prospecting and service data collection processes. Empower your customer success team to collect and analyze hard data about your prospects' goals, needs, pain points, motivations, and expectations.
Monitor industry trends and competitors
No matter the type of SaaS product you're selling, there'll be other competitors in your niche targeting the same buyers you are.
You can learn a lot about your buyer persona by spying on their social conversations and marketing content.
Essentially, you'll want to dig deeper to uncover:
- Your competitors' top-performing and under-performing marketing channels
- Customer engagement across these channels
- The profile of people engaging with your competitors across different channels.
Tools like Sprout Social provide rich data points about your competitor's activities and performance on social media. Another way to uncover more insights about their audience is by scanning competitors’ social media pages.
Look out for:
- Check out their list of followers to get an idea of their demographics.
- Search social media for their public posts, tweets, and responses.
- Read their visitor posts, star ratings, reviews, and testimonials.
Connect with influencers and online communities
Researching and connecting with influencers in your niche and online communities like Reddit, Quora, and Yelp can help gather information about your target audience.
You'll want to track conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry on these channels.
Research:
- The demographics, occupation, and income of your prospects.
- What they like and dislike (values, beliefs, and buying behavior)
- What they expect from brands
- The influencers they follow
- The type of content they consume or messages they respond to
- What they’ll spend money on and
- Buying trends among customers in your niche (pricing tiers, unbundling, trialing, digital self-service, and more).
Influencers and top leaders in your industry already have the attention of your audience and often engage with them. So you want to follow them on social media, engage with their content, and track their audience profile and conversations.
Construct a Video Sales Funnel
Creating effective video sales funnels attracts, educates, and converts leads into actual buyers.
You’ll need to audit your video and that of your competitors. Highlight what’s missing from your video content mix and what your audience needs. Then align your video content so it appeals to each buyer persona at every stage of the purchase journey.
To generate a better ROI from your video marketing efforts, double down on bottom-of-the-funnel videos that actually generate demos, trials, and signups.
Most of your SaaS customers are already in the consideration and conversion phase. So it makes sense to focus more of your marketing efforts on those ready to convert.
Here are some examples of some conversion-focused and bottom-of-the-funnel video content.
- Create product comparison videos that highlight what makes your solution stand out from other tools and
- Produce case study videos that showcase real-world proof that your solution works for different user bases.
- Showcase video testimonials from real customers using your solution.
- Create tutorials, product demos, and explainer videos showing how your tool works and how it fits their unique needs.
- Share onboarding videos that show your customers how to interact or use your product
There is, however, a major caveat. You can’t totally ignore the top and middle of the bottom of the funnel content. But they should come later in the video marketing process.
Determine the Right Platform for Distributing Your Video Content
With so many platforms supporting video content, it’s clear that these platforms are not created equal. As such it can be tricky to know where to focus your video marketing efforts.
While crafting your video marketing strategy, you’ll have to narrow down your choices to the ones that give you the best returns for your marketing investment.
Here’s how to identify the right platforms for your saas video marketing.
- Start by defining your video marketing goals: brand awareness, lead generation, traffic, conversion. Be sure your goals don't exist in isolation; rather it should align with your high-level business objectives. You also want to choose platforms that match your goals.
- Identify the demographics of your target audience, where they hang out and the type of content they prefer. Different demographics hang out on different platforms and prefer different content types.
For example, Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram are ideal for reaching a younger audience. These younger audiences live for light-hearted and fun content. On the flip side, LinkedIn caters a more professional audience who prefer serious content.
Set realistic budgets and resources
Video marketing is a lot of work. It requires a lot of time, effort and resources. So you’ll have to be realistic about how much you’re willing to commit to running your marketing channels.
If you have large budgets, you can employ a dedicated team to help manage video marketing on multiple platforms. But if you have a lean SaaS startup, you’re better off choosing low maintenance channels or limiting the number of platforms you use.
Research how competitors and top influencers in your industry use video marketing channels
This research will give you a sense of the platforms competitors within your industry are using to market their SaaS brand.
Identify the platforms your competitors have an active presence on (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc). What type of videos are they sharing and which of them is performing well? What kind of engagements and reactions are they getting on these channels (likes, shares and comments). How many videos per day, week, or month does your industry typically share?
The beautiful thing about it is that information will guide your video marketing strategy. You’ll know what type of videos to spur audience engagement in your niche.
Additionally, you can leverage these findings to pinpoint gaps and opportunities. Are there platforms your competitors aren’t using? Perhaps you can start using them to have an edge over your competitors.
Reformat Your Video for Multiple Platforms
Different social media and video sharing platforms support different aspect ratios, like 16:9, 9:16, 4:5, and 1:1. As such, creating videos based on each platform’s specification can be challenging, time consuming and expensive.
To work with videos across multiple platforms, it makes sense to reformat according to the individual platform specifications. This lets you get more mileage off your video content without breaking the bank.
However, this process can take 1-3 days, depending on the project length. Even for simple projects, you could lose quality, and words can be chopped off.
To achieve quality video output, it's always a good idea to film in high resolution (2160p or 4k). You’ll retain video quality after editing after zoom and cropping. Also make sure to frame key elements and key subjects so they don’t get cropped off during editing.
Paid Vs Organic Channels
Organic channels are accessible to every SaaS video marketer, regardless of their size or budget. They're also cost-effective as you won't need to spend tons of money promoting your video content. You'll also be able to generate traffic for your business and build deeper connections with your audience.
The intimacy and cost saving you'll enjoy from relying solely on organic channels can be tempting. However the downside is that the organic channels are saturated- nearly every brand is on it. No matter how incredible your video content is, you may have to wait for a long time to get any meaningful result.
On the flipside, paid channels are better for actively chasing leads and connecting your brand to conversion-ready audiences and. You can utilize your video to reach and convert a defined audience, get measurable results and hit your marketing goals quickly.
However the major downside is that it doesn't come free. So you'll need to set aside a budget as you'll be charged for viewers who click through or watch a portion of your video. You'll also need experts to monitor ad performance and results.
To get a good video marketing ROI, it's always a good idea to utilize both paid and organic channels. Use organic channels to connect and delight existing customers while attracting new customers via paid channels.
Variation and Language Dubbing
In dubbing, the original language is replaced by another language, primarily by other voice actors.
Dubbing your videos in multiple languages ensures your video goes beyond your locality. It makes the video accessible to a larger audience and increases its impact.
But here's another thing to consider.
Most users are emotionally attached to their language and culture. So communicating in that language presents an opportunity to boost the audience's retention, build trust, and grow sales.
For example, let's say you're looking to introduce your SaaS into international markets. You don't need to face the hassles of creating ads and social and educational content in different languages. Instead, you can create an original version and dub variations in multiple languages.
You can use it to promote your SaaS tool, introduce a new feature, drive people towards a blog, etc. All you need is content on your page or something to promote. Then you can create variations for different platforms and languages.
Showcase Your Product and Write an Irresistible Value Proposition
In any video you create, showcase your product and clearly articulate the value proposition. Depending on the video script, you may want to include high-quality shots of the product or a live demo of the software. The goal is to ensure prospects have a feel of the product they'll be trialing or buying.
Be sure to show off your standout software features and benefits. Often, SaaS products have different value propositions, all tied into one major value proposition. So it's essential to:
- Visualize what areas your software provides the most value.
- Highlight what makes it stand out from other similar tools and why users should care.
- Paint a mental picture of the results users can expect from your tool.fasdf
