Interactive Video At Each Stage of The Customer Lifecycle

Video content is increasingly finding its way into every stage of the customer lifecycle. The reasons may be obvious, but they’re worth repeating.

1. Video is a preferred content type for consumption by your audience. 
2. Video content continues to get less and less expensive to create, either through platforms like Powtoon or freelance / currency arbitrage opportunities like Fiverr. More on the future of video marketing here.
3. With platforms like Mindstamp, vIdeo can be increasingly interactive, meaning it can play an active role in the customer lifecycle beyond simply content communication. It can be personalized and dynamic based on the interactions from your viewers.

All of this means video can and will evolve in how it’s best used across the customer lifecycle, and that video will play an increasingly important role in end-to-end workflows for customer awareness, acquisition, engagement, onboarding and support.

Like any type of marketing communications, video marketing can and should take many forms across the customer lifecycle.

Awareness

Per Insivia, “viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.” (Insivia). So if you want to communicate something, you might as well communicate in a manner that has the highest return. That means video marketing for awareness can include educating the viewer that you, your product or a specific benefit exists. But this is also an exceptional time to learn about what resonates most through interactive elements. For instance, add simple video navigation (like buttons or hotspots or clickable images) that requires your viewer to choose between two options to ‘Learn More’ about your product or service. Even if the result takes them to the exact same place in the video, you immediately get data on what customers care about.

Engagement‍

When you’re ready to make video part of your engagement marketing strategy (and you should be ready now), modern interactive video platforms like Mindstamp begin to matter even more. It’s no longer sufficient to simply ‘tell’ your audience something once they’ve taken the step to learn more. You need to engage them. From driving action with hotspots and buttons to using questions to collect more information and then personalize what comes next, videos can now be interactive in a way that turns passive viewing into active participation.

Acquisition / Conversion‍

Interactive video can be especially powerful for product videos that feature eCommerce products that can be purchased online. Here are 3 tips to turn viewers into buyers using interactive video. The video itself can become the closing tool. Given that 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video. (HubSpot), let the video tell the story and close the deal! From simply linking to the product page on your eCommerce site to programmatically dropping the product into the shopping cart ready to check out, the video can drive the conversion.

Onboarding‍

Video can help you dramatically shorten the time-to-value for your clients. Get them up and running faster with personalized walk throughs. If you know what the customer was most interested in via Engagement marketing above and have integrated that data into your CRM, post sale you can drive the onboarding experience that speaks most directly to their needs. With direct integrations to Hubspot and Salesforce, it’s easy to ensure the first video your new customer receives is personalized with information about their purchase, making the onboarding experience that much more red carpet.

Upsell / Cross Sell‍

Just like acquisition and conversion, video can be a core strategy for upsell and cross sell. Use choose-your-own-adventure style interactions to let your current customers self-navigate through features or enhancements that most appeal to them. Even if they don’t buy then, by capturing the data on where they clicked and what interested them you can then direct your targeted marketing (or sales team) to close the business moving forward.

Video should be a core part of your entire customer lifecycle strategy moving forward. In each step of the customer funnel, you can use interactive video to collect information, gain insight, drive action and truly understand how your audience responds to your message. Video is not and should not be a 1-way conversation when products like Mindstamp make it easy to make any video an intelligent and interactive viewer experience in seconds.