By 2025, over 73% of organizations plan to switch all their systems to SaaS platforms. This gives SaaS platforms an immense opportunity to significantly grow and scale their business by building brand awareness and increasing conversions.
However, SaaS products can be challenging to market successfully, as doing so requires communicating clearly what your products and services are about—and one of your best shots at accomplish this would be video marketing. With 83% of marketers stating that video helps them with lead generation and 95% planning to increase their video production budget, video marketing is undoubtedly one of the best tools SaaS marketers can have in their arsenal.
While the term 'SaaS video marketing' might immediately call to mind demo and explainer videos, it encompasses far more than that. In this article, we will discuss ten types of videos that you can include in your marketing strategy that will help you boost your brand awareness, get high-quality leads, and increase conversions.
1. Product demo videos
A product demo video explains how your product or service works. As these videos enable your audience to understand what you are selling, they play an important role in convincing customers to purchase your products.
These videos are one of the most important types of videos when you are marketing your SaaS products and services, as 84% of customers state they have been convinced to purchase after watching a product video.
Vidyard, a company that offers tools to host and evaluate video performance, found that when they included a product explainer video on their landing page, their conversion rate increased by 69%, compared to what it was without any video.
2. Educational videos
Educational videos should be a part of every SaaS brand's overall content strategy since they assist customers in understanding the brand's product, business, and industry. Educational content can also help boost your inbound marketing and allow you to position yourself as an industry thought leader. Therefore, it comes as no surprise to find that some of the most successful SaaS companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, Uberflip, and Zendesk are also excellent tutors.
Moreover, educational content also enables you to significantly increase your conversions as a consumer is 131% more likely to buy from a brand right after consuming early-stage educational content.
Here, you can find Hubspot, one of the leading educational content creators, using videos to educate customers on inbound marketing and their latest product updates.
3. Customer testimonial videos
A customer testimonial video allows your clients to hear about other people's experiences with your product in an honest and unscripted manner.
They are among the most effective tools a marketing team can employ to build brand credibility and convert customers, with 72% of marketers reporting a 50-500% gain in ROI from testimonial videos and significant conversion boosts.
In this case study video by Slack, their customer, Sandwich Video, a video content production company, talks about how switching to Slack has impacted their business. The best aspect of this testimonial video is that it also explains how Slack works and how the application interacts with other software, thus providing more credibility to the viewers.
4. Webinars
Webinars are a very effective video marketing tool since they enable you to have a direct conversation with your attendees, understand their problems, and pitch relevant solutions to them.
With 89% of marketers believing webinars will outperform other channels in generating leads, they are a must-have in your marketing strategy. This should include a combination of live webinars, on-demand webinars, and other components that make up a webinar marketing funnel (emails, sales pages, thank you pages, etc.).
Spektrix, a B2B CRM solution company, launched its first webinar and saw great success, with 53% of the target accounts being engaged and generating a revenue pipeline worth £268k.
5. Promo videos
Promo videos are one of the quickest and most effective ways to convey your marketing message, bringing your brand to life by creating quirky, fun, or emotional videos that resonate with your audience.
Promo videos work best to grasp your customers' attention and get your product or service in front of them, as 73% of the audience is likely to watch videos instead of reading text content.
However, you may bore your viewers and drive them away by loading your promo video with all your benefits and features. To grab your audience's attention, your promotional video must be interesting and compelling enough–and that's precisely what Adobe Marketing Cloud has done in their funny promotional video.
6. Customer support videos
Creating customer service videos is a great way to continue foster a relationship with your customers, even after they have bought your product. These videos can help your customers use your product more effectively, while allowing your after-sales support team to focus on more complicated queries.
While having a written manual on using your product is essential, videos are far more effective than written content for delivering vital information. According to a Wyzowl report, 96% of customers watch customer support videos to learn more about their purchased product.
In this video, Uboro, a GPS tracking platform, demonstrates how its system works and makes GPS monitoring simple and accessible by explaining the various features available on its platform and how they function.
Make sure you enable comments when you post these videos so that users can ask questions. You can converse back and also use the questions to survey your audience and add new features they want.
7. Company culture videos
Company culture videos provide a sneak peek into your company's working culture. These videos are essential in building a relationship with your customers, as they let them know you are more than just a tech company. Additionally, these videos also help you significantly in your recruitment marketing strategy.
In most cases, companies create these types of videos by having employees speak about the company's work culture. Showing them examples of employee testimonials and how they are done best will help guide them to creating the videos and avoiding mental blocks. You can take it up a notch by showing more personal footage, like how you celebrate a milestone, behind the scenes when you plan an event, etc.
Zendesk, a SaaS company that provides customer support and sales-related solutions, put together this fun short video about their company culture. In less than two minutes, the video covers who the company is, what they do, and how it works.
8. How-to videos
As a company offering a SaaS product, how-to videos are your best option to help your customers better understand your product. You can start by creating videos about some of your customers' most frequently asked questions.
Additionally, they are an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and establish thought leadership.
Moz, an SEO software company has dedicated a whole YouTube playlist to how-to videos known as "Whiteboard Fridays." In it, they showcase their how-to videos in a fun and easy-to-follow manner.
9. Video case studies
A marketing case study aims to convince customers that a process, product, or service can solve their problems with an example of an actual scenario.
Analyzing the study's quantitative and qualitative outcomes paints a picture of what success looks like from the buyer's perspective. Therefore, case studies can be an invaluable asset for proving the value and quality of what you have to offer.
This case study from Chili Piper, a SaaS company that helps sales teams automatically schedule appointments with leads, explains how they help their customers scale. They have highlighted the major outcomes throughout the case study to build trust with the audience.
10. Social media videos
In today's digital age, social media marketing is a vital component of a SaaS marketing strategy. With the help of social media videos, you can spark conversations and increase the engagement and reach of your posts, which will, in turn, enable you to increase your brand visibility.
The best thing about social media videos is that you can incorporate all the types of videos mentioned above into your social media marketing strategy. However, before churning out social media content, it’s imperative to understand how different types of videos will fare on various platforms and start producing content accordingly.
Additionally, platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter can be great places to target C-executives with your videos since 59% of senior executives prefer videos over text. And the icing on the cake–Twitter videos are 6x more likely to be retweeted than photos.
Here you can find Buffer, a social media management solution, spreading the word about its new feature through a how-to video using Twitter.
If you are already using ads on social media, one feature you will love is custom audiences. On networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube you can create custom audiences consisting of all the people who viewed your videos and retarget them with ads. This is a great ad strategy for Instagram where retargeting ads do well.
You can also retarget people based on how much of the video they watched. For best results, only retarget people who watched 60% or more of the video.
Conclusion
By 2022, video content will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic, so adding videos to your SaaS marketing plan is no longer an option but a necessity. However, creating enough video content for marketing purposes is no cakewalk and can put marketers in a fix.
Using the types of videos mentioned in this article, you can diversify the type of content you create for your SaaS video marketing, which will enable you to reach more audiences, boost your brand's awareness, and increase sales.
Author bio
Rachel Bowland is the content manager at Social Marketing Writing and Creatiwitt – she likes to write about marketing and design.
