Video marketing gets extraordinary results in lead generation and sales outreach, but it’s also one of the best customer engagement strategies to improve customer experience and retention.
In these days of rampant reviews, constant product improvements and frequent feature updates, and high competition with lower barriers to entry, there’s a new need for companies to emphasize CX aimed at engaging, building trust, and most importantly, retaining your most valuable customers (and word-of-mouth marketers) by providing value to them.
If you’re looking to make great customer experience videos to enhance your content marketing, customer journey, and bottom line by keeping your customers happy and informed, here’s how you’ll score some quick wins.
1. Improve customer experience and retention by addressing pain points
Even if you think you’ve built the simplest software or the perfect out-of-the-box product, odds are that customers are going to have questions about something. Regardless of whether they encounter a pain point you saw coming or one that hits you by surprise, the most effective solution for addressing it is with a short explainer video.
People have short attention spans and want problems solved fast.
So, instead of taking a ton of time to write, edit, and optimize a blog post that may not always feel very helpful to someone who wants quick answers, you can create a video in a fraction of the time that can instantly show your customers exactly how to find what they’re looking for or do what they want to do.
By providing short clips that address obvious and unexpected pain points tied to your offering, you’ll improve customer experience and stand out from competitors relying on less effective and outdated methods of onboarding and retaining customers.
A good example of a company using short-form video as one of its core customer engagement strategies is American Express Travelink, which anticipated that recipients of its Gift of Travel award would have issues with redemption.
To help improve customer experience and navigate this predictable pain point, they created great customer experience videos like the one below to help ensure a smooth vacation planning experience. That way, something that’s supposed to be fun doesn’t quickly turn into something frustrating, and people will continue using the service and tell others about it.
2. Use video to place emotion at the forefront of your customer engagement strategies
Great customer experience videos are defined by how they leave customers feeling. Thankfully, you don’t need a top-of-the-line camera to leave a positive impression on people.
Showing people’s faces is one of the best ways to capture the limited attention spans and imaginations of the people in your audience and guide their feelings in a particular direction.
Using actors that look like real people as opposed to models also helps establish authenticity that boosts customers’ connection with your brand.
Finally, having movement, however slight, is another way to improve customer experience with your videos. Adding dynamics to your videos as simple as moving charts and graphs or a shot of people laughing will keep people more engaged with your content marketing on their customer journey. Even minor enhancements in post-production (like zooming in on a still frame) can add intrigue or create a layer of tension to keep viewers’ focus.
3. Identify the most effective video channels for content marketing along the customer journey
Every business’s customers are different, so your customer engagement strategies should be laser-focused on the specific platforms on which they spend the most time – and that influence them the most.
That means your content marketing for the customer journey needs to be published everywhere you typically publish to generate leads, from your website and blog to YouTube, Instagram, and any other social media channel that makes sense for your audience.
The Global Editors Network showcases their savvy at making great customer experience videos for YouTube in the following clip highlighting its 2019 summit in Athens.
Not only is this video something speakers and attendees alike can share with their audiences to show they were there and bolster their credentials, it’s also a resource that GEN can use to entice future speakers and potential attendees to sign up and purchase a ticket to attend a future event they put together.
Thankfully, producing short-form videos in-house is easier than ever thanks to software like Wibbitz that helps you resize your videos in the desired dimensions and optimize them for each channel.
Altair Global used Wibbitz to make this one-minute video about Independence Day in the United States in square dimensions for Instagram – and they didn’t even have to pick up a camera (more on that later).
Instead of just letting the world know their offices would be closed on July 4th with a plain photo of the American flag, the company’s marketing team used Wibbitz to create a fun, informative, and engaging video to use for their holiday social post.
And let’s not sleep on LinkedIn.
Posting videos on LinkedIn is one of the most effective customer engagement strategies for B2B content marketing for customer journey and CX. This is especially true if your product intersects with the world of business analytics, marketing, tech, or anything else that a professional audience would find interesting.
Ideally, your customers will follow your company on LinkedIn so that they’ll see whenever you post. But even if they don’t, your customers still might see your LinkedIn posts if the content is relevant to what they read or if you use hashtags they follow.
Check out how Placer.ai used video to capitalize on the business news of Walmart closing some of its stores. In this short clip, the company makes the case that the closings are actually a positive thing for the company, as Walmart stores in close proximity were taking business from each other and suffering from a lack of optimization.
Videos like this encourage engagement, and if it gets in front of paying customers, they’ll be able to start a conversation and build a better relationship with the brand.
4. Boost production value to further improve customer experience
It’s true that you don’t need videos with impeccable quality to leave a lasting impression of your audience. A smartphone is more than enough to get started shooting footage, so don’t let a lack of resources ever hold you back.
Customers will love you and stick around if you simply show them that you care, and the best ways to demonstrate that are to answer their most pressing questions, illustrate that you understand what they want, and help them get there as quickly as possible.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t improve customer experience by making your video productions look as sharp as can be.
The beauty of 21st century marketing technology is that you can harness the power of software to access high-quality stock video footage without shooting any yourself. That means you can produce sharp-looking video content without even having a studio – or even a camera.
Sure, you’ll probably want to invest in an in-house DSLR camera and some good equipment at some point so members of your team can show face and harness creativity that comes with an in-house studio.
Having real people from your company on video is one of the most recommended customer engagement strategies to seriously skyrocket your retention rate, and combining your employees with strategic, high-quality stock footage is how you make truly remarkable customer experience videos.
SimilarWeb is an interesting case study in how to build a channel-agnostic B2B marketing strategy relying on great customer experience videos.
By leveraging the vast stock video content library within Wibbitz, SimilarWeb saw a 200% increase in monthly videos published and a 10X increase in quarterly video views. The company now receives more than 10,000 average monthly views on LinkedIn alone.
In the example clips below, you’ll see how SimilarWeb used stock footage of Elon Musk and Tesla cars with dynamic charts, social icons, and other cohesive stock footage to create a video about something its existing and potential customers would find interesting and of value.
By following these customer engagement strategies, you’ll start to improve customer experience and produce great customer experience videos that make your content marketing and customer journey so much more impactful than your competitors.