We’re breaking down each stage of the buyer’s journey in this four-part series.

Congratulations! Your video marketing was a success! You’ve used video, along with all your other marketing efforts, to effectively attract viewers to your brand’s page. Now what?

Once you’ve attracted a prospective customer to your website or landing page, you only have a few seconds to keep them engaged while sharing information about your brand. Engaging these visitors is critical during the consideration stage of your sales funnel, and a necessary step before nurturing a lead into a conversion.

Fortunately for you, video is a proven and effective way to capture their attention and deliver more information than any other medium available.

Today, we’re going to cover how you can use video to effectively engage visitors, and turn your web and social traffic into paying customers!

Don’t forget to read the other parts in our series:
How to Attract New Customers with Video
How Video Helps You Nurture Leads into Customers
How to Delight Past Customers with Video

By the time a lead reaches your page, you’ve already introduced them to your brand or core product with some sort of hook. Now, you need to engage them with something fun, informative, or absolutely captivating. Try a video!

It’s no secret that video is the most engaging form of media – not only do consumers end up staying longer on websites with videos, videos lead to more pages viewed per session and an average session duration lift of 340 percent. At the same time, 71 percent of consumers say that a video helps explain a product better than text or images.

That’s why you should be placing videos all over your homepage, ecommerce, and social pages. Not only does this help attract more traffic with better SEO, but it helps to engage them immediately with your brand.

An engaging video will keep the viewers’ attention, way more than text or photos alone, and since they’re coming to your website to learn more about what you have to offer, it’s in your best interest to make it as easily digestible and engaging as possible.

In the first moments after you’ve attracted them to your page, your new visitors are looking for how you and your product are going to help them solve a problem they have. They’re considering your potential value to them, searching for more information, features, and reviews, and conducting research to find out whether or not you’re the best, most efficient, and most cost-effective option.

That’s why, when using video to engage visitors during this stage, it’s vital that you prove to them exactly why and how your product or service can help them. Your goal should be to address any fears, doubts, uncertainties, and concerns they might have about your product with content that immediately captures their attention and keeps them captivated.

Ultimately, an engaging video should lead to the user providing their contact information so you can maintain communication with them – so you can nurture them into making a decision and becoming a customer.

When aiming to engage potential customers, there are a few key types of video content to consider.

A brand video engages viewers with a vision of your company’s brand and mission, usually with stylish and evocative visuals.

A day in the life immediately engages viewers by telling them a real-world story and paints a very real, very human picture of you and your company.

A crowdfunding video is often the first thing you see when visiting a crowdfunding page, and as such, must be engaging enough to keep viewers watching.

A before and after video is excellent for engaging viewers by helping them visualize their ‘problem’ and its ‘solution’ after using your product.

Testimonials allow someone else to engage your viewer by telling their uniquely personal story of working with you and how it brought them success.

A product or service video can be engaging simply by offering them a high level overview of key product features they need to know.

The goal of any type of video you create to engage viewers should be to provide them immediate insight that’s entertaining enough for them to keep watching after the first few seconds. This video content should also provide them with enough value to consider you and your product as a worthy option and give you their contact information.

If you can attract visitors, but lose them after they come to your page and before they convert into sales, then you know the problem is with the engagement phase of your marketing funnel. But how can you assess how “engaging” a video is?

A video’s watch time and view-through rate are two of the most important metrics for measuring engagement, and the most absolute numbers for an idea of how engaging your video content is. Less absolute numbers include lifts in favorability and brand interest, but can be harder to measure. Easier to measure, you can also track “engagement” when you post your video on social media through things like video comments and shares.

At a glance, these are the metrics to pay attention to:

• View-Through Rate
• Watch Time
• Favorability Lift
• Consideration Lift
• Brand Interest Lift

You can look to the above as key performance indicators, but how do you relate those numbers to how well your leads are converting into sales? You need accurate, reliable figures to assess whether or not a video’s engagement indicators result in stronger conversion numbers.

However, out of the four main stages in your marketing lifecycle, the engage stage is the hardest to correlate back to cold, hard sales numbers. Because users aren’t necessarily looking to purchase now, they often watch your video, learn some information, and then not come back for a long time.

Try to implement detailed tracking information to show you big-picture user behavior, and drop cookies and retrieve path information for every person who views your video or goes to your site. Then, you can see what percentage of visitors end up buying from you.

You might be skeptical about how important the engage stage really is. After all, isn’t all you need to convert a sale to get them to the page and get them to sign up or buy? While that’s true, it’s not as easy as ‘build it and they will come’. Everyone is busy, and everyone else is competing for their attention. You have to keep them interested in your page, or you’ll lose that lead forever. And video is the best way to do it.

If this helps, think about the engage stage like you would an engagement in real life: You don’t just get someone to go on a date with you, then immediately try to get them to marry you. You gotta engage them first!

If you have any questions about how you can use video to engage your own web visitors, reach out! We have plenty of ideas we’d love to share with you, and can even bounce ideas around together to come up with the perfect plan. Schedule a call today!