Video is a great marketing tool that people use poorly.

The current vogue in online video, aside from cheap distribution of funny commercials on YouTube, is the animated 60-second-or-less landing page. These short videos relay the primary value proposition of a product, and perhaps some insight into how the product works. In the chain of discovery that buyers endure, this is the very first step — understanding why they should care about you. Short landing page videos give buyers a reason to investigate further.

They then are forced to either divulge personal information in ham-handed calls-to-action (and risk getting a sales phone call), or wade through increasingly dense web copy in order to learn important product details.

Why do companies stop using video after the landing page? This came to mind while reviewing case studies of Silicon Strategies Marketing clients. We once scripted a series of “deep dive” overview videos for DeviceAnywhere. These videos guided prospects through what DeviceAnywhere products did at a level of detail that technical buyers needed. End-to-end, the videos took about 30 minutes and were broken into sections that addressed specific needs their technical customers typically had.

DeviceAnywhere reassigned two of their three technical sales teammates who had been performing online demos all day long, and DeviceAnywhere saw zero declines in conversions.

Videos have a great deal of potential for guiding different buyer genotypes through the phases of discovery, and allowing them to engage your sales teams at the moment their curiosities are completely satisfied. This is important because selling is a little like dating: leaping from a first date to a marriage proposal rarely works. Buyers go through phases of learning and trust building — from discovering they have a need, through investigating solutions, gathering details, sharing information internally, etc. Yet nearly nobody is chaining videos in such a way as to help people rapidly learn during each of these sales cycle phases.

In our 15-second, sound-bite driven world, it may well be essential.

As always, leading buyers by the nose throughout this discovery and learning process is essential. Unsupervised thinking is discouraged. In each phase, you need to:

• Create specific content that picks-up cleanly from the previous phase, and leads logically into the next.
• Provide escapes and multiple calls-to-action so a buyer at any time can take actions that accelerate sales.
• Separate content based on buyer genotypes and tailor each throughout the chain.

Video communicates better than any salesman, and works twenty four hours a day. Put it to work through the entire sales cycle.