Video Lead Generation Strategies That’ll Fill Your Sales Pipeline

Consumers would rather see video content from businesses than any other type of media.

Savvy brands are capitalizing on this trend by using video as the cornerstone of their lead generation campaigns .

To put it simply, if you’re not using video in your lead generation strategy then you’re losing customers.

At Viddyoze, we know a thing or two about using video for lead generation. We’ve helped thousands of brands create eye-catching videos that generate leads, and (of course) we rely on video to keep our own sales pipeline topped up.

So you’re in the right place to learn about:

• Conversion rate optimization tactics to use when filming
• Driving traffic to your videos
• How to convert your traffic into sales leads

Sound good?

Let’s dive in!

Let’s get one thing clear: the success of your video lead generation depends on the quality of your video content.

You can’t post any old video and expect it to generate leads.

To get the best results you need to create video content that is optimized to generate conversions. That means choosing a video type that best suits your product, calling viewers to action within the content, and providing key information on what you want people to do immediately after watching.

Give your video campaigns the foundation they need to succeed by applying these best practices to your content:

Create Videos Which Solve A Problem

Too many businesses hear the phrase “lead generation” and automatically think: “We’d better make this content all about us.”

Fact is, a video lead generator shouldn’t be directly focused on the features or USPs of your products or services. Instead, it should hone in on a specific problem faced by your prospective customers and explain how your product provides the ideal solution. Or, as the classic sales mantra goes: “People buy solutions, not products.”

Think about it:

People don’t buy a car because they want a two-liter engine, a built-in satnav, or lots of cup holders. They buy a car to shuttle their kids to and from school safely, to visit their loved ones, and to explore exciting new places. And maybe also to look cool.

Call Your Viewers To Action

On average, people watch six hours, 48 minutes of online video a week.

With all that noise, it’s hard to persuade people to sit through your full video, let alone take action at the end of it.

So don’t leave it to chance. When someone watches your video, use a clear, persuasive call to action (CTA) to explain exactly what you want them to do next.

That could be to visit a specific landing page on your website, fill in a contact form, or request a meeting.

And don’t wait until the end of your video to use your CTA! Try to include it as early in the video as possible without it feeling forced. This way you won’t miss out on potential leads who don’t watch the full video.

Nudge Your Viewer With Lower Thirds

With lower thirds, you can add actionable messaging throughout the video as a way to nudge potential customers in the right direction without disrupting your video content.

At its most basic, a lower third is a graphic overlay or text element added to the lower part of the screen in what’s known in the world of TV production as the “title safe area” — the zone in which graphics can be located without fear of them being cropped.

Lower thirds provide contextual information that supports what’s happening on screen without diverting too much of the viewer’s attention. Here’s an example of how they can look:

Use them to reinforce key points or urge viewers to take action at specific points of your lead generation video.

Pro tip: Viddyoze makes it super simple to unlock the power of lower thirds with our easy-to-use template overlays!

Most businesses fail because they don’t understand how to generate awareness of their product (or services) and then translate that awareness into sales.

It’s a common problem which typically arises from producing marketing materials which fail to sell the USPs of your product and also aren’t optimized to capture leads.

Thankfully, there is a solution: lead generation focused video content.

Viddyoze helps you to produce amazing marketing videos which make people want to buy your products immediately after watching.

Our online video maker gives you access to thousands of studio quality video templates, which guide you to make content that:

1. Clearly emphasize the problems your product solves
2. Calls viewers to action (so that they convert into leads)

Each template on the Viddyoze app can be customized with your own branding and creative, to provide you with unique videos. And our app is super easy to use with no technical skills needed.

Sign up to Viddyoze today and kickstart a video marketing strategy which will transform your sales pipeline.

Let’s be real for a second.

It’s not enough to just create a snazzy, in-depth video and expect it to double your leads overnight, without any further effort on your part.

If you post your video and then just forget about it, how is your audience suppose to know it exists? Let alone watch it.

For your video marketing to deliver the desired results, you need to craft a promotion process to drive a constant stream of traffic to your videos.

Here’s how:

Email Your Subscribers

Video and email go together like Julia Fox and the phrase “Uncut Gems”: great on their own, but even better when combined.

According to Campaign Monitor, adding video to email:

• Boosts open rates by 19%
• Increases click-through rates by 65%
• Reduces unsubscribes by 26%

So if you already have an email list full of prospects, why not point your latest piece of video marketing straight at their email inbox?

Post Organically And In Groups

Perhaps the simplest way to boost the reach of your video marketing and get in front of more interested viewers is to share it organically across all your social profiles.

So don’t limit yourself to YouTube; post it on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and anywhere else you have a social following.

On a similar note, don’t ignore dedicated industry groups that are relevant to your company and product.

Those groups contain a ready-made audience, so posting in them is a fantastic way to connect with prospects who don’t follow your socials or visit your site.

Be Active On Forums

Ever Googled a question and found the topic result was a thread on a site like Quora?

Forum-type sites are an absolute gold mine for lead generation because they allow you to search out the questions your audience is asking and craft a response that positions your product as the solution.

And as an added bonus, many of those sites attract a ton of search traffic, so you can potentially reach hundreds or thousands of people with a single answer.

Plus they’re almost always totally free to join. What’s not to like?

Embed Videos Into Your Landing Pages

This one’s simple: if you have a landing page that’s already attracting plenty of traffic, embedding a video can dramatically improve the conversion rate.

Indeed, research from Aberdeen Group reveals that companies using videos in their marketing mix see an average website conversion rate of 4.8%, vs. just 2.9% for businesses that don’t use video.

Link To Your Videos In Email Signatures

Again, we love this tactic because it’s so easy.

Chances are, you already send a bunch of business emails, with McKinsey research showing the average high-skill knowledge worker spends an astonishing 28% of their working week managing email. So why not use those emails to amplify your latest video?

Just create a banner to promote your video, add it to your standard, company-wide email signature, and include a link to the video. As if by magic, every outbound email sent by your company becomes a promotional opportunity!

YouTube is kind of a big deal. So big that its users stream 694,000 hours of content on the platform every single minute. So we’ve dedicated a whole section of this guide to YouTube lead generation best practices:

YouTube SEO

YouTube isn’t just the world’s most popular video streaming platform — it’s also the second-biggest search engine. So you should definitely be optimizing your video content for search.

This isn’t the place for us to talk at great length about SEO on YouTube, but as a general rule, you should do the following for every video you post:

• Add relevant keywords to your video title
• Include your target keyword in the video file name
• Optimize the video description by adding the most important keywords to the first couple of sentences
• Use hashtags in your video description
• Add your video to a relevant category
• Include subtitles and closed captions in your videos

Pro-tip: want to learn more? Check out our YouTube SEO post to find out how to boost rankings.

YouTube End Screens & Cards

As the name suggests, end screens are the final frames of a video. That means they’re the perfect opportunity to steer your viewers toward a related (but perhaps more sales-heavy) video or a specific landing page on your website.

Here’s a great example of how HubSpot uses end screens to drive lead generation on YouTube:

In a single screen, it includes:

• A link to a different piece of video marketing content
• A CTA to subscribe to HubSpot’s YouTube channel
• A link to the resource center landing page on HubSpot’s website

Video Playlists

The average YouTube user spends just under 17.5 minutes on the site every day.

Given that the platform’s average video length stands at 11.7 minutes, it’s evident that a lot of people watch multiple videos in succession — and video playlists are a big part of this because videos in a playlist auto-play one after another.

If you’ve ever found yourself slipping deeper and deeper into a YouTube rabbit hole, you’ll know how difficult it is to tear yourself away when the next video starts auto-playing. So you should definitely create your own playlists to keep people watching your videos and learning more about your company.

Ad Sequencing

Ad sequencing is a powerful feature used by advertisers on YouTube (and other platforms) to control which ads the viewer sees, allowing them to alter their video targeting based on how the viewer engaged with previous content.

To give a simple example, if a potential customer skips the first video in your sequence, you might follow up with something more entertaining and less salesy.

But if they watched in full or clicked a link in the CTA, they clearly liked what they saw, so you could capitalize on their interest with a “harder sell” — like a case study or product explainer video.

Smart stuff, right? And it really works, with Google research showing sequenced ads have a 74% lift in recall vs. a single 30-second YouTube ad.

Gated Video Content (Pre-Watch)

Gated video is where you have to input an email address (and potentially a bunch of other information) before watching the video.

This tactic has applications throughout the buyer journey.

You could use it as a top-of-the-funnel lead generation tool by creating a video that speaks to a broad industry trend or high-level pain point, then hiding it behind a lead gen form.

Or you could use it to capture middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel leads who are researching your product and comparing it to your competitors, like in this example from Workday:

In-Video Forms

This approach is pretty similar to pre-watch gated content, except that the lead capture form appears midway through the video.

It’s easy to see why this tactic works.

Once the viewer has invested time — potentially several minutes — into watching the first half of your video, that suggests they find it interesting and valuable. So there’s a good chance they’ll hand over their name and email address in order to watch the second half.

Utilize Facebook Ads Video Lead Forms & Autoplay Features

From its vast audience to its impressive conversion rates, there’s no shortage of reasons to run video ads on Facebook.

But one lesser-known reason is the ability to incorporate lead capture forms in video ads. That way, you can capture people’s details within the Facebook environment rather than steering them toward a dedicated landing page on your own site, removing a potential barrier to conversion.

Those forms can be auto-filled by pulling information from the user’s Facebook profile, making life easier for prospects — particularly mobile users who don’t want to type out their name and email address in full.

It’s also worth noting that Facebook video ads are set to autoplay, which means they’re guaranteed to generate impressions.

Leads are the lifeblood of your business.

Without a consistent stream filling the top of your sales funnel, you can’t plan for the future or scale your business.

So it’s definitely in your interest to leverage the most engaging, persuasive lead generation tools — and that means adding video marketing to your lead gen playbook.

Especially when you can use Viddyoze to quickly and easily create professional-quality video assets (but without the professional price tag).

Can We Use Video For Lead Generation?

Yes, you can use video to regularly generate new leads and fill your sales pipeline.

What Is A Lead Generation Video?

A lead generation video is a piece of video content that creates demand for your product or services and compels viewers to contact your business immediately after watching.

How Is Video Marketing Used In Lead Generation?

Video marketing is used in lead generation for two purposes. Firstly, as an awareness tactic that brings cold leads into your marketing funnel. Secondly, as a conversion tool to educate leads on why they should buy your product.

How Do You Generate Leads Using A Video?

To generate leads using a video you need to create a piece of content that your target audience desperately wants to watch. Then you give them access to the video in exchange for their contact information.

How Effective Is Video Marketing?

Yes, video marketing is effective with a huge 84% of marketers claiming to have generated leads thanks to video content.