What is buyer’s journey and how to leverage its different stages with videos?

Most of your customers do not buy your products the very first time they visit your website.

This is not how you would expect your customers to behave, but sadly this is true. The average amount of time taken between a Google search and purchase is 20 days. During these 20 days, a few of them drop the idea of buying, decide to go for an alternative, or never come back because they never had the intention of buying the product in the first place.

What about the people who decide to stay in the journey because they want to buy the product online? What do they go through, and what makes them convert?

In a nutshell, a prospect who finally ends up buying the product goes through a series of steps called buyer’s journey.

Let’s get into that in detail.

Buyer’s journey is a process that most prospective buyers follow to consider, evaluate and purchase the product or service that fits their needs the best. A few buyers take a short span of time in making the final decision, while a few others can take a considerable amount of time.
Either way, a buyer goes through three different stages of buying process.

Awareness: At this stage, the buyer is aware that there is a problem, and to solve it they need to buy a product or use a service

Consideration: In their quest to solve the problem, buyers consider and evaluate different options based on strengths and weaknesses. 

Decision stage: This is the final stage where the buyer has a clear understanding of the problem, how it can be solved by the product or service of a brand, and they don’t mind putting their money in it. 

Video marketing is the thing right now. So alienating it from your buyer’s journey can be a big miss for your business. 53% of the marketers have agreed that marketing videos can help in creating more brand awareness. 

To talk more about this in detail, we invited Karthik Subramanian, head of marketing at Picmaker. Karthik has close to two decades of experience and has worked with IT giants like Cognizant and Accenture in the past. Recently, his interview series, “High on Stories” has been getting a lot of attention on LinkedIn.

There is an interesting story about how he made his transition to marketing, but for that, we recommend checking out our recorded webinar video. 

In the next part of this blog, we will be talking about the points that we discussed in the webinar. This will keep the discussion relevant, and give you a quick walkthrough of what you can expect from the webinar video.

A lot of marketers mix up buyer’s journey with the marketing funnel. While they both have similarities, using them interchangeably can make things go wrong. 

A buyer’s journey is looking at the buying process from the buyers point of view. It means you list down all the activities that your buyers perform, and map out the steps that they follow before taking the final decision of buying the product.

A Marketing funnel is a blueprint laid down by a marketer. With a marketing funnel, a marketer tries to look at a customer’s journey from their point of view. This gives them a good understanding of the process and how they should frame the marketing strategy.

“Talk to your customers” — Karthik Subramanian

 Yes, that is it. That’s all you have to do to understand the customer journey. There are no magic formulas or secret ingredients that will give you success overnight. Talking to your customers will help you to reverse engineer from customer’s behavior to learn more about the customer journey.

A marketer can start an interaction with a prospect right from the start. Like when they reach out on chat or email to enquire about the product. Besides, a marketer can ramp up their efforts of studying more about customer behavior by running surveys. To encourage customers for filling these surveys, they can offer a minimal reward.

Simplicity is the key here. Using practical methods can help anyone to gain a lot of insights about customer journey.

At every stage of the buyer journey, a customer has different requirements. The videos can be aligned with these requirements to make it relevant for the customers. Getting your videos right is like holding the hands of your customers and leading them to the destination. Here are some examples of different type of videos you can create at different stages - 

Brand awareness stage: Here your customer is only trying to learn more about your brand. So telling your customer about the product, and its features is probably not a very good idea here. Instead, a video showing the brand value, mission, vision and what problem you’re trying to solve will work better at this stage.  

Evaluation stage: This is the stage where you can go a step further and give your customers a complete picture of your product. A customer at this stage is evaluating everything and learning about the product. By creating a video, you’re serving them everything they need and making their job easier.

Decision stage: If they have gone through your above two videos, then most likely they’re comparing your product with your competitors. Your prospective customers are looking for subtle signs on the basis of which they can give a score to the products. A customer testimonial video can be very effective at this stage. Additionally, videos on case studies, success stories, etc. will help you establish trust and credibility on you over your competition. 

Videos have evolved along with marketing. There are so many ways by which you can create videos, and each one of it can have a different impact on your customers. So after you have an understanding of what videos will work at different stages, it’s a great idea to decide what type of video will be the right fit for your business. This is necessary because video production costs money and other resources. Taking a wrong decision here can put tremendous pressure on your marketing activities thereby halting other operations.

Let’s take a look at the four most common types of videos created by businesses for marketing purpose

Real-time videos

These videos are not very budget-friendly because there are high production costs involved. Being real-time in nature, there is no editing and your customers are looking at raw footage. To get it right at the first attempt you need to ensure that every piece of equipment is at the right place, and all other factors like lighting has also been taken care of. In spite of being expensive, real-time videos can be very effective. The amount of value that they can create is tremendous. The customer watching a real-time video will know that there is no filter involved, and whatever they’re looking at is real.

Interview videos

In interview videos, you invite people to ask questions, and gather their thoughts on different subjects. These videos can help you to establish brand credibility. You can invite prominent personalities, but that will require you to shell out some budget, or you might have to get a back-up from your own brand presence.

Animation videos

Animated videos has gained popularity over the years. With tools like Animaker, you can create videos without spending a heavy budget on recruiting an agency. With the help of these DIY tools, you can create animated videos to tell a story or even explain a process. These videos are light-hearted which makes it more engaging for the customers to watch.

Screen recording videos

Over the years, companies have realized their dependence on videos for improving their marketing reach. However, as the demand increased, so did the new ways of creating videos. One such technique that has been spreading amongst companies very fast is screen recording videos. Screen recording videos are not only used for marketing, but also for sales follow-up, internal communication, and customer support. Screen and webcam records are finding their way in multiple functions of business today with their luxury of easy production and cost. 

Further Read: How to Increase Feature Adoption with Explainer Videos

“Videos are just forms of content, so the weightage should be more towards the content idea and next move to the format” — Karthik Subramanian

One of the best ways of blending videos in current marketing activities is by creating more number of videos in a shorter format. Considering the low attention span of the customers, simple 90-second videos can help you get the job done.

Once you have the video in place, you can think of repurposing the content. Repurposing will help you to create more videos but by using the same content. For doing this, you don’t need to employ extra resources or spend a lot of time. Additionally, integrating a QR Code into your videos can further engage your audience by providing quick access to related resources or promotions.

The future of videos is going to be about quantity more than quality. People are so used to watching videos on their mobile devices that they will remain hooked to it for a long time. Along with this, the attention span is also shortening, so they will be more interested in your content than the quality.

Karthik shared a great message with us when we asked him this question. We will use his quote to answer this question, and also summarize this blog

“Keep producing as many videos as possible, and try to be more creative with your approach to be more successful. Keep it short, keep it simple and most importantly keep your audience in mind. Personalize your videos for the different stages of your buyer's journey and ensure they answer the questions the buyer might have in those stages. You will succeed.”

Few of our previous webinar blogs worth checking out:

SaaS narrative: The Art of Storytelling for SaaS Companies
How COVID Has Disrupted The Way Startups Operate
5 Proven Ways to Improve Customer Service in 2021
6 Proven Ways to Improve Sales Productivity in 2021
Building a Successful Creative Design Team in 2021
Mastering Communication For Agile Teams In 2021