Generating leads for your business is one of the crucial, continuous processes that will drive sales and marketing success, put your brand on the map, and boost your customer acquisition rate. And to generate qualified leads and attract the people who are most likely to buy something from you, you need to invest in the right marketing, sales, and support strategies.
After all, it’s not just about catching their attention, it’s also about inspiring them to interact with your brand and follow the road through the funnel towards conversion and brand advocacy. To achieve this, you first need to improve your lead generation, and since video is the most popular type of content on the web right now, that’s what we’re going to focus on today.
Here are the most powerful video lead magnet types and how to use them to win over customers in 2022 and beyond.
Webinars
To start, long-form video content is one of the most effective tools for lead generation, especially for nurturing qualified leads throughout their journey towards conversion. You can, of course, also use webinars in the post-sale process, leveraging the format to keep educating your customers and delivering value, which will boost customer retention.
Many resources can help you create an online course for free. For example, popular tools like Kajabi have dedicated platforms and tool stacks with everything you need to create courses and webinars. Webinars are great for building brand authority as well, as informative, educational content can elevate your brand’s status in the competitive market.
A free webinar is also an amazing lead magnet that will engage existing customers and attract new ones to your business. Though you may be tempted to put it behind a paywall, you might have a more difficult time getting newcomers to sign up. But if it’s free, then you can promote it across social media, email, and other marketing channels knowing that you’re going to be completely booked every time.
However, while it might be free, that doesn’t mean that the webinar shouldn’t have a sales component throughout or at the end as a call to action.
Live events
Live online events are another type of video content that brands use to expand their reach, tap into new audience pools, and generate qualified leads. Nowadays, you can run live events on countless platforms, but social media has been and still is the best place to go live. Social networks are where your audience members spend a lot of their free time, and this is your opportunity to engage with them and have them tune into an interesting topic and discussion.
Depending on where certain people are in your sales funnel, your live events will inspire people to take a variety of different actions, as outlined in an article by Glue Up about membership-specific sales funnels. Some people will initiate first contact with your business by joining your live event, while others might be incentivized to make a purchase, become a member, or subscribe to a service.
You can create all-purpose live events with messaging for each type of attendee woven throughout, or you can specialize your event for a very specific stage of the funnel.
Shorts and reel-type videos
Short-form video content is booming across the social media world. From TikTok to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and beyond, every social network is focusing heavily on promoting reel-type videos, which are growing in popularity by the day.
This is an opportunity for any type of business to generate leads. For example, if you have a mentorship business and are offering online courses, promoting your courses or your brand with short videos could attract new students. Reels are short, fun, and catchy — just the right format to spark peoples’ attention without wasting their time.
What’s more, according to Uteach, you can maximize the potential of this type of lead magnet in several ways. For example, you could include special deals and discounts in the video. You can also get influencers to back you up and create their own short-form videos promoting your product, course, or service.
User-generated videos
Speaking of influencers and videos, this is something called user-generated content, meaning that you leverage the voices of your followers, customers, and influencers to promote your brand across the online world. User-generated videos are not only great for reviews and testimonials of your brand, but they’re also great for word-of-mouth marketing and for building social proof — all of which will generate leads for your business.
You can also use this video format to boost your ranking on Google and social media, and to appear in people’s feeds more often. Inspiring your customers to make their own videos and using influencers are worthwhile approaches.
Keep in mind that people follow in the footsteps of their peers, and when new customers see that others just like them are happy with your brand and are creating content about their positive experience, they will feel more inclined to reach out as well. This is how you can generate leads almost passively through social proof and word of mouth, after which you can nurture them towards conversion and brand loyalty.
How-to guides, explainer videos, and product tours
Lastly, consider expanding your video production to guides, explainer videos, and even product tours to generate more leads. How-to guides are an excellent choice whether a potential customer is just now finding out about your brand, or if they’re at the deliberation stage of the funnel and need more information and educational content to progress towards a successful sale.
You can create how-to videos on a variety of topics that may or may not be directly tied to your product offering. The possibilities are endless here, and these videos can address everything from general industry issues to brand-specific topics and customer pain points. The same goes for explainer videos, which tend to be more concise and narrower in focus, tackling concrete issues and challenges that users and customers might be facing.
Product tours are specific, delivering in-depth information about one product — just the kind of content qualified leads need to make a positive decision. All three video types are excellent lead magnets, but they can also help take potential customers through the funnel and inspire them to buy.
You can then repurpose your videos to nurture long-term customers, and update them as necessary to keep generating qualified leads.
Over to you
Creating different types of videos is one piece of the lead generation puzzle, but a crucial one nonetheless. Now that you know what types of videos you can use to generate and nurture qualified leads, focus on a video-first marketing and sales approach that will bring in new customers and inspire existing ones to keep coming back for more.
About the Author
Nikola Sekulic is a seasoned brand developer, a writer, and a storyteller. Over the last decade, he’s worked on various marketing, branding and copywriting projects – crafting plans and strategies, writing creative online and offline content, and making ideas happen. When he’s not working for clients around the world, he’s exploring new topics and developing fresh ideas to turn into engaging stories for the online community.
