Video Lead Generation: Drive Demand with Video Marketing

No matter your preference for marketing funnels or flywheels, we all agree that there’s a sort of journey buyers take. Somewhere along that journey, those buyers transition from being people we don’t know to people we do know. Let’s call that lead generation.

Using video for lead generation isn’t especially new. After all, a webinar is a form of content marketing with live and on-demand flavors. However, advances in video marketing technology have made the practice easier for marketers to manage and easier for consumers to consume. At the end of the day, lead gen succeeds when it can remove friction from the experience.

If you’re looking to entice buyers with more video or you want to leverage existing video engagement for leads, you’ve come to the right place.

What Is Video Lead Generation?

Lead generation is a marketing strategy for building an audience primed to convert—often through calls to action (CTAs) like web forms and chatbots. While video is simply the vehicle for collecting contact information like any other content, your CTAs, capture devices, and channels will notably affect your video strategy.

How to Generate Leads with Video

CTAs

CTAs or lead magnets are the starting point for driving leads. Selecting the right ones can make or break your video lead generation strategy, but a key attribute good CTAs share is consistent value.

Consistent value could mean actual value like discounts or perceived value like exclusive content. The point is they must be consistent, not promoting price changes as discounts or public content as exclusive. And they must be valuable to the target audience, based on their level of intent and relationship with the brand.

The right CTAs could be anything, as every brand and audience is different. But there are several categories that hold true for most businesses.

• Offers. Sales and discounts are some of the most common tactics because they immediately convert. But premiums are also widely used, ranging from limited edition items and collectibles to name-brand apparel and electronics raffled at conferences and trade shows. Other examples include free trials, waiting lists, and early access to a new product or service.
• Events. Whether registering for in-person conferences or virtual webinars, events have long been a staple in many marketing strategies.
• Research. Industry research is a valuable tool for many businesses. You can license it from analysts, commission a study or survey, or create a report using your own proprietary data.
• Subscriptions. Subscriptions to your blog or other regular content make it easier for users to consume it. The content doesn’t even have to be exclusive; it just needs to be relevant enough to make buyers open email newsletters. Make sure you have a dedicated team regularly producing fresh content, or this CTA won’t generate many leads.
• Contact Sales forms. Some buyers are more likely to do their own research about you than follow your linear journey. When they’re ready to talk, contact forms should be waiting for them. They’ll be farther along the buyer journey than other leads, but they’re still leads you generated through the marketing resources made available to them.

Any of these CTAs could be used with video, but which ones and on which videos depend on both the capture device and the promotion channels.

Capture Devices

Digital name capture can be done through chatbots and what some call website visitor identification (using third-party data to resolve traffic to a company or individual). But for video marketing lead generation, web forms remain the best mechanism. There used to only be one way to do this, but as interactive video has grown, so has the flexibility for displaying lead forms.

• Landing page forms. The tried-and-true method is to embed videos on landing pages next to your name capture forms. However, the downside of adding videos to landing pages is that they can dilute clicks, splitting them between the video and the form. To limit attrition, use videos that can stand in for most of the page copy and ensure that the player and form are above the fold.
• In-video forms. With interactivity, lead forms are embedded as overlays on individual videos. This means you can add email signup forms that don’t require viewers to leave the viewing experience. Most online video platforms (OVPs) with interactivity can also integrate with marketing automation platforms (MAPs) and import their forms. For example, Brightcove integrates with most popular CRMs and MAPs like Hubspot, Eloqua, Marketo, and Salesforce.

Channels

Video marketing can take advantage of most digital channels for lead generation. While some channels work better with a certain kind of video, most can vary the content so long as the CTAs fit the medium.

• Display. Digital ads are the keystone of many lead gen campaigns, so it’s best to focus on self-selling CTAs like premiums, offers, events, and research. Creative can either be video ads or static ads leading to a video landing page. The important thing is to keep the experience clean. For example, if you’re using a video ad, you don’t need to embed the same video on the landing page—your audience has already seen it.
• Email. While cold emailing is increasingly difficult due to privacy laws and service provider policies, email sponsorship is a great way to start building your own list. Sponsored emails are essentially display ads in another company’s newsletter and thus follow the same principles. Dedicated emails, however, are more like native ads. For example, you could send a limited series of video emails with CTAs to subscribe for more content. Whatever you do, don’t try to attach or embed your videos, as this can hurt your sender’s reputation—and they likely won’t let you anyway.
• Organic search. For brands with big video libraries, optimizing your content for search is critical. Assuming you’ve already created a video sitemap and incorporated schema markup, you can add newsletter subscriptions to your top videos. If you’re not sure about the sitemap and schema, you can also let Brightcove Gallery manage that for you.
• Paid search. One part advertising, one part content marketing, paid search can do just about anything. You can promote new research with a text ad directing to a video landing page. Or you can use a trending thought leadership video as a video ad.
• Social media. Like search engines, social media platforms are quite versatile. Paid social video ads can promote premiums and discounts, while organic social videos can support explainers to boost newsletter subscriptions. On the latter, just remember that social users prefer to stay in-platform. If your content is valuable enough, you might be able to convert social fans to email subscribers. But keep an eye on your likes and shares; converting a handful of fans may not be worth it if it erodes engagement.

Of course, not all audiences will respond the same way, so test what works for you. You may find that users are more likely to convert from video ads if they can rewatch what they missed on a landing page. Likewise, some users may not want to disrupt their viewing experience with an in-video form at all and would prefer it elsewhere on the page.

Content

Before looking at the best types of videos for lead generation, take a moment to reflect on which CTAs you use on different channels and why.

Do you promote blog subscriptions with display ads? Probably not. Display is a high-volume, low-intent channel. It’s great at capturing broad interest, but to do that, you typically use CTAs with more actual than perceived value, like offers.

Do you optimize your landing pages for bumper sticker premiums to rank on Google? Hopefully not. Compared to display, search is a lower-volume, higher-intent channel. So while it can draw really targeted interest, it needs rich content with CTAs that match the users’ intent to consume content, like subscriptions.

Ultimately, the best videos will be whatever works for your brand, but that means it will be based on whatever content is already working. Below are just some of the common types that tend to work well for most companies.

• Awareness videos. These aren’t merely short videos, nor are they existing ones at all. Awareness videos are new assets designed to promote the CTA. Producing them doesn’t necessarily require dedicated film shoots. Oftentimes, motion graphics and existing footage will suffice. For example, making live event content available on demand in a gated video portal could use highlights from keynotes or clips from industry experts. Just remember, they need to use CTAs that can sell themselves, like offers, events, and research.
• Thought leadership and explainers. If you have a video library, chances are you already have interviews, tutorial videos, and other similar content. Since these assets attract audiences earlier in the buyer journey, they’re ideal for lead gen. All you need to do is add CTAs to them via overlays, lower thirds, or slates. Take the previous example: You could promote that gated portal by making one video available for free, with a prompt to subscribe for the rest. While subscriptions tend to be the strongest CTAs here, even contact sales forms can be strategically placed on product-oriented explainers.

Video production is a specialized skill, so if creating awareness videos for every lead gen ad sounds expensive, that’s because it often is. Video lead generation isn’t merely putting videos on every form or gating every asset; it’s an investment. In this way, it’s no different than the custom ad sets you create for display campaigns.

Savvy readers may also notice that product and testimonial videos were not included. This isn’t to say that top-performing demo videos and high-profile case studies can’t generate leads. But in general, both types attract buyers a bit further along the journey and don’t drive broad enough interest for most campaign goals.

How to Qualify Leads with Video

Tracking engagement is one of the primary ways brands identify high quality leads, usually by monitoring things like email open rates and click-through rates. Unfortunately, these metrics don’t measure content engagement. Web options like average session duration and scroll depth can help, but at best, they’re incomplete and at worst, they’re wildly misrepresentative.

Now if you’re using video for lead generation, you have better ways of measuring content consumption. But which video metrics you use will depend on your business model.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a complex process that involves tracking user behavior across your properties and assigning points to actions based on alignment with buyer personas. It’s often employed by B2B brands because these buyers have to be satisfied with the product before ever using it. Since buyers are rarely the sole decision makers, they need to like it so much they’re willing to sell the investment to their colleagues. Thus, buyers need to be deeply engaged with your brand and their engagements tracked and scored to reflect intent.

Video engagement is the percentage of content consumed, and it’s the best way to track the deep engagement needed for lead scoring.

For example, an average session duration of three minutes on a product page could mean the buyer is reading about your offering and they’re potentially interested. But it could also mean they’re frustrated and they stopped on a random page to scour your menu to find what they’re really looking for. Conversely, an engagement rate of 80% on an explainer video means the buyer deliberately clicked to play and consume the content. Both of these actions demonstrate clearer engagement with the content.

Using video engagement, you can set the normal thresholds you would for any other element in your lead scoring model. These could be points for videos with, let’s say, 80% engagement or greater consumed within a given timeframe. More importantly, you should track these thresholds in sequences. A buyer who watches several unrelated videos with high engagement is likely less interested than another who watches several videos on the same topic.

An additional benefit of video engagement is that, as a more accurate picture of interest, you can hand off these leads to sales with better information. Without video, you would have to guess which product they’re considering based on pageviews, clicks, or scrolls—all of which measure browsing behavior. But with video, you can clearly see which content they consumed, and by extension, which products they engaged with. This information can give your sales team a head start and allow them to personalize their outreach with more relevant questions and resources.

Lead Cultivation

Lead cultivation is a much simpler process than lead scoring, often focused on maintaining audience engagement within a single channel rather than tracking cross-platform touchpoints. B2C brands with shorter sales cycles or lower price points use this method because buyers are typically the sole decision-makers. When they’re ready to buy, they buy. They don’t need to be deeply engaged by your brand; they just need to be regularly engaged to keep your product top of mind.

Video play rate is the percentage of times a video was played, and it’s the best way to track the regular engagement needed for lead cultivation.

Video is well known in marketing for increasing click-through rates. Given that these kinds of brands usually have more competition and market noise, they need to do more to stand out and drive clicks. Static ads and written content are still very effective, and they will likely never be completely replaced. But anywhere you can use video, test it and see if it increases clicks.

Using video play rate, you can quickly see how video compares to other types of content at engaging your audience. That said, be aware how autoplay best practices can affect this.

For example, if you’re testing whether videos or blogs drive more clicks on organic social posts, turn off autoplay. You need to compare blog clicks to video clicks, and autoplay will negate the latter. Similarly, if you’re testing video emails, autoplay needs to be on, since your copy should be prompting users to “Watch Now.” But since this makes your play rate 100%, you’ll need to compare email click-through rates instead.

It’s also important to note that video play rates will vary by channel and can’t be compared across platforms. Opted-in email subscribers usually have much higher rates than social fans. Furthermore, unlike lead scoring, you don’t need to track user behavior as much across platforms. Keeping buyers engaged wherever they’re most comfortable will be more effective than trying to manufacture more touchpoints.

Video Lead Generation Best Practices

When you use video for lead generation, all you’re doing is calling attention to one part of your larger lead gen content strategy. That means it’s more important that your videos follow your own best practices for generating leads than the advice of a think piece like this. But if you’re having trouble incorporating video or are looking for new ways to enhance, give some of the following tips a try.

1. Gate (Some of) Your Content

Gated content has been a B2B marketing strategy for decades. But over time, ungating content grew in popularity as a way to create a better user experience, especially among account-based marketing (ABM) practitioners. Proponents argued that ungating increases traffic, particularly organic, and improves trust. The obvious challenges are that not only does this decrease leads, it can work against the highly refined targeting these brands need.

Take Brightcove, for example. We’re a streaming technology company, so naturally, we create a lot of content about streaming. But do you know who else does? Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and other consumer brands. Ungating all of our content would certainly increase traffic, but it would also dilute our leads with consumers simply looking for streaming services.

The truth is, gating never stopped working; certain assets did. Since the content marketing boom, things like e-books and white papers have simply lost their value due to saturation. Assets like research, however, have not lost their value. If anything, buyers are hungry for more data and analysis related to their respective fields. So whether you use an awareness video to promote a gated PDF, or you incorporate the findings into a gated webinar, content like this still works. Keep the gates, but use them wisely.

2. Pick CTAs that Qualify Leads

The best CTAs attract interest from the right audiences. Too often, companies employ lead magnets that are related to their business but don’t directly support their goals.

Imagine a high-end shoe manufacturer launching a new hiking boot. They’re entering the market as a premium product, so they need to sell value, not price. Since this will be a slightly longer sales cycle, they’re considering premiums to generate leads that they can educate about their value propositions.

The shoe company could use high-quality shoelaces as their premium to target audiences interested in more expensive footwear. However, even though laces are related to the business, they would generate very broad leads from buyers looking for other kinds of shoes.

A premium that could support the goals of launching new hiking boots might be wool socks. Wool isn’t a common material for everyday socks, so it’s more likely to target buyers with an interest in shoes as well as being outdoors in rugged conditions.

Picking highly targeted CTAs helps qualify potential leads before they’re ever on file, increasing conversion rates and customer lifetime value (CLV).

3. A/B Test Landing Pages

CTAs, content types, capture mechanisms, channel mixes, and even form placements are less best practices than they are the results of proper testing. And by that, we don’t mean comparing campaign performance; we mean A/B testing landing pages.

A/B tests are limited to single variables and repeated at least three times with cohorts over 1,000 to produce controlled, statistically significant results. They’re time-consuming to set up, implement, and analyze, but nothing is better at identifying the best content or the best CTA.

For example, if you want to know whether audiences engage more with explainers or thought leadership videos, the process will be straightforward. Duplicate the landing pages identically (except for the video), create randomized audience segments, and email your test. The results could lead you to create more of the winning kind of video, add a new section to your site, or develop a dedicated newsletter.

Similarly, you could test whether video ads pointing to video landing pages split the CTA. Duplicate the pages (except for the video), create the segments, send the emails, and let the results inform your video lead generation strategy.

4. Integrate Your MAP and OVP

MAPs are already powerful enough with their ability to segment audiences by customer data and marketing data. Integrating your MAP with OVP unlocks another valuable source: content data.

With content data from your videos, you can further refine audience segments by video play rates and engagement. B2Cs could test an explainer series on a cohort with the highest average play rate to determine knowledge gaps and guide documentation. Or B2Bs could test thought leadership videos with a high video engagement cohort to gauge buyer interest and shape product development.

Also, because MAP integrations allow you to import forms into your OVP, you can add conditional logic to your video experiences.

For example, you could gate high-value videos but add a condition that allows customers on file to view them without re-entering their info. Or you could use dynamic forms on top-performing videos to fill in customer data gaps. By setting only empty fields as visible on a standard form, you could collect valuable data without overtaxing your buyers.

The possibilities with integrated data are endless, but Brightcove takes this a step further. Not only do we integrate with popular MAPs, we also integrate with customer data platforms like Blueshift, Braze, and Sailthru. And we even allow data exports to Amazon S3 buckets, so you can analyze it in your preferred system.

5. Personalize Content with Interactivity

Interactivity makes video content just as engaging as the rest of the web, but it also presents opportunities for personalization and lead qualification.

“Buy Now” buttons on awareness videos could allow impulse buyers to skip lead nurturing entirely. Ratings or emojis could indicate how well your explainer videos are answering their questions. Video-to-video branching could direct them to related content on thought leadership videos.

Though interactive video brings many benefits, exercise caution with the elements you use and how much you use them. Leads are only potential customers, so don’t get too familiar with them or you could scare them away.

For example, using third-party data to personalize their videos with their name or company could induce paranoia or, worse, backfire spectacularly if the data is wrong. Similarly, overloading a video with several interactions might inspire engagement at first before causing fatigue and disinterest.

If you’re not sure where to begin, start with where you are. Ultimately, video lead generation follows the same principles you’re already using with other content types. So build from your own best practices, incorporate the tips here that fit your strategy, and refine as needed.