When it comes to promoting software as a service (SaaS) products, saas video marketing has emerged as a powerful and effective tool for driving conversions and building brand awareness.
As the world becomes more digitally focused, businesses are constantly searching for new and innovative ways to capture the attention of their target audience.
By leveraging the power of video, businesses can showcase the unique features and benefits of their SaaS offerings in a way that's engaging, memorable, and impactful.
Whether it's through explainer videos, product demos, or customer testimonials, video allows businesses to tell their story in a way that resonates with their target audience and inspires them to take action.
But creating effective saas video marketing content is easier said than done.
It requires a deep understanding of your target audience, your product's unique value proposition, and the latest trends and best practices in video marketing.
It also requires a willingness to experiment, iterate, and refine your approach over time to ensure that you're getting the most out of your marketing efforts.
Discover the power of SaaS video marketing as we explore strategies, tools, and real-world examples of how businesses use video to drive conversions and build brand awareness.
SaaS marketing is the process of promoting and selling web-based software applications.
It involves attracting, engaging, and converting potential customers into paying subscribers. Differentiation and customer retention are key challenges in SaaS marketing.
This is where customer success software comes in handy, as it can help SaaS businesses establish a strong competitive edge by understanding user needs, addressing pain points, and delivering a seamless customer experience, thereby fostering long-term relationships and reducing churn.
Data analysis plays a vital role in optimizing SaaS marketing campaigns. It requires a deep understanding of both software development and marketing.
With the right approach, SaaS marketers can help their companies succeed in today's digital economy.
Video has become an integral part of the modern marketing landscape, and it's not hard to see why.
88% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
That's a powerful statistic by wyzowl that highlights the incredible impact video can have on your SaaS marketing and sales process.
By using video, you can showcase your product in a dynamic and engaging way, help your target audience understand its unique value proposition, and ultimately persuade them to make a purchase.
But video isn't just about driving sales. It's also an effective way to build trust with potential customers, establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry, and differentiate yourself from the competition.
Trello is one of the most popular project management tools. And the journey started with this…
‘Trello for Android’ is one of the company’s early videos to explain its product and how to use it.
Years later, it has stuck with animation to talk about its products, with this one published recently that explains one of the app’s features:
Trello isn’t the only SaaS company that uses animation.
From HubSpot and Asana to Marketo, Hootsuite, and Slack, some of the leading SaaS brands leverage animated videos to promote their products and drive sales.
This trend has increased in recent times with more competitors, and an imperative need to effectively communicate with the target audience.
So, if your company offers SaaS products, animated videos can be a great addition to your marketing plan, enabling you with greater rewards and higher business growth.
There are many benefits of integrating animated videos into your marketing strategy. Here are some of the reasons why SaaS marketers love animation:
SaaS products aren’t easy to understand. They have unique interfaces, dashboards, features, and an overall value proposition that needs to be explained thoroughly.
In many cases, the demand needs to be generated for that SaaS product; they don’t have top-of-the-funnel attention, which must be established and nurtured to drive conversion.
Animation can be effective here. It is one of the best content formats for the task of explaining intangible products so well.
B2C and B2B marketers can use animation to introduce their products, elaborate every feature, connect the audience’s pain points with the right solutions, and motivate the viewer to take certain actions.
You can also create complete tutorials of the SaaS product supported with some animation, which makes the video more interactive and engaging.
This video by Google does an amazing job at explaining G-suite simply and effectively through the power of animation.
In line with the previous point, consumers aren’t aware of your SaaS product.
So instead of throwing demos and free consultations at them, animated videos are a fitting option to get those people acquainted with your product.
These videos are a great first touchpoint, aka ToFu asset, for customers to know and understand your product.
And then, if they are interested, they can opt for a demo or sign up for a trial.
This Headspace's animated explainer video on meditation serves as an excellent introduction to the unique and whimsical Headspace style, now easily recognisable by its audience.
3. Visually appealing and interesting
This is a common benefit of animation, but nevertheless worth mentioning.
Animated videos are highly appealing and attention-grabbing. Moreover, with the right storytelling elements to them, they can be equally enjoyable.
This is a critical benefit, especially when dealing with SaaS products that could be difficult to understand.
Certain platforms or solutions have too many features and have complicated interfaces. This can confuse and overwhelm the customers.
Not only does animation simplify such complex features and interfaces, but it also does it in a way that people remember for a long time. So, you can make a lasting impression among the audience about your product and brand.
The higher retention value of animated videos also unlocks remarketing opportunities, which, if done well, can be a key in driving exponential sales.
This video by Salesforce is definitely memorable. It relates to what the user needs and explains how they solve the problem.
Recommended Read: Selling Complex Products: A Comprehensive Digital Marketing Guide
There are plenty more direct and indirect benefits of animation that have made it an integral part of B2B and B2B marketing for many marketers. Check out: How Animated Videos Can Help Your Business in 2021?
The dynamics are completely different when you’re dealing with SaaS products as compared to any other industry.
Consumers’ needs, expectations, as well as their journey map, are much different – particularly when the product awareness is low and its price is high.
This demands a carefully crafted SaaS product video marketing plan, which requires a clear approach to how you can use animation in your pipeline to generate more leads and drive higher sales.
Here are 11 tips to help you optimally use animated videos and achieve better ROI:
You can’t publish an animated video without having a thought process or strategy behind it. The decision shouldn’t come out of a whim.
It should be a part of a large picture that’s relevant to the business’s bottom line. And here that ‘bigger picture’ is the marketing funnel.
You need to have a proper marketing funnel that addresses all customer journey touchpoints. It should include different stages and the steps you need to take at each stage.
This marketing funnel will subsequently help you create your video marketing strategy.
For instance, if your funnel has a longer top-of-the-funnel phase with multiple touchpoints, you should publish more ToFu animated videos.
So as a priority, create a marketing funnel that will guide your marketing plan.
Similar to the previous tip, this is one of the prerequisites of having a high-converting video marketing strategy for your SaaS product.
Unless you know what your target audience is, you will end up attracting the wrong audience and wasting a lot of money. As a result, the Average Cost Per Acquisition (CAC) would be much higher.
Create buyer personas that answer relevant questions about your target audience. This includes where they live, their level of education, their income, their pain points, the influencers they follow, the social media platforms they are more active on, and so forth.
The more you know about them, the better the chances of creating more effective animated videos that deliver higher ROI.
Once you have a marketing funnel and buyer personas, you can start ideating the kind of animated videos you should publish and, overall, the marketing strategy you should have.
For instance, if people are aware of a product like yours and you’re targeting 40-50 years old CFOs at Fortune 5000 companies, creating promotional animated videos for LinkedIn is a much better idea. (Running LinkedIn ads against the ‘CFO’ title at relevant companies can bring you surprisingly high returns.)
So ideate the topics you want to cover with your animated videos, as well as the video’s objectives or goals, length, distribution channel, call-to-action, KPIs, and more.
Ideate and plan a smart video marketing strategy that outlines how you will go about with animated videos.
Also, see How explainer videos can propel your SaaS land and expand strategy?
This is one of the biggest video marketing mistakes: focusing on features.
Understand that your target audience doesn’t care about your brand and products, especially if you don’t have a strong brand identity.
They care about the solutions you can provide them to help with their pain points.
And this is something you should keep in mind when creating animated videos.
Instead of talking about your product and its features, you must keep the focus on its benefits, and how those benefits can help solve pain points.
This is very important in particular when you want to attract top-of-the-funnel attention.
So be very thoughtful with the content of your animated videos. Always navigate according to what consumers want and prefer.
You can learn a lot from your competitors; from what they have done, what they are doing, what’s working for them, and what hasn’t.
In fact, the competitors are the biggest source of learning.
So, optimally tap on this ‘source’.
Look at your most successful competitors, analyze their video marketing strategy, and draw some insights that you can use in your own SaaS product video marketing plan.
This way, you can jump to effective execution and bypass the numerous errors and trials your competitors may have gone through.
6. Find your “magical” channels
Ideally, you want to be present on every relevant platform so as to have a wider reach.
But even then, you should select a few channels that are working best for you; channels that are contributing the most to your ROI.
This is important for the strategic allocation of resources and to optimize returns.
So, is it going to be LinkedIn for you or a landing page on your website? Are Instagram Stories working better for you or has Quora brought you better returns?
Find out your “magical” channels and focus more on them. Then, create contextual animated videos for them and shape your SaaS product marketing strategy accordingly.
There are many different types of animation, from 2D and 3D to stick figures and typography to the whiteboard and stop motion.
You have so many options to explore.
Try all popular types of animation. See which one is working better with which of your buyer personas.
Remember, with video marketing, experimentation is the key. If you only stick to 2D animation, you will never know the kind of returns whiteboard explainer videos can bring you.
The more you experiment and test, the more opportunities you will discover to improve the sales of your SaaS products.
Admittedly, in the early days, this may cost you more.
But once you have a clear understanding of which animation types are the right fit for your SaaS products, you can focus more on them for a higher ROI in the long run.
8. Strive for higher engagement
This is marketing 101 today when static prompts like “Buy Now” don’t work and brands have to win consumers’ attention and trust.
This is all the more relevant in the SaaS segment, where the audience prefers to learn more about the brand before committing their money to any product.
The key here is engagement.
The more you strive for engagement with the target audience, the more they will connect with your brand and start trusting you.
(Of course, the conversation has to be relevant and meaningful with high entertainment and utility value.)
Whether you’re explaining your product to the audience or discussing their pain points, make sure the animation is engaging with interactive colors and copy.
Engage with them in different forms as well. Ask them to leave comments; respond to their comments. In the long run, such efforts will bring you excellent results.
In this motion infographic video that we’ve developed for McAfee, the company talks about its product, MVision.
By using Infographic Animation, we made a video for them that not only simplifies the concept but also holds attention with slick transitions.
9. Conversion doesn’t have to be immediate
People won’t buy your SaaS product right after watching your animated explainer videos.
They may not be at the last stage of their customer journey map. They will take time to do research and compare your products against others.
So pushing your ToFu and MoFu audience for sales is not a good idea.
Instead of that, you should have a remarketing strategy.
Re-approach those people with the right message and on the right platform to funnel them down towards sales.
As mentioned earlier, animated videos are impressionable. So, people will already remember you and your products. All you have to do is bring back their attention to you, which is why you need to have a clear remarketing strategy.
In all, don’t obsess over immediate conversion. Instead, with a remarketing strategy, focus on definite conversion.
How many times have you heard “quality of the content is more important than quantity”?
It’s not wrong, but it is only half true.
Today, when competition is high, and consumers’ attention is low, the quantity of the content is just as significant, if not more.
You need to constantly publish more animated videos to reach a wider audience, grab people’s attention, and keep them engaged.
After producing a stellar piece of content, if you go missing in action, people will lose their attention. They may even start engaging with your competitors.
So constantly being out there in front of the target audience with the right message is crucial now.
The more high-quality and relevant animated videos you produce, along with other forms of content, the more growth opportunities you will discover for your SaaS brand.
Nothing tells better stories than animation. And this is what you need in your B2C or B2B SaaS product video marketing strategy.
Tell great stories about your brand; connect those stories with consumers’ pain points and the solutions you bring to the table.
This will help you establish your brand identity, eventually paving a way to build brand value and trust, both of which are essential for business sustainability in modern times.
Check out 5 best SaaS explainer videos to help you lower your customer acquisition cost
These are a few tips on how you can effectively use animation in your SaaS product marketing to boost your sales.
Now, a large part of how well these tips work for you depends on how good your animated videos are.
So, do focus on the quality of the animation. Make sure it’s visually striking and has the right message.
If you need any help, reach out to animated video production companies like Broadcast2World. We have worked with many SaaS brands over the years and have helped them scale their business to newer heights.
Our team assures you of the same outcome. So get in touch with us today, and let’s create a SaaS product video marketing plan on the back of new-age animation.
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