Are you struggling to connect with potential customers and expand your brand in the SaaS industry?
Do you find yourself explaining your product or service repeatedly with little success?
Your land and expand strategy should include SaaS explainer videos!
Explainer videos are an effective tool for communicating complex information in a concise and engaging way.
By using visual aids and storytelling techniques, you can captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression.
Whether you're introducing a new product or service, explaining a complicated concept, or simply trying to build brand awareness, explainer videos can help you achieve your goals.
You can also use them internally to explain how to operate
license tracking software or any other tool to your employees.
So how do you stand out from the competition, connect with your prospects and land your first deal in the target account?
And how do you convince and inspire the decision-makers higher up in the hierarchy to expand within the account?
SaaS Explainer Videos tell stories that can empower you to land, expand fast within your accounts and help you minimize your customer acquisition cost.
SaaS Explainer Videos tell stories that can empower you to land, expand fast within your accounts and help you minimize your customer acquisition cost.
In this blog, we'll explore the benefits of using explainer videos to land and expand your brand in the SaaS industry.
From creating compelling content to promoting your videos across multiple channels, we'll cover everything you need to know to get started. So, let's dive in and learn how to leverage the power of explainer videos to take your SaaS business to the next level!
Land and expand is all about starting small and then gradually building trust with the customer.
You can begin by offering a small product or service, which can demonstrate the value of your offering and help establish your credibility.
From there, you can expand your offerings to include more features or additional products, leading to increased revenue and a deeper relationship with the customer.
One of the great benefits of the land and expand strategy is that it allows you to enter new markets with ease.
By starting with a small, entry-level product, you can establish a presence in a new market and then expand your offerings as you gain more customers and market share.
By starting small, building trust, and gradually expanding your offerings, you can create a mutually beneficial relationship with your customers and position your company for long-term success.
Here is a guide on executing SaaS land and expand strategy by SaaSSales.
The SaaS market is extremely diverse, quite complex, and highly competitive. At early stages when you are trying to land into an account you generally take a bottom to top approach.
So you want to connect with those specific users who are at the front-facing those operational challenges that your product is going to solve. Every individual is driven by certain goals, aspirations, & purposes in life.
Firstly your saas video should tell a story that captures them specifically. Once you have their attention, you need to engage them.
For that, your story needs to talk about the problems you are going to solve.
And finally, your story should end with the transformation of the user or the hero for the good. That is how his or her life is going to change post using your SaaS product and inspire them for action.
Look at this animated storytelling video used by Adobe Analytics to connect with their prospects:
In under 2 minutes, the video takes you through a relatable journey you can relate to. It talks about how Adobe Analytics can increase your efficiency and save you time for your fun things in life.
It also talks about how Adobe can enable you to fulfill your manager's expectations and get you the appreciation you deserve.
As you might’ve guessed, the ones who would actually appreciate such content are individual users. It is these people who care about the features and your product’s efficiency (and consequently theirs).
Your product story should specifically address them. It should talk about their struggles and how your software helps solve them.
Let’s look at another live-action tv commercial video by Salesforce:
The saas animated video talks about the customer, Room & Board, first. This helps you get a better understanding of where they’re coming from.
Then when they talk about how Salesforce helped them, it makes more sense. Check out how long will it take to make your custom animated explainer.
By doing this, the video puts you in the customer’s foot and makes you understand how going for the product was the best decision. Their success story inspires you to have your own success story with Salesforce.
For individual users, the video tells the story of how Salesforce helped them boost efficiency. Since that is something individual users care about, the video urges them to try the software out.
Once you have enrolled the individual users, the next goal is to inspire decision-makers and get the whole organization on board—let’s talk about this in the next section.
As a SaaS company, you follow a subscription model for your services. Most of your customers will bring in revenue after a year or so. Clearly, closing a deal isn’t the end for you.
You need to delight existing users so they stick around and spread the word about your services.
At this stage, you also need to connect with decision-makers and get their buy-in for SaaS expansion within the target account.
People at the top are not interested in transactional things, they usually have higher needs and aspirations. Unlike those lower down, they don’t care much about features and efficiency.
Their goals revolve around increasing market share, growing the company, strengthening the position of the brand in the market, etc.
Now your stories should talk about their goals and purpose in life. So you need to connect those dots between your SaaS product and their desires.
Once they are hooked to your story, your SaaS explainer should express empathy for the kind of challenges they have to overcome for achieving their goals. And finally, how your product can empower them and transform their lives.
Let’s look at this animated storytelling SaaS video used by Gsuite from Google to connect with prospects higher up in the hierarchy:
In this video Google smartly talks about possibilities of having a workspace where ideas float free, where everyone can work together as one team and business runs better.
Now, these things are very close to people at the top and this video can touch their hearts inspiring them to take action!
This video by Salesforce is another great example of how SaaS videos can help you expand:
The video starts by talking about the vision of Barclays, a customer of Salesforce. This defines the target audience.
The only ones who would be interested in watching the video beyond this point would be the top-level management. Those are the people responsible for giving an overall direction to the company. They take care of the big plans.
Explore, 10 secrets to high impact explainer videos.
It also talks about how the company wanted to ensure that they’re providing value to their customers even in the future. That too is something more relevant for those at the top. So when they watch this video, they’re more likely to convert.
As a marketer, you run nurturing campaigns in the hope to convert your free trials into paid customers and then expand them to drive maximum value.
When I say expand, it means either upgrading the same user to higher packages or increasing the number of users within the same account, or maximizing the lifetime value of the paying customer.
But with so much competition and the reducing attention span of our customers, how can you keep engaging them and create strong brand recall?
There are different kinds of videos that can be used across SaaS marketing telling stories as per the use case and objectives.
Also when it comes to nurturing your existing customers you can pick and choose your accounts which will give you more returns in the long run.
We have already discussed SaaS explainer videos in detail, so let’s look at other types of videos for your SaaS products below:-
When you think of a product demo, you probably think of making the audience go through your software on a video call. While that isn’t an issue for big teams, smaller teams might struggle to give each user an in-person demo.
This is where SaaS demo videos come in. They explain how users can use various features of your software. From the simplest tasks to the most complex ones, these videos make everything easy to understand.
These videos help the users make the most of your software.
They can even give the users a glimpse of how they will benefit from the paid version of your software, thus inspiring them to make a purchase. Follow these steps to create high converting software demo videos.
But the main objective here is customer retention and experience. These videos enable the support team for customer success.
Since these videos are great at explaining how the software works, the support team can simply show them to the customers. This way, they only have to spend time on customers with issues only they can solve.
A good example of how demo videos work is this one by SeaChange:
It delivers precisely what it promises. It tells the users how to use the features on SeaChange.
And it does that by showing the screen to the users so that they can do it simultaneously on their device.
This video is highly focused and discusses only one function. You could try juggling between such bite-sized videos and full-length demos. It all depends on how your audience would like to consume the content.
Here are best product demo videos examples.
But SaaS demo videos are not just for feature-specific education. They work just as well for onboarding new customers.
When you’re new on a platform, it almost feels like an alien world. You don’t know much of what’s happening around you. And it can get frustrating really quickly.
You’ll soon walk away from the platform unless it’s absolutely necessary for you to be there.
To prevent your customers from doing the same and to make the time they spend on your platform worthwhile, you need to onboard them properly.
You need to equip them with all the knowledge they would need to make the best out of your software.
Onboarding videos can help you out with that. They can guide your customers through your platform and make them understand how it works—all at their own pace.
In some ways, it works better than in-person demos.
Look at how Shift used SaaS onboarding videos to make new customers feel at home:
The video takes the audience through the basics of the platform and gets them up and running to use the platform properly. Whatever is left can then be learned with the help of demo videos.
A similar approach has been used by Sponsorium in this video:
In this video, Sponsorium emphasizes that Sponsorships are important. But they can also be complicated, and quite a hassle to manage.
Investors struggle to find the right entities to sponsor and vice versa. This is not just a hassle, it’s inefficient and expensive. And as they say, time is money.
Sponsorium understood this issue all too well. That’s why they created their unique SaaS platform to help sponsors cut through the fog and do what they do best-- unleashing their creativity, intuition, and building rewarding new projects.
Next, we’re going to look at a type of SaaS video that can help you build trust with social proof.
We’re talking about testimonial videos, they are similar to explainer videos where the story is about a hero's quest.
When you talk about the experience your customers have had with your software, it builds trust.
People take word of mouth seriously. And when they see that someone like them used your software and saw great success with it, they trust that.
Let’s take a look at this humorous SaaS testimonial video by Slack:
The video is a bit on the goofier side but it does an awesome job at getting the message across. When Sandwich Video Inc talks about their experience, you find it relatable.
Communication issues aren’t rare in companies and you can see how Slack can help bridge the gap.
By using humor in the video, the company ensured that you feel at ease and see the video as an entertaining one.
It is by being entertaining that it ensures your attention for almost two and a half minutes. Get some more examples here.
When you need to build hype about your product pre or post-launch, promotional videos are the way to go.
These are also called commercial or 30-second explainer videos, and they follow the format of concise storytelling.
This format is just enough to hook the audience, create brand awareness and drive traffic to your landing pages.
These videos are generally short and don’t get into intrinsic details about the product.
A great example of promo videos is this one by McAfee:
When McAfee came to us they were planning for rebranding globally. They wanted to be perceived as a cyber security company.
The story just focuses on the desires of the target audience and makes them curious about Mvision as a product. Here we produced mixed-media animation commercial
These videos can also be effectively used to target decision-makers at the top. As they are always short of time, such videos can pique their interest.
Check out 5 best SaaS explainer videos to help you lower your customer acquisition cost
In conclusion, explainer videos are a powerful tool for any SaaS business looking to expand their reach and grow their customer base.
By simplifying complex information, building trust with potential customers, and promoting your content across multiple channels, you can effectively execute your land and expand strategy.
Through the use of engaging visuals, animations, and storytelling techniques, you can effectively communicate the unique value proposition of your product or service, and establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry.
Explore, How to use animated SaaS product videos to increase sales?
So don't wait any longer, start creating high-quality explainer videos today to take your SaaS land and expand strategy to the next level.
By leveraging the power of these videos, you can capture the attention of potential customers, build trust, and ultimately drive growth for your business.
Our animated SaaS explainer video company can empower you to tell stories that engage, clarify your message and inspire your audience.
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