Improve your CRO video strategy: 5 tips for making videos that convert & pay off

Hey there, video enthusiast! Are you ready to achieve outstanding results? We have the ultimate guide that you can use to transform your creativity into conversions: five genius tips that you can integrate into your strategy to skyrocket the Customer Rate Optimization (CRO) of your videos! First, though, Let’s talk about CRO video strategy: what is it and how does it work?

CRO video strategy? Easier than it sounds

Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it might seem: CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization, the set of practices that you can use to improve your chances of turning viewers into customers or completing a desired action.

Now, when we talk about CRO video strategy, we are referring to the systematic use of videos to increase conversion rates. Instead of relying solely on text or images, videos can be a powerful tool to engage your audience and persuade them toward certain desired actions.

The effects of a CRO video strategy on the marketing sales funnel

Just imagine: you’re browsing one of your social networks when you see a video that catches your eye. So, you stop scrolling for just a moment. It could be a product demo, a customer testimonial, or even an informative tutorial that explains how something works. All of these different types of videos are strategically placed to guide you toward a specific goal, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting more information.

The idea behind a great video marketing sales funnel is to create videos that are not only attention-grabbing, but also provide value for your viewers. You don’t want to simply capture their interest for as long as possible (perhaps until the end of the video); you want to give them a reason to stay and take the particular action that would keep them traveling along your sales funnel. By showcasing your products or services in an engaging way, you can build trust, address any last-minute doubts or concerns your viewers might have, and ultimately increase the likelihood that they will convert into customers.

Positioning is as important as content

But it’s not just about video content. Placement and optimization are equally important. You want to ensure that videos are easily reachable, whether on your site, on social media, or through email campaigns. It’s absolutely critical to optimize your video for different devices and for each platform: Videos should be edited and updated so that they are interesting and work well, regardless of where they are viewed virtually.

CRO and SEO: one goal, two approaches

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic, conversions, and possibly sales. Both CRO and SEO have the same end goal but they pursue it with different approaches. Ultimately, while SEO focuses on increasing traffic to your site, your social accounts or your app, CRO aims to convert that traffic by encouraging more people to take action, whether it’s signing up for your newsletter, filling out a contact form, or making a purchase. In other words, CRO helps you convert the most traffic you can target with SEO. On the one hand, you optimize your touch points to be more visible on search platforms, and on the other, you improve the functionality of your touch points to encourage conversions.

How to calculate the conversion rate

The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors to a website or social network page. For example, if a website receives 1,000 visitors and generates 20 conversions, the conversion rate will be 2%. Optimizing the conversion rate is important because it allows you to reduce your customer acquisition costs and thus get more value from both casual visitors (whom you have managed to qualify) and your regular users (whom you are retaining).

Overall, through a CRO video strategy, you can increase revenue per visitor, acquire more customers, and grow your business. To do this, the key is to make videos that are engaging, concise, relevant, and above all, meaningful to your target audience. Your videos must be recognizable. And they must be able to entertain, even if their main goal is to communicate and convey important information. Oh, and don’t forget to always include a clear call to action: ultimately, you want to guide your viewers to the next step, whether it’s clicking a button, filling out a form, or making a purchase.

Quick tips for harnessing the potential of your CRO video strategy  

Now, we’ll  expand on what we have said so far. The planned actions within a CRO video strategy have the goal of improving conversion rates by leveraging the engaging and persuasive nature of videos. Regardless of the destination of the journey—making a purchase, filling out a form, signing up for your newsletter—a CRO video strategy is the map that harmoniously integrates creative, storytelling, and compelling calls to action into a single data stream. With this map, you can provide reference points to your audience and guide them along their path to conversion.

Although every company, every marketing department, and every single team of marketers integrates video differently within their strategies, we’re sharing five tips that are always effective. From the most inspired storytelling, to leveraging data-driven insights, our tips will help you harness the full potential of your videos.

1. Get to know your audience before you launch your message

First, you need to know your audience incredibly well. To craft a message that resonates with them, you need to understand their desires, concerns, and habits. Next, immerse yourself in research. Put different modes of inquiry in place, from analytics that process massive amounts of data from multiple sources, to qualitative surveys that capture sentiment, to information obtained directly from your customers in the conversation spaces on your digital channels.

The value that a CRO video strategy can provide for both brands and customers lies in its ability to harmoniously combine expressive qualities and rationality. It’s all here in the data-driven insights: every view, click, and interaction is carefully examined to extract meaningful patterns that describe recurring behaviors and widespread perceptions of the target audience.

With this wealth of knowledge at their disposal, marketers can refine every sequence, every scene, every word, and every animation to craft a personalized and memorable experience.

Once your analytics activities have extracted the most useful insights with respect to your goals, you can begin to develop content. Whatever your message, your videos should be designed to capture attention: they should speak directly to your target audience. Don’t just praise the features of your product or service but explain why your solutions are best suited to solve your viewers’ specific problems.

2. Use storytelling to connect with viewers

Stories capture us and have the ability to stir emotions like no other content. Therefore, when it comes to engaging customers, storytelling can prove to be an incredibly powerful tool.

• It creates an emotional connection. You are much more likely to remember something if you experienced it in the form of a story. And you will almost certainly have been much more emotionally engaged if the information was presented to you as a narrative rather than a list of facts or statistics. Storytelling has been a favorite tool of marketers for decades precisely because it has the power to engage customers in a way that other techniques simply cannot match. That is, it’s able to create a stronger emotional connection with the target audience.
• It establishes a relationship of trust. Leveraging the mechanisms of storytelling can nurture a relationship of trust between you and your viewers to a far greater extent than other marketing techniques. For example, by sharing customer testimonials or their personal stories, you can show that you are able to listen, that you understand their needs, and you have already succeeded in solving those particular problems. By using a few special effects, a “behind the scenes” perspective,  and clear, understandable language, through videos you can communicate in a totally transparent and honest way.This allows you to build a reputation for authority and credibility and helps you establish a trusting relationship with your target audience.  

In summary, storytelling in a CRO video strategy employs narrative elements to open and maintain contact, especially emotional contact, with the audience and to develop relationships based on mutual trust. The suggestion here is to use stories in a way that is useful to individual viewers: a view that is not only exciting but more importantly, that is relevant to the problem that needs to be addressed, can turn into an experience worth remembering, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.

3. Take advantage of the distinctive qualities of different types of video  

In today’s fast-paced digital world, the attention threshold of users and consumers is getting lower and lower. To attract viewers and increase the chances of conversion, your videos must fit the context in which they are placed and provide valuable responses that fit the different stages of the customer’s journey. Differentiated video content can function as an extraordinary catalyst for improving conversion rate optimization strategies. There are many benefits of using different video formats:

• Explainer videos allow companies to concisely convey complex ideas, effortlessly capturing the attention of potential customers and guiding them to the desired action.
• Video testimonials wield the power of social proof, instilling trust and credibility in viewers and strengthening conversion rates.
• Product videos allow companies to showcase their offerings in a visually stimulating way, leaving a lasting impression on potential customers and significantly increasing the likelihood of conversions.
• Personalized videos, especially when interactive, are small miracles of innovation that enable brands to make deeper connections with their audiences by making customers finally feel seen and recognized, appreciated and heard, they foster more intense and richer interactions over time.

It goes without saying: not all videos are the same and don’t always serve the same function within the marketing and sales funnel. Some are explanatory, while others are purely promotional. As we have seen, there are customer testimonials, product tutorials, and videos that share the company culture. Each has its own use case and target audience. Finding the right type of video content for your channels can be tricky. For example, you may not be able to rely on your intuition to know the best type of video for your home page. Or you may find that the video that you didn’t expect to perform well actually resonates with your audience. For all of these reasons, the effort you will have to make now turns in two directions: optimize and measure.

4. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize.  

The magic word: optimization. To improve the effectiveness of your video strategy and make sure that you’re search engine friendly, you need to optimize every aspect of your videos: from titles to descriptions, from keywords (which must be consistent with what your target audience is looking for) to captions and subtitles (essential for making videos that are accessible to a wider audience and that increase engagement).

Don’t forget to optimize your videos for different devices and platforms. The key aspect here is to make sure your videos are strategically placed where they will have the greatest impact. By now you know your audience inside out, so you’ll know if they are more likely to interact with videos on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram or if they prefer to watch content on your website. Oh, and don’t forget about mobile optimization! Given the number of people consuming content on their smartphones, make sure your videos are optimized for mobile devices and load quickly.

To maximize the effectiveness of your videos, it is essential to consider key factors such as viewability, context, and user behavior. Here are some basic rules:

• place your videos prominently on your website or landing pages (above the fold or in strategic locations where users are most likely to interact);
• make sure your videos are relevant to the content on the page, provide valuable information, and feature elements that are appropriate to entertain the viewer (pleasing graphics, fun animations, interesting text).

In other words: you need to choose the digital venue where videos can seamlessly integrate with the user experience, for example on relevant product pages or within blog posts. In general, aligning video with user intent and interests helps create a consistent user experience and encourages higher conversion rates.

5. Measuring to improve  

The last aspect to consider when designing a CRO video strategy, but no less important, concerns evaluating the results of the actions you have put in place. Keeping an eye on metrics such as views, engagement rates and, of course, conversion rates is absolutely critical. And don’t forget to monitor other important metrics that allow you to understand how users interact with your videos, e.g., play rate, engagement, and abandonment points.

Monitoring different KPIs allows you to quickly understand what works and what doesn’t, and you can use this information to refine and iterate your video content and experiment with different formats, styles, and calls to action to find the winning combination that consistently generates conversions.

Top-performing videos lend themselves well to extended A/B tests that compare two different versions of the same content. Remember that video ranking optimization is an ongoing process by which you can evolve and translate changes into opportunities for growth.

There you have it: our five tips for designing a CRO video strategy and getting conversions in quantity and especially, quality. Now, it’s up to you to use your videos strategically to increase conversion rates: create engaging content, optimize its placement, and encourage your viewers to take action.

Babelee

Copywriters, video creators, digital marketers and developers: this is who we are! Young, passionate, geeky and very keen on media and technology. Fancy to meet the team? Contact us or submit your cv, we love talented people.