How to use explainer videos in LinkedIn outreach strategies

You always want to be the best salesperson, whether you’re working alone or in a team. But if your prospects don’t even open your outreach messages on LinkedIn – let alone respond and reply to them, how are you going to achieve that?

And more importantly – what can you do about it?

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social networks when it comes to sales outreach and B2B selling. Every salesperson surely knows that. But, as most sales and marketers rely on this platform for outreach strategies, it’s naturally getting harder and harder to make your outreach message stand out when it hits your prospects’ profile.

When it’s feeling like it’s just too painful to send another personalized outreach message that gets ignored, it might be time to leverage explainer videos.

This short, engaging type of video will help you grab your prospects’ attention faster than plain-text messages and make it easier for you to deliver it concisely.

Read on how you can harness the power of explainer videos and get a better result in your LinkedIn outreach campaigns.

The power of explainer videos

Explainer videos are well-known for their capability to break down complicated explanations into smaller chunks, so your prospects can easily digest your message in a matter of minutes.

It uses storytelling and enticing graphics to catch the eye faster, educate prospects about your offers, excite them with stunning visuals and voice-over, and set the mood for a purchase.

As a salesperson, must know that it takes time to build a solid relationship with your prospects. But a well-crafted explainer video (sent via your Dux-Soup automated LinkedIn drip campaign of course!) can expedite this process.

According to the stats, 51% of marketers have used video in their LinkedIn campaigns - with this medium generating more than 300 million impressions on the platform. What’s more, videos on LinkedIn also earn an average of 3 times the engagement of plain-text posts.

These staggering numbers show that video marketing is a great additional tool for your outreach strategy, helping you get quality leads faster (a picture paints a thousand words).

So, let’s now take a look at a real-life example from the iconic explainer videos from Dropbox – one of the popular data hosting services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4eTR7tci6A

During their start-up phase, Dropbox actively invested in Google AdWords to get more prospects using their service. But the results were always disappointing. Like any other small business, they were struggling to reach prospects and move them forward through the sales funnel.

After they’ve spent $233-$388 for their fall-flat outreach marketing campaigns, they decided to create a robust yet straightforward explainer video demonstrating how the service works and benefits its users.

The results?

The 2-minute whiteboard animated explainer video successfully drove hundreds of thousands of people to their website. What’s more, their beta waiting list skyrocketed from only 5,000 prospects to 75,000 people.

And here’s the juicy part… it all happened overnight!

Using explainer videos in your LinkedIn outreach strategies adds a human aspect to your process, which in turn helps kickstart more genuine relationships with your prospective customers, boosts customer retention rate, and builds customer loyalty.

As explainer videos are definitely not a commercial advert, they help you to stand out from the crowd on the platform.

How to use explainer videos in an outreach strategy

Rather than sending a generic sales pitch to leads or investing in LinkedIn paid ads while crossing your fingers and hoping for the best, successful outreach strategies leverage a fruitful explainer video.

Thanks to the internet, with a bunch of tools and software out there, it’s never been easier for salesperson even with limited experience and design skills to create a professional-looking explainer video for their outreach campaigns.

Here are some of the best ways to use explainer videos in an outreach strategy so you can make sure that it works properly and bring the maximum return for a given budget, time, and effort.

#1. Define pain points

Do you know that humans have a shorter attention span than goldfish?

Eight seconds. That’s all the time you have to catch your prospect’s attention before they get distracted.

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The key here is to get their attention right off the bat and hold them. You can achieve that by highlighting your prospect’s pain points from the first few sentences of your explainer videos. By doing so, the prospect can quickly identify your message and retain it right off the top.

So, making your explainer videos short and straightforward is paramount in an outreach strategy. According to Wistia, the sweet spot for an ideal explainer video is 2 minutes and under.

#2. Brand positioning

When it comes to outreach campaigns, communicating what makes your brand unique is a must. Your prospects want to know why they need to invest in your brand rather than your competitors.

‘What makes you worthy?’

You can use explainer videos to show what makes your brand different from your competitors. It allows you to tell who you are and how you can help your prospects solve their problems in your own way.

This way, the prospects can develop an authentic brand identity and clearly position your brand in their mind. To create a good brand positioning so that you can impress your leads in an outreach strategy, you need to showcase your brand image, tone, special colors, and more.

Look how Dollar Shave Club use an explainer video to show their brand position while taking a stab at dry humor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI

The video propelled the company to overnight stardom by bringing them 12,000 new purchases in just two days after it was released.

#3. Tell intriguing stories

In an outreach campaign, your prospects are too busy to hear you bragging about your brand and trying to force them to invest in it. Delivering your message in a friendly way, by telling them stories, means you don’t sound too hard-selling and put people off.

Explainer videos can help you get this balance right.

Explainer videos allow you to use animation and illustration to create an engaging story that’s much easier for them to digest but importantly also gets the point across – while conveying all the company’s attributes, humor, and style.

Here’s an example from Wizzki that nailed their brand story using a well-thought explainer video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtybHjLq2wI

Explainer videos and Dux-Soup

As soon as I saw the recent announcement that with Dux-Soup you can now run multiple, concurrent LinkedIn drip campaigns I knew it was the perfect time to write a short piece about explainer videos.

Creating an explainer video for use in your Linked outreach strategy, and then automating this outreach and qualified lead collection with Dux-Soup has the potential to totally turbo charge your sales results.

With Dux-Soup, you don’t have to spend hours looking for qualified prospects or valuable connections who will be interested in your explainer videos because Dux-Soup does it all for you.

Why not get started today!

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About the author

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Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).

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Twitter: @breadnbeyond

Email: andre@breadnbeyond.com

LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro

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