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Here’s the punchline: Video can be a powerful tool at each stage of your sales funnel.
Most small businesses have a general sense of their customer’s decision-making process when it comes to making a purchase, but they don’t always examine the nitty gritty that makes it happen.

Guess what! You’re a franchise owner…

Before the internet, marketing focused almost exclusively on the awareness stage of the process, leaving it to the salesperson to do the rest. The idea was that if you could get your customer to come into the store, you could talk them through the rest of the process. Print and TV ads dedicated themselves almost exclusively to stimulating desire.
But nowadays, people may never walk into a physical store or even visit your website; Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, and customer reviews tell them just about everything they need to know. These aren’t just the platforms where they get information– the newspaper, magazine, and TV ads of today. They are now the shop. It’s where the funnel process happens. You can either leave it to other companies to guide customers through the decision-making process, or take control. Let others do the work, and you’ll save some money… but miss the opportunity to greet them at the door.

In general, people’s buying process is a lot more sophisticated than it was ten years ago. A decade ago you’d walk into a store, survey the three or four toaster ovens on the shelf, and either buy the brand you knew or the cheapest available. Nowadays, customers look at ten different brands, read dozens of reviews, watch a tutorial, visit any number of online stores for the best deal. Their process, the funnel, can be broken down into three distinct stages: Product or service awareness. Consideration (or evaluation). And decision. Each stage has its own video opportunities:

• In the Awareness stage, people want to see product commercials, as well as brand and company culture videos to understand you.
• When it comes to Consideration, they look for reviews, testimonials, and How to use videos.
• And in the final Decision stage they may rely on tutorials, FAQs, and comparison videos before taking the final leap.

When you consider their decision-making process, you can see why marketing agencies recommend that you create more than one video. No single video can address all the stages of your customer’s process. This doesn’t mean you have to create every type of video, but you do want to insert yourself into their thinking before they reach the “shop for the lowest price” stage.

In each stage of the funnel, customers are asking a question, and you need to know what that question is and how best to answering it. Let’s say you sell ballpoint pens (no, I’m not going to give you the “sell me this pen” routine). Your customer needs a gift for his spouse, a professor. He wonders what type of gift he should purchase. In the awareness stage, you might highlight the brand’s elegance, and craftsmanship. In the Consideration stage, the buyer wonders if the cost is justified, and the dealer illustrates how easy it is to swap the ink—multiple pens in an elegant package. In the Decision stage our almost-pen-buyer, asks if this is the best pen for his partner, and you enlighten him on all the famous writers who use your brand. In this hypothetical transaction, the you know what questions the buyer has at each stage of the funnel, and the most compelling response. Now, all you need is the customer for the customer to find you. And you need to get them to a place where you can answer their questions.

Your store is being managed by someone else

Online, this is difficult. It’s a highly competitive feeding ground where most of the watering holes are pay to play.

The truth is, you no longer own your shop. But you do own part of a franchise, with outlets in Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Google My Business, and LinkedIn.
And your website, and possibly Amazon.com. These online platforms are extensions of your shop, but they’re being managed by other people. Marketing and branding are, in many respects, your tools for regaining control of your shop. The sales funnel becomes the framework for creating a strategy for holding a conversation about your product.

What’s the takeaway here? You should determine what questions your customers ask at each stage of the decision-making process, and then create media that answers those questions. Next, determine which platforms your customers use to search for these answers, and keep in mind that they may ask different questions on different platforms. Millions of 25 year-olds use Instagram, but just because they may satiate their “pen lust” on those pages, it doesn’t mean they’re looking for tutorials on how to replace their pen tip. Push your media out to the platforms where customers are the questions.
And take control of the conversation.

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