‘All on board!’ – Uhm, you got a video for that?

How do you get your users to start using your product?

This is one of the questions I hear the most on a daily basis. Marketers today know very well that getting people to buy a product is just the first quarter of the ball game. You’re off to a good start and scored a couple of points but, since this is the first quarter, it still can become a very bad game. As a matter of fact, your your newly won customer very well could make use of the option to ask for his money back or end the trial well before the end of the game. These are the modern days. Selling is nice, but the crunch time in 2015 is all about keeping customers on the system for the whole season and not just one game.

How do you achieve this?

It should be quite easy: Tell them how great the product is, what it can do for them and, how it works.. That’s a lot of coaching, books and manuals before they can even start using the product. No user today is prepared to do that anymore. Today, even complicated products do not ship manuals. They scare people.

If you buy a GoPro camera today, they ask you to go to their website and watch a video. ‘Aaaaahhhh! Yes, that’s why I bought this and look, this is how it works!’ Funnily enough, after watching the first video you don’t really know how the camera actually works. You get to see a couple of image and creative guidance videos that happen to show various accessories you can get for the camera. ‘Oh look! How cute this dog looks with the GoPro on his back!’ In the SaaS world we call that up-sell! At this point you really want to know how this cool camera works because you want to take these cool videos yourself and be part of the cool crowd! At this point you are ready for the actual tutorial that is placed right underneath the other clips.

This is the experience and the emotional thrill ride (-ish) that your users will expect from you. Offer them plenty of reasons, enrich it emotionally so that the users right after are ready to watch the rather dull tutorials to actually learn how your software works.

But why video, written manuals are nice!

People shorten their texts and tweets of max 140 characters, because they are too lazy to read and write a couple of words. For all you know what is worth a full page of text for a twenty year-old. Vine, Instagram and now Twitter recognized that visual communication is the only way to go today. Today messages are consumed via pictures or short videos.

Capture your chance!

While this trend towards a much more visualized communication has all the traditional marketing people scrambling for their old Video-8 cameras, wondering where they had that empty tape, all the others have to recognize how big a chance that is.

You now finally can play the emotional game to its full extend again. Your targets are now open for short videos that you can produce cost-efficiently to a high standard and push out all the messaging nobody wanted to read in years past. What had to be a single-line instruction can now be a 30 second video.

Your user will appreciate that. Combine Reason-to-believe content with creative how-to leading to plain tutorial videos. If your product is complex, break it down into little, brief chunks and guide your users through the steps. Don’t make it long or dry, but entertaining and crisp. Your users will appreciate your efforts.

For OXCS, OX Customer Success , we offer our clients a broad variety of videos that they can either use as is or customize for their needs. We constantly look to improve this service to better support our customer base that faces the same problem as anyone in the SaaS world does: I have this great product, but how do I get my customers to see it? Videos help a lot and are in high demand.

Thinking about it, I should’ve made a video for this post…