A 2022 practical practical and idea-packed guide to the most suitable types of video for expanding clients
Tim Cumming and Helen Pain, updated 11 Jan 2022
In marketing, we don't like to admit that occasionally, we've no clue what to say. We may have loose ideas, messages, short fragments, sentences, straplines, or a clear sense of the big picture. Yet, we lack the weekly, monthly, or daily narratives that are required to communicate a simple message.
There's a very good reason for this: it is fabulously complex. Without some kind of map, or orientation to guide us through the maze of the different occasions customers might be searching, browsing, interrogating, or comparing, we haven't got a chance to nail down the exact format or message, or level of daring in terms of asking for the business.
This guide will help to reveal a little more about Google moments versus Land and Expand videos.
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Google's search-orientated approach
Google likes to see moments as a three category system: Hero, Hub and Help moments.
Hero
This is for when a customer is prepared to be impressed, to sit back and absorb your positive sales messages at a light or high level. The videos you might use would be proposition, services or product explainers, tasters, or stories revealing features and benefits. Hero pieces are usually more glamorous, high budget and make a more showy statement.
Hub
Google argues that customers are willing to journey inwards, into your website or social media, to discover or learn. These are distinct from Hero because the customer is looking for something - the known, or unknown, information. These video types are interactive, explainers, testimonials, case studies, or videos about your specialisms, events or insights into markets, sectors, processes or other forms of narrowed down content.
Help
These are about how to use the service or product you are selling and include demos, how-to films, tutorials, client or staff trainers. Google, being Google, looks beyond the classification of the content into how advertising can be sold around these types of content and the usefulness and volume of searches performed by users.
You might take all or this with a certain pinch of salt, or you might not. If you're a search-orientated company, i.e., if your customers tend to find you via search engines, this kind of model is more helpful for you. Videos that fit into these categories will be useful and match the kinds of journeys your customers go on in order to discover you.

Alternative approach
If your business is not a predominantly search-driven business, like most small and medium sized firms, the Hero/Hub/Help pieces will have some utility, but will fall short in a number of real world customer moments. A different approach which reflects nine different groups of moments, is less dependent on search and more likely to represent the varied ways the customers find you. These can include not just search, but social, blogging, email, and offline forms of communication such as networking, events, and snail mail.
The nine levels of interest are:
- Attracting
- Assuring
- Explaining
- Persuading
- Prospecting
- Nurturing
- Convincing
- Onboarding
- Land and Expand
These moments typically reflect the various levels of interest, purpose or intention that your customer might bring to their search for a solution to their problem.
Land and Expand videos
This is a moment defined by you. It's the odd one out; the only moment which is called by your client services team, or your sales team. You create an opportunity to upsell or cross sell further services or products you believe are relevant to your existing client. Your client may well be aware of the services or products because they've seen them in social media or on your website, but this is the moment where you're drawing the attention of one specific client towards a particular product or service.
The character of land and expand videos is not dissimilar from explainer, persuader, or convincer videos in that you're selling almost afresh, explaining the benefits, features, processes, imagined outcomes and vision for your client, which are quite similar to the kinds of messaging that you projected in the earlier parts of your client journey when they were still a prospect.
The big difference here is that this company is now a client, and they already have a sense of who you are, and what you're like, so while your messaging can knowingly communicate the benefits and features in a very clear way, expander videos also have the job of reflecting the truth that the client has already experienced. An explainer video, for example, has the job of selling a single idea on its own, whereas an expander video needs to suggest clearly how the idea adds to, or extends, the client's existing experience.
Your job is to say 'why now' and what the relevance is to the moment they are presently in. As such, a customised one-to-one video is a better approach than a generic one. Video formats like these include:
Product Videos
When your buyers are ready to step past the awareness stage, into your proposition, the product video tells the story of its benefits and the buyer's pain and remedy. This is where their desire grows. Product videos also provide buyers with visual proof of a product or service, ideally in use (scale, function, appearance and user feel are all useful). Viewers really like familiar formats like before-and-after, pain-and-remedy, swift demos and even maintenance and repair stories.
Scenarios
A scenario video is designed to reveal optional outcomes to your viewers in a way that educates. It demonstrates strategic understanding and describes what correspondents think are the possible outcomes of a crisis or a current situation. Guidance should be given on the probability of each scenario.
Terminology, such as 'building on your...' or 'adding to your experience of...' are relevant in this moment. The CTA will always be about contacting your client account manager, or your regular point of contact.
Do List
- Create sales opportunity through customised video: Video technologies are sufficiently sophisticated to easily produce a generic video with customised, overlaid text, or customised storytelling and footage through the use of piping or user-controlled content. You'll need a special player for this, so check with your video agency before making your decision.

Already got this covered?
If you already have business videos and they're not generating response, there's much above that will help you improve their performance. But what would be even better than your current business videos?
One-minute Improvers
- Cross-check all your business videos largely follow the above suggestions, or deviate for good reasons
- Ensure you've used on-site CTAs which match your buyer journey moments
- Ensure your social videos, articles and posts have off-site CTA's that match your buyer journey
- Check your business videos match the messaging your audience needs to hear
- Check viewing behaviours - if audiences aren't watching to the end, revise your video
- Do buyers want to know what you're like?
- Do buyers want proof of your success?
- Should you provide buyers with the information they want?
- Do buyers want a sense of what will happen to them if they buy from you?
- Do buyers need to find you easily via search and social media?
- Do you need to be seen as relevant and modern?
- Goal setting: choose a video agency that can offer you all levels of interest
- Understanding: realise the full potential of videos, and implement into your project
- Strategy: choose your effective performance measures of your video
- Implement: choose an agency that can capture sentiment
- Achieve: use key moments to track response and increase audience capture

What's at Risk here? A one-minute test
The risk of doing something wrong always hinders us as decision makers. And equally, the risk of doing nothing lurks behind that too. Both carry the risk of failure. So why not delay - deferring looks safer. Like a Whitehall mandarin. Is that the kind of decision maker you want to be? Thought not. So here's a helpful checklist for wise decision maker inside you that's aching to be heard.
The One-minute Decision Checklist
If the answer to any three of these is yes, you should almost certainly proceed with this. Or at least be questioning why you have so many no's.

Conclusion
By defining moments in a client's journey, you hugely increase their discovery of you and their connection with you, securing the prospect of future business:
The very process of considering what your video content should say will generate more ambitious thinking. This way, your marketing will have greater attention and conversion.
So, now you've considered using a Land and Expand video in the buyer journey, you've moved closer to your goal. Time for a chat about success with video?
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