Anyone who has mastered scaling knows the simple tenet that in today’s world of information overload and diminishing attention spans, people do not buy products; they buy clarity. To scale, you have to drive this clarity relentlessly across a mesh of complex systems, and you have to do it all at great speed.
You see, in the early days of a SaaS company, founders take it upon themselves to explain the product to every stakeholder. Every demo is live, personal, and improvised. Scrappiness is charming, and early customers tolerate this human imperfection because they see a founder with a vision.
But scaling changes the rules.
Pipelines grow, teams expand and now the best version of the product story must be told hundreds of times, consistently, clearly and still somehow carry the identity and ethos that it was built on.
What once worked through conversation now has to work through different systems and communication channels that reach a wide variety of stakeholders. This is where video stops being “a nice-to-have” asset and becomes a critical part of your information and communication infrastructure.
Last year, 83% of video marketers said that video led to directly increased sales. Over 82% found that video increased the dwell time on their website significantly, and 6 out of every 10 organisations reported that videos helped them reduce support queries.
This is because video allows scaling SaaS companies to turn their best pitch into repeatable assets. It transforms complex workflows into clear narratives, aligns marketing, sales, and product around a single story and creates trust at a distance when founders are no longer on every call.
This guide is built for SaaS and B2B tech teams that are scaling and feeling the friction. It breaks down how video becomes a revenue driver, how SaaS video marketing is fundamentally different, and how to build a system of videos that supports growth across the entire funnel, from first click to long-term retention.
Video Is a Top Revenue Driver for SaaS Because…
1. It Shortens Sales Cycles Drastically
You know the exhaustion of a long, drawn-out sales cycle that is often driven by stakeholders at different levels who take their own time to evaluate the product (as they should their accountability is on the line), and you find yourself doing repeated product explanations, doubting yourself for not closing the deal already.
Videos cut through this friction like a knife through butter.
Several studies done across industries have proven that adding video to sales emails can increase response rates by over 200 percent. A video enables buyers to self-educate, making them spend less time meeting vendors and giving the gratification of making an informed choice on their own accord.
A video that factors all of these things will answer the most common questions before a sales call even happens and this drives smooth demos and faster evaluation to decision with clarity.
2. It Improves Product Understanding
Most SaaS products operate inside workflows that buyers may not fully understand at first glance and this lack of understanding can really come in the way of helping them see the use case of a product for their organisation.
A well-made video will accomplish the following three outcomes for you effectively:
- It will show workflows rather than describe them.
- It will demonstrate outcomes instead of listing features.
- It will explain integrations and edge cases visually.
This will help your customers contextualise your product within their everyday operations and help them see its many possibilities. This drives trial activation and adoption faster than any sales strategy because it makes choosing your product feel like an empowered choice for your customers.
According to Vidyard, viewers retain 95 percent of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10 percent when reading it in text. For complex SaaS products, this difference directly impacts trial activation and adoption.
3. It Supports PLG and Sales Led Models
You can tailor your video narrative depending on the strategy that you are leading with.
If you follow a Product Led Growth model, you can shape your video narrative in multiple ways such as:
- A product demo that increases trial activation.
- An onboarding video that reduces drop- offs.
- A feature- driven video that appeals to users and drives expansion.
Whether you follow a product- led growth model, a sales-led approach, or a hybrid of both, video supports the core motion.
And if you follow a Sales Led model, you can tweak it into:
- Explainers that qualify inbound leads
- Demo videos that accelerate sales cycles
- Customer stories that drive validation and build deal confidence
D. It Builds Credibility and Trust in Crowded SaaS Markets
Buyers are saturated with marketing pitches for multiple SaaS products, each telling a new story of transformation and trying to win them over with a unique sales strategy.
In the backdrop of this saturation, buyers are comparing and evaluating your SaaS product at various levels, both direct and indirect. Sometimes on information and sometimes on emotion. Both rationality and abstraction are at play here in notions of the human psyche.
A video that is crafted to drive your brand identity can be your champion to make sure that your voice is heard by the buyer. It will help build credibility through a well-crafted, compelling story that can validate the choices your buyer will make when choosing you.
If you do this well, scaling becomes a play of joy, and you can move on to the next challenge on your SaaS journey.
The Uniqueness of B2B Video Marketing for SaaS
The average B2B buying group for SaaS generally involves 6 to 10 stakeholders, operational heads, and CXOs, each with their own set of priorities and risk thresholds.
Gartner reporters have documented it time and again that less than 20 percent of SaaS buyers spend their time meeting their potential vendor; the majority will make the purchase decision based on self-guided research and peer validation.
The beauty of SaaS products is that they are not transactional in nature, they do have a real impact on workflows, data and teams…but this means that for truly scaling your SaaS through video marketing you have to work really hard on education, alignment and building trust at scale.
This will involve focusing on the following concepts:
Explaining Complex Workflows, Not Just Features
The pride of the development teams is the features that they have so painstakingly designed, the complex workflows they have developed. But so often, SaaS marketers with their videos will try to prioritise the features and, in doing so, will lose out on truly communicating the essence of their workflow.
An effective SaaS video on the other hand will focus on bringing it all together and making sure that your buyers get a clear picture about:
- The before and after state - the visible, tangible difference your product brings into their lives.
- How the product fits into the daily work of their teams.
- The business outcomes delivered, that’s where the ROI questions get answered.
Multiple Stakeholders in Buying Decisions
Imagine your product rising through a pyramid of buyers within the organisation, first come the users at the base who evaluate functionality, then come the managers who look for efficiency, then come the technical evaluators who will point out the red flags, and finally come the core decision makers who will measure the impact in the long term and make the decision on onboarding.
Now to truly scale with your video marketing efforts you need to tailor your messaging for each of these sets of buyers and you need:
- High-level explainer for executives and managers.
- Workflow demos for users.
- Security or integration videos for technical teams
Role of Video in Onboarding and Retention
Retention should be one of your topmost priorities for scaling. Retention is where SaaS revenue compounds and videos play a critical role in helping users reach value faster.
When revenue is driven by a subscription model, increasing customer retention by as little as 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% (Bain & Co research). Retention is a sign that customers have reached their true moment of value, and this increase in revenue compounds month after month.
And good retention is often driven by a strong onboarding experience.
To achieve this, you can use it effectively to reduce cognitive load on your users. Instead of asking them to read long documents, show them a video during onboarding with their use case in the context.
Smooth Onboarding >>> First True Moment of Value >>> Successful Retention>>> Scale That Compounds.
This trajectory is only seamless when communication is clear, contextual and distributed across channels that reach all the stakeholders in a critical time period.
And the best way to do this is to start planning a video strategy that caters to your user journey from onboarding to retention.
Common SaaS Video Marketing Mistakes
Just putting together a video budget is not enough, you have to draft an effective video strategy along with it that delivers on your goals.
A good video production agency will hold your hand and create the right strategy for you, but most times marketers work with vendors who have little understanding of SaaS business and this leads to fundamental strategy gaps that almost make you lose your belief in video marketing.
But it is not videos that are the problem here but some common mistakes that so many marketers make.
Inconsistent messaging, an excessive feature driven approach to the script, a lack of clear call to action and video that is too indulgent in its own products.
There are many reasons like these that can lead to your product demos, explainer and onboarding videos to underperform and underdeliver frustratingly. We have analysed hundreds of videos and have written about these mistakes in detail here and here.
Once you have taken a note of these mistakes you are now ready to craft high impact video strategy.
Building a High Impact Video Strategy
A true transformation in video marketing happens when you stop looking at videos as mere content pieces and start treating them as a tool that is an integral part of your growth strategy.
These are the top 3 points you must consider when creating a high impact video strategy.
1. Align Video Goals with Revenue Stages
This is when you will see how videos align directly with the revenue stage you are at. The question is not “What video should we make next?”, it is “What is blocking growth at this stage?”
At the awareness stage, your videos should be about helping the audience see your product in the context of their everyday issues. High performing awareness videos focus on the pain, the cost of inaction, and the category you operate in. Success at this stage is measured by qualified traffic and engagement from the right accounts, not immediate conversions.
During activation, videos help reduce uncertainty and cognitive load. Short product walkthroughs, use case videos, and first step guides help users reach their initial moment of value faster. The metric that matters here is not views, but whether users act on the given call to action.
For the conversion stage turn your video into a decision making tool for your users. Help them compare options, establish credibility, appeal to all stakeholders in the equation. This is where demo videos, testimonials come into the picture.
And finally when at the retention stage as we have written here before the role of videos here is to provide timely guidance. Feature adoption videos, and product update explainers help customers continuously understand how to get more out of the product.
2. Define Your Core SaaS Use Case
Before scripting any video there are three core questions you must have complete clarity on:
i) Who is making the buying decision versus who uses the product every day, since they will be caring about different outcomes you have to know who you are writing for.
ii) Narrow down the most important pain-point that often becomes your hook. A great hook ensures users don’t drop off from the early stages of the video.
iii) Third, define what success looks like in the first 30 days, because early wins drive activation, retention, and confidence in the product.
A clarity on these points will help you create videos that are sharper, your internal feedback will be more precise and your users will get exactly what they are looking for.
3. Know the Video Type You Need To Choose Right Now
Different video formats serve different purposes. Your video marketing ecosystem will comprise of videos in each of these categories:
- Explainer videos help with positioning and clarity
- Product demos drive deeper engagement and support conversion.
- Onboarding videos drive adoption and lead towards increased chances of retention.
- Customer stories build trust, credibility and help users settle their doubts. .
You can read about all these types of videos with a detailed explanation for each of them here or watch a video we made describing each of them in detail.
Together, these video types form a connected system that supports the entire SaaS growth journey, from first impression to long term retention.
Refine Your Video Marketing Approach With These Essential Tips
Lead with the Problem, Not the Platform
Be it writing effective hooks for your scripts or outlining the goals your video strategy should achieve, always start with the pain-points. Writing down all the keywords related to the pain points will help you see a starting point.
A place where your buyers can anchor themselves before they start listening to you about your product. If this anchor is absent users drop off and video marketing fails to deliver from the very beginning.
Show Real Use, Not Just UI Tours
Lead your buyers to imagine the possibilities they can explore with your product, it demonstrates some real-life scenarios, you may have to step away from the ui for a bit and bring in a more human centric approach to your messaging. Design Videos for the Funnel Stage
Match intent to stage.
A homepage video should not look like a sales demo. An onboarding video should not feel like a brand ad. Companies circulate the same video everywhere but this really impacts extracting the most out of your video. Craft your video strategy to match your intent.
Where Decisions Happen Keep It Short & To The Point
High intent moments call for grabbing the attention in the most meaningful and optimised of ways. Understanding the environment in which your audience is watching the videos can help you figure out the duration of your videos that you should aim for.
Our general observation over the years after making hundreds of videos for SaaS and tech clients at WhatAStory has helped us arrive at the following duration for these set of videos.
- Homepage videos: 60 to 90 seconds
- Sales follow ups: 45 to 60 seconds
- Onboarding Videos: Up to 2 mins.
Craft a Compelling CTA
Every video should guide the next step you want the buyer to make:
- Book a personalized demo
- Start your free trial
- See your use case live
- Talk to a product expert
A clear CTA matches the viewer’s stage, not your sales goal. It is action oriented but low friction. It avoids generic phrases like “Contact us” where possible and most importantly it makes the outcome clear, not the effort.
The Right Channel & Platforms For Your Videos
SaaS companies see the highest impact from video when it is placed at moments of decision, not scattered randomly. Each touchpoint serves a different purpose in the buyer and user journey, video should be used to reduce friction at exactly those points.
Here’s a table to help you understand the different places where you can use your videos
Measuring SaaS Video Marketing Performance
In SaaS video marketing, it is not surface level engagement but revenue impact that defines the success. The most meaningful metrics are those that show whether video is helping prospects and users move forward in the journey.
Such metrics are directly tied to growth.
- Demo requests influenced by video, which indicate whether video is driving qualified sales conversations.
- Trial to paid conversion shows whether video helps users understand value well enough to commit.
- Feature adoption reveals whether onboarding and enablement videos are helping users use the product more deeply.
- Retention impact is the strongest signal, showing whether video contributes to long term customer value and reduced churn.
Raw views, likes, and follower count may indicate reach, but they do not explain whether video influenced a buying decision or improved product usage. These vanity metrics can create a false sense of success without revealing real business impact.
For SaaS companies, the real question is not how many people watched a video. It is what viewers did next, and whether that action moved revenue forward.
In Conclusion
At What a Story we have created 1200+ videos for SaaS and tech companies from around the world and we see that one pattern is consistent - the teams that see real impact from video are not chasing trends or formats, they are building a highly effective video strategy into their growth systems.
We have seen firsthand that video works best when it is treated as infrastructure, not a one off campaign. Explainers that sharpen positioning, demos that reduce sales friction, onboarding videos that accelerate time to value, and customer stories that reinforce trust all serve different but connected purposes.
When these pieces come together, video stops being a cost center and starts becoming a compounding growth asset.
