To succeed in this competitive market, business-to-business (B2B) companies need to take advantage of marketing strategies that put their brand in front of buyers across the internet, encourage people to visit their website, and help them connect with their target audience. That’s why more and more B2B marketers are taking the time to create meaningful video content to promote their products and services.
In other words, video is changing the B2B marketing game.
With the popularity of video content growing across all social channels and unlimited opportunities for connecting with new potential customers, it’s time to for B2B companies to take advantage of video marketing.
The Benefits of Video Marketing for B2B Businesses
B2B marketers in all industries—from software to manufacturing—are realizing that video content can be a powerful and effective part of an overall marketing strategy.
Using video content to promote your products or services is just the start. We’ve outlined a few of the many benefits to B2B video marketing.
Grow Revenue
Successful video marketing campaigns have a real-world impact on the revenue of a B2B company. Videos increase brand awareness and build credibility—making it more likely for buyers to find your website, engage with your content, and become a qualified lead.
Engaging, informative, and entertaining videos boost sales. Simply putting a video on your website’s homepage can increase conversion rates, and adding video content to your product pages encourages visitors to make a purchase.
With increased interactions, click-throughs, and conversions, there’s no question that implementing a video marketing strategy can generate revenue.
Influence Buying Decisions
What do buyers do when they are considering a purchase? Now more than ever, they are likely to watch product videos and customer testimonials to discover what a brand has to offer and see if the company can provide a solution to their problem.
Videos use sound and eye-catching visuals to grab the attention of viewers. If you share entertaining and easily digestible content in a video format, your buyers will gravitate toward your brand and watch your videos to effortlessly learn about your products and services.
Trust in a company goes a long way with today’s buyers, which is another reason videos influence buying decisions—they have a significant influence on the behavior of your customers. Without video content, your brand is neglecting that trusting relationship.
Meet Customers Where They Are
Not only do internet users watch videos, but they also tend to prefer it over other content types. Video tops text, pictures, and links on social media.
Since your buyers prefer video content, you need to create compelling videos if you want to get their attention.
Rank Higher in Search
Have you ever noticed that video results often appear near the top of the search engine results page (SERP) on Google? Google and other search engines value video more than other forms of content. That means if you’re not publishing videos, you’re missing out on search engine traffic.
Additionally, visitors stay longer on websites that include video content, which helps convince Google that the website is credible and should rank higher on SERPs. Videos are also more likely to generate quality backlinks, adding to a website’s overall ranking.
Remember that search engine optimization (SEO) principles apply to video content, too. It’s important for B2B companies to use SEO best practices when creating, publishing, and promoting videos.
Increase Traffic
Videos have the power to drive quality traffic to your website. When you embed videos in the pages of your website, people who find your content promoted across the internet will be drawn to your webpage. And visitors looking for quick, informative content on their pain points will be more likely to choose a website that has video.
Also, since videos help improve your overall SERP ranking, your video marketing strategy will increase your traffic.
Types of B2B Videos to Boost Your Marketing
Every video you make needs to have a purpose, and most videos can be categorized by what they are intended to accomplish. These various types of videos are useful at different points in the buyer’s journey, so your B2B company should use a variety to engage with prospects at each stage.
Product Videos
Product videos are designed to showcase your products or services. These videos should be more than just an overview of the product; instead, successful product videos demonstrate how a buyer’s problem will be solved after purchasing the product.
By making videos highlighting your products or services, you will generate brand awareness and encourage viewers to make a purchase.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos are one of the most popular video genres on the internet. For B2B companies, how-to videos, tutorials, and other explainer videos are the perfect way to educate and inform your viewers.
This type of video will be most successful if it is compelling and entertaining. Make it easy for your customers to get answers to common questions, learn about new products, and build a relationship with your brand.
Webinars
Webinars are excellent opportunities to engage with potential customers, answer questions, share your expertise, promote your brand, and pitch your products or services. They are usually live events and focused on educating a small group about what your B2B company has to offer.
Most webinars have some sort of viewer participation, so you can communicate with attendees—and they can communicate with you.
These videos establish your business as a trusted resource and leader in your industry.
Q&A/Interview Videos
By using videos to answer some of the frequently asked questions you encounter, you can make it easy for customers to get the answers they need. Choose between a series of short videos or a long Q&A session with timestamps that take viewers to the relevant part of the video.
Videos featuring interviews with industry leaders or members of your team establish your company as an expert in your field. The conversational tone of interviews is more engaging to viewers, and you can take advantage of the audience of the person you are interviewing to increase the exposure of your brand.
Customer Testimonials
People trust online reviews, and B2B marketers can use videos of customer testimonials to provide value to anyone interested in making a purchase. Ask satisfied clients to shoot a short video describing their experience with your company and share it with potential customers to show proof of your brand’s value and reputation.
Video Ads
B2B companies, like others, use video ads to generate interest and promote brand awareness. You might notice these short ads placed throughout videos on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms.
The goal of video ads is to entice viewers to click on a link, find out more about the brand, and make a purchase. It’s no surprise that B2B ads need to be creative, eye-catching, and informative in order to succeed.
5 Effective Strategies for B2B Video Marketing
Before hitting the record button on your camera, you need to create a video marketing strategy. Take these steps to put together an action plan.
Start by Creating a Buyer Persona to Better Understand Your Target Audience
Any marketing specialist will tell you that knowing your audience is key.
To make sure your videos are reaching the right people and meeting the needs of your potential customers, you need to know your target market. Start by coming up with three or four buyer personas that your B2B company wants to target. You’ll need to conduct extensive market research to understand your buyers’ pain points and what content style resonates best with them.
These personas should guide your entire video marketing strategy.
Script and Storyboard Your Videos Before You Start Filming
Your videos need to tell a compelling story. Why? Because buyers don’t just want to make a purchase. They want to learn about your brand’s vision and make a connection.
Script and storyboard your video content before moving onto filming. Make sure your video’s story fits in with the point you are trying to make on your website through its tone, language, style, visuals, and voice.
Regardless of the topic or format of your video, try to weave a story around the content.
Make Sure Your Videos are High Quality and Visually Appealing
B2B videos need to engage your target audience, which means they need to be high quality and visually appealing. That means you have a choice: you can invest in the equipment, time, and education required to make beautiful videos or hire a professional video production team to guide you through the process.
Just uploading your videos to your company’s YouTube page is not enough; you need to share them with a wider audience on social media. Additionally, boost engagement by responding to comments and reacting to feedback from your followers.
With a comprehensive social media marketing plan in place, your videos will reach your target audience.
Measure the Effectiveness of Your B2B Video Marketing Campaign
If you don’t track the performance of your videos, you’ll have no idea of the success of your video campaign or what effect video marketing has had on your overall marketing strategy.
Track performance indicators like viewers, subscribers, click-through rates, conversion rates, and other marketing stats to provide an accurate measurement of your video’s success. Based on the data, you can improve your future video marketing efforts.
The Best Video Distribution Channels for B2B Brands
Integrating your video content into your overall B2B marketing strategy is essential. That means the platforms you use to distribute your videos should be based on the purpose of your video as well as how you currently reach your target audience.
We recommend starting with these distribution channels.
Company Website
Your website should serve as the hub for all your content, including videos, because it helps generate leads and increase the average time your visitors spend on your site. Include videos on your homepage, blogs, and landing pages. Add explainer videos to your help center and customer review videos to your testimonials page.
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing efforts, like email marketing campaigns and conversational marketing strategies, can benefit from video content.
Include an intriguing thumbnail of a video in one of your emails and link it to your website. That way email subscribers are an easy click away from your products and services. And remember that readers love videos. In fact, just using the word “video” in an email subject line increases open rates.
Chatbots and live chats—two of the most popular conversational marketing tools used by B2B companies today—can share videos in response to customer inquiries. For example, when a user encounters a technological issue, program the chatbot to send them a video from your help center that guides them to a solution. Or if someone is interested in one of your products, have your customer service representatives share a product video.
Videos help build a relationship between the recipients of your direct marketing campaign and your B2B company.
Social Media
Social media prioritizes video content because it encourages engagement from the platform’s users. Focus on sharing your videos across the social medial channels that are most popular among your target customers and in your industry. These platforms have a built-in user base and high overall reach, which means new groups of people will see your videos and you will have the potential of going viral.
Conclusion
At OneIMS, we have a track record of helping B2B companies like yours use videos to boost lead generation and conversion, increase your engagement rates, and grow your revenue. Our experienced video marketing team has all the strategies, tools, and solutions you need to meet your marketing goals—from video optimization and content ideation to editing and promotion.
With an effective video marketing strategy in place, you can market your products or services across platforms in an engaging format, putting your brand in front of the eyes of new customers.
Are you ready to improve your video content creation process and boost your marketing strategy? View case studies from some of our happy customers, read our blog to get an idea of our training and experience, and schedule a consultation with us today to learn more.
