7 Ways to Use B2B Video Marketing for Your Business And Why It’s Important
Chris Mulvaney is the CEO of CMDS. I make things... I’m the creative entrepreneur with passion for (re)making brands and inventing solutions to problems no one knows exist.
7 Ways to Use B2B Video Marketing for Your Business And Why It’s Important
Want to dominate your industry? B2B video marketing is the way to do it. Use this guide to learn how to integrate B2B video marketing into your business.
Brand awareness, lead generation, personal connections, search optimization — the benefits of B2B video marketing for businesses are endless. Successful video marketing can transform how a B2B company operates.
The days when videos were seen as something exclusively for internal sales or training teams are over. Today, video marketing has become a vital tool for building customer trust, impressing potential clients, and improving a brand’s organic ranking on the biggest search platforms.
The statistics speak for themselves.
- More than 75% of adults in the U.S. spend up to two hours per day watching short-form digital videos.
- 86% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool.
- The amount of revenue generated from video-related interactions has increased by 69% percent since 2020.
- 75% of B2B customers prefer remote sales interactions over face-to-face ones.
Video marketing is a worthwhile investment for B2B businesses for one simple reason — videos convert.
Using video content in a marketing package leads to higher conversion rates and greater revenue. If something as simple as adding a video to a landing page can increase conversion rates, imagine what adding video to an email pitch or a social media post would do. Interactions go up, click-throughs increase, and conversions skyrocket.
When used correctly, publishing videos on YouTube can boost a website’s search engine ranking and help companies outrank competitors online. The more high-quality video content a brand publishes, the more traffic it attracts, which boosts overall search rankings. Given YouTube’s position as the second largest search engine after Google, this is a value proposition B2B marketers can’t afford to ignore.
Buyers today prefer to interact with suppliers and sales reps digitally, often using a self-service model. But the effectiveness of this new sales approach hinges on a business’ ability to weave video into an integrated marketing strategy. The omnichannel marketing ecosystem is all about engaging customers — past, present, and future — but it doesn’t work without a video component.
Are you interested in trying out B2B video marketing, but not sure where to begin? Start with these seven proven techniques for integrating video into your marketing strategy.
How to Use B2B Video Marketing for Your Business — 7 Top Strategies
How to Use B2B Video Marketing for Your Business — 7 Top Strategies
1. Explainer Videos
By far, the most popular B2B video marketing content is the explainer video. Ninety-six percent of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service, and 88% of people say they’ve been convinced to purchase something after watching a brand’s video.
Explainer videos help companies position themselves as the industry experts. Explainer videos should be brief — ideally three minutes or less — with a basic structure or template. Each video opens by highlighting a problem, and then clearly explains how to solve that problem. Explainer videos are often used on a brand’s landing pages or product pages.
The most popular types of explainer videos are:
- Animated videos: Animated videos explain a service or product. These videos are easy to update to make adjustments or enhancements in the future.
- Live-action videos: Non-animated videos that explain a business’ product or service.
- Whiteboard videos: Whiteboard explainer videos use hand-drawn animations written on a virtual whiteboard. These videos are very popular among B2B marketers because they are the cheapest and easiest type of video to make on this list.
- Live stream video: Live stream videos contain raw footage that a business posts on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. Most companies will save these videos to share on a website or social media page after the live stream is complete.
2. Personalized Videos
Using market research and identifying your target audience takes the guesswork out of campaign development. It’s also the first step to creating a personalized B2B video marketing strategy.
It’s crucial to identify your niche before developing video content. B2B companies see the most success from B2B video marketing when they target very specific groups of potential customers. Understanding the age, geographic location, and other demographic factors of the customers you are trying to target will impact the video content you create.
Determining the right people to target takes a good amount of research, and when possible, a deep dive into market data. Who is visiting your website now? Which groups of website visitors are most likely to convert? Which potential customers are the least likely to convert? What types of messaging or content are they most likely to respond to? These are all questions you should be asking yourself before jumping into a B2B video marketing campaign.
3. Product Demos
Product demonstrations give potential customers the opportunity to clearly see and understand a company’s offerings. According to one study, 84% of people say they’ve been convinced to make a purchase based on a company’s video.
The best product demo videos are around two minutes in length, however they can go up to five minutes depending on the amount of detail that’s necessary to explain a product’s specific features. A creative agency can help define a structure and put together a product demo script that hits all the right points.
Product demo videos are most common among B2B companies selling products with a high price point. They work most effectively when you’ve clearly defined the goal you’re trying to achieve. Conversions, education, and brand awareness are three of the many potential goals when creating product demo videos.
See some examples of what other B2B companies do for their product demo videos:
Mailchimp
Asana
4. Email Marketing Video
Did you know adding the word “video” to an email subject line can increase open rates by 6%?
Email marketing videos work best when the sender is trying to do something — sell a product, promote an event, or share a story. Having an end goal in mind is important not just when developing video content, but also when deciding how and where to publish it.
Not all email clients support the technical requirements to play video inside email, so it’s important to understand that a video that’s embedded into an email message won’t be seen by every recipient. Hosting videos on your content distribution network (CDN) or on your own company’s servers is one way to navigate this issue, just make sure the file size isn’t much larger than 200KB.
If you’re concerned that not all email subscribers will see the video you’ve embedded in your email message, consider this workaround: Rather than embedding the video directly, include a static image from the video with a “play” button overlay on top. The static image should link to the full video on your company’s website or YouTube page. This is the quickest way to link to video in email, and it ensures the greatest number of recipients will see the email message as you designed it.
Using a GIF of the video is another way to sidestep this issue and still your video content into an email message. GIFs are supported across most popular email clients, and they can be created easily to show the most important information in the first frame.
5. Enhancing Existing Content
B2B video marketing boosts engagement rates on existing content. Website visitors get hooked on video, and before they know it they’re clicking around your website and checking out other content.
Video can be repurposed for social media, as well. Breaking up a long video and uploading shorter clips to Facebook is one way to take advantage. Many B2B marketers are also finding success by turning shorter videos into GIFs for Instagram and Twitter.
Another solution: Repurpose video content by transcribing it into blogs and posting that to your website.
Landing pages are a logical place to start. Do you have any landing pages that have gotten stale? Any website content that isn’t getting the conversions it once was? Not only does video content make website visitors more likely to convert, it can also help increase a web page ranking in Google search results.
To help Google find the videos on your landing pages, you’ll need to create an XML video sitemap that tells the company where your page is, where your video is, and what your video is about. Once your sitemap is submitted, Google will crawl the page to verify the new video exists and index the video, so it will appear in search results.
If the process of submitting a video sitemap through Google’s webmaster tools feels too complicated, an agency like CMDS can manage the process on your behalf.
6. Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials help companies build trust among potential customers and make companies appear more credible. Making a customer testimonial video doesn’t have to be hard. Just ask an existing customer to share their experience using your product or service, and record their response on video.
According to McKinsey & Co., the three keys to omnichannel success for B2B companies are transparency, expertise, and speed. Customer testimonial videos will help you achieve all three of these goals by giving potential customers a glimpse into what it would be like to work with your brand or use your products. In a world where human connections matter more than ever, visually seeing and hearing an existing customer sharing their story makes brands feel authentic.
An agency like CMDS can coordinate the process and edit customer testimonials into a cohesive narrative that tells a story about your brand. Putting the professional polish on actual customer reviews is what pushes the best customer testimonial videos over the top.
7. How-To Videos
How-to videos provide step-by-step instructions for using a brand’s products. Like customer testimonials, how-to videos help B2B companies establish trust among potential customers.
How-to videos are what we call “easy to consume” B2B video marketing content. Just like the name implies, it’s easier for a viewer to understand how to use a product or service after watching a how-to video than reading step-by-step directions.
Blending how-to video content with written instructions, often posted in the caption below the video, offers the opportunity to get more detailed with instructions without losing viewers in the process. Linking to more in-depth details on a separate landing page is another option for brands that want to post how-to videos on social media platforms like YouTube or Pinterest.
In House or Agency?
In House or Agency?
It is possible to create a viral video using nothing more than a smartphone and basic video editing software, however it’s important to understand that professional-quality B2B video marketing is almost always handled by an agency. The equipment necessary for high-resolution video, quality audio and digital editing can be expensive, and it may be a more budget-conscious decision to outsource the project to an agency, rather than to purchase the necessary equipment and manage the project in-house.
What story will you tell through B2B video marketing? What product information will you highlight? How will you bring your goals to life through video?
Agencies like CMDS can handle everything from developing a creative concept to editing the final video, so your team can spend more time growing your business and expanding your relationships with clients.
B2B Video Marketing: Key Takeaways
B2B Video Marketing: Key Takeaways
When it comes down to B2B video marketing, it’s all about audience preference. Audiences clearly prefer video content over written content because it’s easier to consume and it presents a welcome break from the endless streams of text we see online each day.
There’s a reason why YouTube and TikTok are among the most visited websites on the internet. People today prefer video content, both personally and professionally. B2B video marketing helps brands reach audiences in more effective ways. Video marketing improves a brand’s perceived authenticity and makes companies seem more transparent.
The best marketing videos stick closely to the brand’s identity. From the tone of the script to the look of the animation, it should be easy for viewers to identify the brand behind the video. That sort of cohesion and consistency is what makes B2B video marketing most effective.
While it might seem intimidating for a smaller company to execute a video marketing strategy on a budget, it can be done.
Video marketing does not have to be expensive to be successful.
Live streams, how-to videos, and customer testimonial videos can all be recorded using basic equipment, and the editing software required to make most animated videos and product demos is widely available online.
Video marketing isn’t something you should jump into blindly — but it is something we suggest every B2B company gives a try. With the right team in place, it’s possible to create the kind of video marketing campaign that will drive real results for your brand.
To learn more about how to develop an effective video marketing strategy for your B2B organization, contact CMDS today.