B2B companies usually work harder than their peers. In a traditional D2C retail brand, the buyer cycles are shorter, AOV (average order value) is less, and repeat orders come by easily. All you need to know is your ideal customer persona to weave your marketing magic.
If you look at a typical B2B organization, the AOV can cost thousands of dollars, and the final decision involves up to 5-6 decision-makers. This makes marketing, sales, positioning, and operations a lot trickier.
This is one of the primary reasons B2B brands are apprehensive about adopting any new marketing strategy. But, B2B marketing is changing. And when your competitors are changing, you cannot be behind.
The new kid on the block in B2B marketing is definitely video marketing. TVCs, video ads, and commercials were all a D2C game, but that is changing now.
So how can a B2B firm adapt to this new working ground without breaking their backs completely? The answer is a video marketing strategy that allows brands to seamlessly integrate video into their existing processes.
Before we talk about how you can draft a video marketing strategy for your B2B company, let us quickly refresh why you should do so. If you look at any popular B2B brand like Shopify, HubSpot, Hootsuite, Mailchimp, Salesforce, and so on – they all have one thing in common.
They connect with their audience using strategies that the D2C brands leveraged before, and design language is a differentiator for most of these businesses in the industry.
Design is becoming increasingly important in B2B. It drives emotions, aids in brand building, and delivers a superior ROI than other avenues.
Now, video marketing is a superlative method of celebrating your brand’s design language. It is also one of the most effective ways of capturing the audience’s attention across any channel.
Video content is effective on landing pages, product pages, social media platforms, newsletters, and so much more. According to a study, customers believe that video delivers the highest form of value in content marketing. 24% of marketers picked training videos, 24% picked promo videos, and 14% chose demo videos as their preferred avenue for value-driven marketing.
B2B marketing’s major objectives are always to drive focused brand awareness, build trust in the market, and drive home conversions across channels.
Video can effectively deliver these goals if you approach it with the right video marketing strategy.
Approaching your content marketing efforts strategically can optimize your budgets, streamline revenues, and help in overall productivity. Here is a breakdown of the best B2B video marketing strategy for your brand to enter the world of video without a significant overhaul of your processes.
Let’s get into it.
Every content marketing strategy begins by identifying and defining the target audience. That does not change even when you want to work on your video marketing strategy. Yes, you need a little more information to align your video marketing. So, what do you do?
The key to securing video views and clicks is to deliver what your audience is exactly looking for. And to do that, understanding them is very important.
You know your customers, so you can extrapolate what they like. But, a good B2B video marketing strategy is not about just delivering what the customer likes. It is about bridging the gap between the customers’ wants and the company’s needs. So the next step in our video strategy is to define marketing goals.
Answer this: What is your expectation from a particular video or video campaign? Are you looking to drive clicks or revenue from a video, or is the aim to incorporate video at every stage of marketing?
Strategies for each of these answers look very different from each other, so pick wisely before you proceed.
When your marketing team understands this, a lot of time and effort is saved, and your campaigns deliver results that your brand actually needs.
Whether you want to incorporate videos for a particular intent or build a cohesive marketing strategy with videos, you must understand a B2B buyer’s sales cycle before going ahead.
By tracing the B2B buyer’s journey, you can understand what happens :
A B2B buyer’s journey is extensive and involves many decision-makers, and can stretch up to 4 months.
When you understand what happens in those 4 months for each account that you handle, it can help you deliver the content and guidance your customer needs to reach you.
Do you want your marketing efforts to be successful? You cannot ignore consistency anymore. Brand style guidelines are as essential to a company’s success as any other policy document. How the customer perceives your brand can have a huge impact on the success of your campaigns. So set the tone right from the very first day itself.
Video production is expensive, intensive, and is usually outsourced, at least for editing or scripting. A video brand style guideline will ensure that :
What does a video brand style guideline contain?
Content creation cannot exist in silos. As much as creating original content is important, the reach would be abysmal if the brand did not distribute the content across all channels. Content repurposing and distribution reduces the pressure of creating original content across all platforms and helps you reach the audience at various touchpoints.
So, in your video marketing strategy :
When you have these processes and templates pre-defined for your video marketing strategy, outsourcing becomes a breeze. You can focus on devising original content ideas without getting bogged down by the distribution and repurposing processes.
Do you want your customers to be hooked to your message and not lose the forest for the trees? Then, your videos must include equal parts education, entertainment, and engagement. Only then it works. And customers attest to this.
59% of B2B decision makers prefer an explainer video to make a product choice, but you cannot forego the engagement factors. Use trending sounds, include closed captions, and subtitles, and highlight your brand elements along the way to gain an edge.
Videos cannot be too boring or just an animated whitepaper. But it can also not be a flashy humorous take alone. Walk the balance, and you will see results.
Just like this video does with a humorous take on recruiting while building brand awareness too.
B2B brands need video marketing as of yesterday. Getting into a new project can be daunting, but it is nothing that a little planning and organization cannot solve.
So get out there and reach your audience with an innovative video marketing campaign. If you wish to explore different kinds of motion graphics but don’t know where to start, try a video design subscription. You can create unlimited videos and ask for unlimited revisions until you get the video you like.
