Video B2B Marketing Content Creates Human Touch
Video B2B marketing content is being adopted by a growing number of B2B brands. Find out how video can add a human touch to your content and help drive results from your buyer’s journey.
I was excited the first time a client asked me to write scripts for a B2B video marketing campaign. It was a chance to try my hand at an emerging online advertising format.
My job was to prepare the text for the CEO of a B2B firm to present in a series of product videos. The campaign succeeded, but I made some mistakes (forgive me, I had some learning experiences) along the way.
Probably the biggest challenge was capturing the voice of the CEO. I had successfully ghost written (forgive me, drafted byline articles) for this executive in the past, and he’d been pleased to release them as written.
Help Video Presenters Feel Comfortable
Even so, when it came to saying the words I’d written out loud, his staff didn’t feel they sounded authentic for him. With just a handful of small changes, we managed to help him feel comfortable and come across as himself.
That’s the key advantage of video in B2B content marketing. Apart from meeting face to face, it’s the best technology we’ve come up with to create a sense of human connection and empathy with buyers.
Traditionally, video content has been more the preserve of household consumer brands. Their audience sizes, buyer behaviour and simpler sales cycles leant themselves more to visual messaging.
Consumer Brands Led Video-Based Content Marketing
Besides, consumer advertising had been the backbone of the entire television industry for half a century. So, it was natural that household consumer brands would lead the way in creating video-based marketing content.
Video’s personal connection, along with the widespread availability of affordable video production gear is now making it the fastest growing content channel in the B2B marketplace.? For example, the B2B Marketing Benchmark report found 59% of respondents planned to use video for content marketing in the year ahead.
That was just shy of the top choice, which was in-person events (60%).The same report found that 67% of B2B marketers who’ve used video, plan to use it even more in future campaigns.
Video is the Best Online Medium for Storytelling
Beyond the human connection that well-crafted video content can offer, it’s the best? online medium for storytelling. That’s an awkward admission for me, because I’m naturally drawn to the written word.
Leaving that aside, video’s humanity creates deeper emotional connections with potential buyers which, despite some misconceptions, matter in B2B content marketing. Buyers find video more engaging, and LinkedIn has found that video content’s share rate is 20% higher than other online marketing channels.
Conventional marketers viewed the complexity of business-to-business products and sales cycles as barriers to applying video to their content marketing.. However, today’s online B2B marketers seem to reject that conventional wisdom.
Clarify and Demonstrate Your Business Solution
Video can offer ways to clarify and demonstrate the business solution your products provide. In today’s digital world, video is no longer a mass media advertising tool.
When marketers choose the right forums for their potential customers, they can target their video-based messages more precisely than ever before. Video content marketing enables them to target visual and spatial learners, like engineers, scientists and many senior executives.
Social media platforms hosting your content also prefer video for many of the same reasons. That makes them more inclined to share and distribute it when your team works with them.
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Set Clear, Tangible Objectives for Your Videos
As with all marketing content, it’s important that you set clear, tangible objectives for your videos. Your team also needs tools to measure its video content performance against those objectives.
Typically, the basis for all that planning is your brand’s model buyer’s journey. Video content can deliver results during the interest, desire or conversion phases of that cycle.
During the interest phase, when your goal is to create brand awareness, short videos that introduce your visual branding in the first few seconds can attract instant attention. Video is especially engaging when it uses bold, high-contrast colours.
Include People From the Very Beginning
The other thing that attracts attention is people. Your team’s videos should include people from the very beginning, and present them in a memorable story line.
Later in the buyer’s journey, when your team is focused on building awareness and desire, video content can continue to support your messaging. During these phases, your team should focus on thought leadership messaging.
That’s exactly what my client asked me to do when we were producing video content for their CEO. Our goal was to showcase the company president’s expertise and build a rapport between him and his potential clients.
Human Element in B2B Marketing is Undeniable
That’s why it was so important to capture his speaking style in the video’s text. Although B2B buyers insist that they make decisions based on facts, evidence and business cases, the human element is still undeniable.
During the conversion or demand generation phase of your buyer’s journey, your team can support sales with online product demonstrations. Previews of upcoming events and customer testimonials also instill that human touch in the video format.
As your video campaigns mature, you’ll want to measure their results. Social media platforms now provide countless statistics and analytics for your video marketing content.
Differentiate Vanity Metrics from Performance Indicators
It’s important to differentiate “vanity metrics” from those that apply directly to the performance indicators you team came up with when planning a campaign. Plays, views, view rates, costs per view, completions and completion rates all sound impressive, but your team needs to link all this data to a campaign’s original purpose and objectives.
All signs suggest that video represents the future of online content creation. Incorporating video marketing content into your brand’s customer journey, might be the best way to apply the human touch that’s often missing in B2B marketing content.
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I'm a freelance writer and commercial blogger, providing content marketing stories to select business-to-business clients in Canada and the United States.
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