This is it - the B2B Video Marketing guide you’ve been waiting for! Stop what you’re doing and read this right now - because if you’re in B2B and video is not a part of your marketing strategy, you need an urgent rethink.
And if you are doing B2B video marketing, we’ve got some fantastic strategic advice and top tips to help you make the most of this medium at a time when a lot of your competitors will still be figuring out their approach.
There’s far more to this field than corporate promos and explainer videos. Video can transform your prospecting and lead nurturing, it can speed up prospects’ progress through your sales funnels, and it can help your customers achieve more for less input from you.
Here are the subjects we’ll look at in the course of this 2021 ultimate guide to B2B video marketing.
- Why Video Marketing is so Effective in B2B
- Strategy #1: Transform Prospecting
- Strategy #2: Supercharge Sales Funnels
- Strategy #3: Accelerate Customer Journeys
- 5 Essential Steps to Become a B2B Video Champion
But first, let’s take a look at some...
Video Marketing Stats to Blow Your Mind
You already knew that video is the most effective marketing tactic for B2B or B2C out there, right?
You didn’t!? Well, check out this video marketing stats blitz:
- 86% of businesses are using video in their marketing
- 30% of marketers see video as more important to their results than the website itself
- 91% think Covid-19 has made video marketing even more important
- Video marketing delivers 600 times more return than direct marketing and print combined
- 93% of brands report getting new customers via videos on social media
- 90% of customers say that video marketing helps them make buying decisions
- 74% of prospects given a chance to see a product in action on video will buy it
But despite all that:
- Only 32% of businesses are using video directly in their sales activities
- An astonishing 41% of marketers say they’re not making optimum use of video because it’s “too difficult”
That might have been true five or six years ago, but technology has moved on since then.
It’s now so simple and so affordable to produce video marketing content in recent years that if you’re not doing it then you are seriously missing out.
Luckily for you, this blog is going to show you what you need to do.
Why Video Marketing is so Effective in B2B
“OK”, some of you may be saying. “I get it for B2C, but B2B’s different. It’s more formal; more complex; it depends so much more on face-to-face interactions and relationships. Does B2B video marketing really work?”
The answer is: “Oh yes. It works - and how!”
Everyone is consuming more online videos than ever before. In 2020, Cisco predicted it would constitute 82% of all internet traffic by 2022.
B2B certainly is different, but that just means your video marketing strategy has to be geared towards B2B needs rather than B2C.
B2B decision-makers are people too, just like B2C consumers:
- They are more likely to open messages that stand out in the crowded inboxes
- They respond to personalized content that shows you understand their needs and concerns
- They remember and recall what they see in a video far more effectively than what they read (95% versus just 10%)
- 59% of executives would rather watch a video than read a text
- Video is ideal for demonstrating products, onboarding new users, sharing knowledge, and training - all areas where “show” beats “tell”
- Unlike text, it is easy to convey emotion and create empathy with video - critical elements of most real-world buying decisions
Covid-19 shut down most opportunities for face-to-face interactions for around 18 months worldwide. In that time, habits and preferences have changed: even your grandparents are probably comfortable in front of a video camera today!
B2B sales and marketing have had to adapt in that time, and video has filled the gaps where conferences, expos, networking events, in-person meetings, and even a quick drink with a prospect once were.
The world may be getting back to normal, but businesses have seen the huge cost savings that switching from in-person to video has brought about. Why spend time and money sending sales reps around the world when they’ve shown they can do it all from their laptops?
B2B video marketing also saves businesses money by enabling them to automate repetitive parts of their sales, marketing, and customer success activities that would previously have been delivered either one-on-one (inefficient) or via text and other media (unengaging).
So B2B video marketing is not only effective because it speaks to the humans behind the buying decisions, but it also helps keep sales, marketing, and customer success costs down.
And remember this stat from earlier? Only 32% of businesses use video marketing in sales. There’s huge scope for companies that embrace B2B video marketing to get a serious competitive advantage.
Let’s dig into where that difference can be made.
B2B Video Marketing Strategy #1: Transform Prospecting
Video is great for prospecting because:
- It’s scalable - the same content can be used over and over again
- It nevertheless feels personal - a well-crafted video message creates rapport
- It’s not something that everyone else is doing...yet
Over Email
Video email is shaking up the B2B email marketing landscape.
- Video emails can yield much higher average open rates (42% in our experience) than emails that contain text and an image
- Video thumbnails get 65% more clicks than other media in emails
B2B or B2C - you need something that effective in your strategy, and Sendspark is the ideal tool for this purpose:
- Install the free Sendspark Chrome browser
- Film a message to your prospects - this can be a webcam-only recording, a screen-only recording, or a combination of the two. There’s no limit to the length of your videos - unlike with most of Sendspark’s competitors.
- Customize a beautiful-looking landing page to host the video, complete with Call To Action and interaction tracking
- Depending on the recipients’ email clients, select the most effective way of embedding your video - and send!
Sendspark supports three different ways of doing this, which accommodate the overwhelming majority of email clients:
- Embedding video in emails for inline playback with HTML5
- Adding an animated thumbnail GIF video preview that links to your bespoke landing page
- Adding video content to email templates in your email automation software.
Sendspark also lets you create and save video templates so that you can produce consistent-looking series of video messages for drip campaigns. Check out this blog for a step-by-step “how-to” on video emailing.
Video emails are great for introducing yourself and your business to new prospects. It’s very easy to make a video that you’re using for multiple contacts feel personal with simple personalization of the email text.
You can also share valuable video content - webinars, client testimonials, Q&As - over email to nurture leads:
Then, once you’ve got a response, film every week bespoke video messages - focusing on the lead’s specific needs, problems, and use cases. No more playing phone tag to book a meeting: video email is convenient for you, enabling you to present your pitch in your own time; and convenient for the prospect, who can watch it when it suits them.
As we’ll discuss later, video marketing has a role to play at every stage of the sales funnel.
Over LinkedIn
Around 75 million senior B2B decision-makers are LinkedIn users. The platform gives you the ability to target the people who would benefit from your products and services the most and then reach out to them on a one-to-one basis.
So it’s no wonder that LinkedIn has emerged as an essential ingredient of successful B2B marketing - especially Account-Based Marketing - in the last couple of years:
- Posts containing video generate 98% more engagement than non-video posts
- 54% of executives who use LinkedIn share video content internally on a weekly basis
However, it’s important to be aware that LinkedIn only supports certain types of video. Here’s a quick recap of the key specifications from our previous blog on making the most of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn gives priority to “native video” (i.e., content you have uploaded to the platform) over embedded links in its newsfeed algorithm, so it’s best to upload it if your video fits the criteria above to maximize visibility.
You can also send videos directly to contacts. There’s no facility to upload files here: you just add a link to your message.
The average view rate for LinkedIn video messages is 50%, but a tool like Sendspark can help you beat that:
- By letting you customize preview images with text and logos
- By enabling you to design awesome, branded landing pages to host your videos with calls to action that drive viewers onward through your funnel
- By giving you detailed analytics on video performance
B2B Video Marketing Strategy #2: Supercharge Sales Funnels
Top of Funnel Video
Video marketing gets attention, so it’s ideal for top of funnel activity.
One amazing strategy that many B2B marketers are using to great effect is the Video Sales Letter. We’ve written a whole blog about Video Sales Letters, but here’s the essence:
- Record a detailed pitch for your product or service, digging into the problems or Jobs To Be Done your target audience have, demonstrating how your way is the best way to solve them, and then piling on evidence of other people’s success and addressing all the common objections you encounter
- By sharing this with your audience over email or on your website, your full pitch can be seen by thousands of relevant decision-makers for the time you spend recording it once
- You can then assume that anybody who clicks through your booking flow after watching the whole VSL is a well-qualified lead who is genuinely interested in buying from you
Webinars are also a great way to position yourself as a thought leader while demonstrating your solutions and collecting prospect details. A recorded video hosted on your website (public or behind a registration form) is a great way to turn a one-off event into an evergreen lead magnet.
Video is also the ideal medium for introducing and demonstrating products to new audiences, either on your website or over social media.
Your imagination is the limit for this kind of content - it doesn’t have to be all about budget or Hollywood production values. A clever idea that leads viewers to an Aha! moment in an entertaining way that makes them interested in finding out more is what matters. Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” series of videos is a great example.
For something a bit more glossy, take a look at the “So yeah, we tried Slack” campaign.
And video is awesome for SEO.
Forrester Research has found that it is 53 times easier to get video content on page 1 of Google than any other content type.
Middle of Funnel Video
But video marketing doesn’t stop at the top of the funnel. It offers some serious advantages in mid-funnel as well.
Once a prospect has shown interest in your product or service, they’re bound to have questions - this is especially true in B2B where transaction values tend to be much higher than in B2C and sales cycles much longer.
Mid-funnel is where most of your lead segmentation will take place, as you sort out prospects into different groups depending on their needs.
Video provides the opportunity to be efficient again:
- With FAQ videos that can provide information about what users are interested in
- With product demonstrations and explainers, tailored to specific use cases
- With deep dives into specifications for technical audiences
Record it once and update it when needed, instead of giving the same presentation again and again.
Video testimonials from satisfied clients are incredibly convincing. The social proof impact conveyed by a video of a user talking about their experience with your service is far more powerful even than written testimonials.
Sendspark’s Request Video makes it super easy for you and your clients to produce testimonials:
- Just click the function to generate a link
- Send it to your customer
- Without the customer needing to download anything, they’ll be able to film a quick testimonial and send it straight back to you to share
B2B Video Marketing Strategy #3: Accelerate Customer Journeys
Hey! The marketing doesn’t stop just because somebody’s now a customer!
B2B products and services are often complex and multifunctional, with steep learning curves. Video marketing lets you educate and train users on common applications and problems without - yep, you’ve guessed it - being there in person, delivering that material over and over again.
We’ve already mentioned webinars as top-of-funnel content, but by the same token, videos can be used as part of your Help Center, your Knowledge Base, etc.
Video is particularly helpful in onboarding new users: by showing them a video that talks them through the “getting started” process, you can remove a lot of the initial friction that slows this down.
Similarly, common helpdesk solutions can be recorded and shared with users experiencing difficulties - saving your customer service agents time.
In this way, video marketing can be used to promote customer success in an efficient, cost-effective, and mutually convenient way.
Clickfunnels even use a video from the founder as part of their cancellation flow, with the aim of winning departing users back over!
5 Essential Steps to Become a B2B Video Champion
#1 Keep It Short
A 2018 study found that 75% of B2B videos were under two minutes long. Makes sense: 33% of all video viewers give up within 30 seconds.
Webinars and VSLs show that there is an appetite for long-form video content, but for most cases, it’s best to keep it short and sweet - and make sure you grab the viewer’s attention from the first moment!
#2 Repurpose Your Best Content
Got a great blog that needs a new lease of life? Repurpose it as a video to attract a whole new audience!
Different types of users prefer to consume different media: video is much easier to consume on mobile devices than text, and many of us are spending ever-more time on mobile. Break it down into a series of bite-sized videos for the time-poor or attention-challenged audience!
#3 Think About Accessibility
It’s important to think about the needs of your audience, which may include hearing-impaired people or people who don’t speak the same language as you. Subtitles and closed captions on your videos can make a huge difference.
Not only that, Verizon Media has found that 69% of people watch online videos on silent!
#4 Be Lively and Authentic
You know what? A few “ums” and “ahhs” in your video will make you seem human. That’s how you’d speak in person, right? And a lot of the time, we’re using video to replicate that vibe. Perfection tends to appear inauthentic.
Of course, it’s important to prepare what you’re going to say and say it well - but don’t come across as though you’re reading from a script. It’s painful for the viewer!
Be lively on camera, make eye contact, and smile a lot - just as you would in person.
#5 Sign Up For Sendspark Today!
Sendspark makes it easy to create or import videos and distribute them across email, social, and the web. Sign up now if you want to start recording and sharing videos for free.
