Building the first video marketing strategy for B2B customers is akin to baking your first cake! Nobody gets it right the first time but you need to start somewhere.
A lot has changed in the market, but the art of sales continues to be the most arduous task. Buyers whether in the B2C or B2B markets, trust sellers who listen to them, engage them and deliver great value in time. While trust remains critical to every sales success story, credible information delivered with flawless customer experience is an invincible combination that every marketer wishes to achieve. A picture speaks a thousand words; a video turns into an engaging story. Therefore, every B2B marketer is trying to move beyond the illusion of invincibility by leveraging competent video marketing platforms. Brave marketers do video marketing in 2017 to increase B2B sales opportunities.
Video has become the most engaging form of content marketing and digital advertising, thanks to the lucrative proposition they offer as sales initiation and enablement assets. The most enticing aspect of having video at the core of your marketing campaigns is its flexibility and perennial brand value—they never get old or boring.
Digital marketers attribute the positive effects of video content on Quality of Experience (QoE) to build more enterprising connections with the audience.
To succeed in 2017, marketers must be able to speak ‘video’ trends fluently with customers across the web, mobile, app, and social media. Here are 5 legitimate examples that show video is the safest B2B engagement platform for maximum sales returns in the shortest time.
Video Makes your CRM edgier for B2B sales
Video has come a long way from being a source of entertainment to becoming a reliable sales conversion tool. Currently, marketers can efficiently queue in their video data directly into existing CRM using premium integrations. Marketo, Salesforce, Hubspot and other marketing automation platforms offer add-on capabilities. Leading video marketing platforms like Wistia, Brightcove, Vidyard, and uStudio allow marketers to leverage CRM data, driving sales momentum and resolving customer service issues quickly.
By adding video, marketers can actually build a stronger CRM model, enabling salespersons with the luxury of a highly persuasive content-based sales pitch.
Michael Litt, CEO and Co-Founder of Vidyard, acknowledges the power of video marketing linked to CRM. In his blog, Michael mentions, “By following up with high-interest leads through email and responding to incoming requests for demos, we were able to track and account for well over $3,200,000 in the pipeline – all based on one highly targeted video marketing campaign connected to our CRM.”
Reading is time-consuming! Videos, on the other hand, make an empathetic connection with humans with a trail of immersive thoughts and emotions. Customers want marketers to address their demand — “Show me, don’t tell me“.
Replicate B2C e-commerce Success
If you find your text-based web content doing great, adding video to the campaigns will make you invincible. Videolicious claims that Top Fortune 500 retailers manage to lift their e-commerce product detail page conversions by over 90% when they add a product video. While it’s a momentous endeavor for B2B marketers to replicate the successful model of B2C e-commerce, inserting video campaigns is the best way to start informing, engaging, and converting your visitors into buyers.
70% of US marketers plan to use social video ads in the next 12 months. (eMarketer, 2016)
According to Forbes Insights, video is the most critical source of information for senior executives. A sales prospect is more likely to watch a product-related video over the week than searching for relevant information elsewhere. Offering a palatable, engaging and informative video reduces the ambiguity and redundancy of text.
Giving customer the Power to “Play”
The “play” button is among the most ubiquitous things in our lives. By virtue of the ever-growing popularity of social media platforms, most B2B prospects feel empowered while watching videos online. Most publishers have figured out the formula to build a rapport with customers with omnichannel marketing content. For the obvious reasons, videos fare well on social and mobile, resonating best with their targeted audiences.
According to Twitter, 82% users watch video content on Twitter and most watch on a hand-held screen. Moreover, Twitter users are almost twice as more likely to have uploaded a video online (anywhere) than the average US internet user.
Handing your customers the power of play is technically the most desirable way to engage them—allowing your content analytics efforts to sink in to measure what content has the highest impact. For example, adding video posts to online marketing display platforms can significantly improve a key metric to measure social media engagement — Dwell Time (DT). A respectable DT means that the viewer has consumed most part of the content on a page before performing any other task on the site. In short, the video makes any content “sticky” enough to retain the customer’s attention for longer.
A Chance to Pull Creativity out of Your Hat
I have some personal favorites in picking video content that have significantly high B2B engagement. While you may not have a very high audience traffic coming your way through the video, every viewer is your potential prospect. Some of the best video content in MarTech has been created by Demandbase, Madison Logic, Marketo and Oracle.
While they may all look very theoretical, the creativity and collaboration required to create the final video is a great engagement opportunity in itself for generating B2B sales leads.
Time-Savers with Live Video and Messaging
When an online B2B customer asks you, “What is the next thing that I should do?” Grab the opportunity to create shared experiences with the customer on how the product works and what value it brings to the buyer. Live video marketing is going social with engaging live content that builds intimacy instantly. Creating a free live broadcast for your press release is the next level in reaching out to your target audience. Unlike static, pre-recorded content, live video messages take customers straight into the heart of the action.
I found out the best way B2B marketers actually do it by participating in marquee events like Rev Summit 2017, Marketing Nation Summit, SiriusDecisions 2017 Summit, Adobe Symposium, and Oracle’s Modern Customer Experience.
Ready for the Video Revolution in MarTech
Video marketing is a beautiful extension of MarTech—and Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite explains how “video selfies” are the safest B2B trend-setters among customers and employees. Ryan says –
“…it feels like people are more connected than before. The video serves as a kind of real-time window into the challenges and triumphs of everyone from the customer success team to the sales squad and the engineers working behind-the-scenes.”
The video perfectly amplifies the need to embrace technologies that deliver great omnichannel customer experience. A key piece of the content marketing puzzle, the video is more than just a specific tactic. It is set to be the real star of the B2B sales storytelling that best fits the brand’s top-of-funnel marketing introductions. And, then you have the magic of programmatic and retargeting coming your way once your initial video marketing campaigns start delivering results – genuine B2B sales conversions.