Sales and Marketing Leaders Increase Video Investments Even Though 80% Not Confident in Measuring its Performance

For the Sixth Consecutive Year, Video Investment Is up and 94% of Companies Say Videos Are Valuable in Their Daily Marketing Mix.

Vidyard, the leading video platform for business, has partnered with Heinz Marketing on an original research report to better understand the power that video has within the increasingly noisy, digital world. Findings uncover how businesses connect, communicate, and engage with buyers through video programs and identify gaps between how B2B professionals perceive video and how they actually use it.

The survey consists of 218 B2B sales and marketing leaders, all manager-level and above. Respondents hold a variety of different sales and marketing responsibilities and their companies range in size from SMB organizations to large enterprises.

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Key findings show that video usage has exploded in the B2B landscape and has become a staple in today’s modern marketing toolkit:

1. There’s no question that video is important to today’s marketer. A whopping 94% of respondents ranked video as either somewhat or very valuable in their current sales and marketing strategies.
2. Video makes an impact at every stage in the sales funnel—creating awareness, increasing the impact of nurture programs, and increasing the frequency of signed deals. Video is an easy way for buyers to digest complex content, which is why at least half of respondents are using explainer videos, demo videos, and product tutorials with great success in their marketing and sales strategies.
3. Many marketing and sales teams continue to focus on early-stage campaign metrics, making it hard to prove the impact of video on revenue. Going beyond metrics like social engagement, increases in site traffic, and longer times on site to expanding the use of video across the buyer’s journey and tracking engagement throughout will help sales and marketing teams to better understand the impact of their videos and identify areas for improvement.
4. Accurate video analytics are paramount to a successful and scalable video strategy. But, despite that, more than 80% of respondents agreed that revenue-driving key performance indicators (KPIs) like lead conversion, pipeline conversion, and the number of opportunities created are the most challenging video metrics to track.
5. Video is here to stay! Two-thirds of sales and marketing leaders plan to increase their investment in video. Though there is still a lot to learn when it comes to video production and performance tracking, the inherent value it provides is clear to today’s sales and marketing professionals.

It’s clear that whether a video is used heavily, moderately, or very little, it holds deep value for today’s B2B sales and marketing leaders. Nearly 70% of respondents agree video in the sales and marketing mix is valuable, with its ranking as the second-most-important content delivery mechanism falling second only to website and landing pages.

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Many motivating factors have contributed to an increase in leaders adding a video to their sales and marketing mix. The majority of respondents report that technology has become more accessible and easier to use, and the return on investment (ROI) of video has become easier to track. When it comes to the monetary investment involved, it’s also clear that B2B sales and marketing leaders don’t feel they need to break the bank. Three in five respondents report spending less than 10% of their budget on the production and promotion of their videos.

Explainer videos, demo videos, product tutorials, and webinars are among the top types of videos that organizations produce, which is optimal because many of these video types require the simple share and record of a user’s screen. More than half of respondents say videos play a major role in their sales and marketing mix and regularly use videos for one-to-one sales conversations. Volume isn’t the key to video success either, with half of the organizations producing just one to two videos in a given month.

Video helps marketers and sales leaders share more engaging stories to humanize communications and personalize their customer experience. Respondents are using every channel available to them to promote their videos, with websites, email, LinkedIn, YouTube, and landing pages among the top channels. Unfortunately, revenue metrics are found to be the most challenging to track. Two-thirds of respondents whose videos play a major role in their sales and marketing mix are not confident in their reporting, with the number of views, lead conversion rates, and time watched among the top metrics that respondents track.

While successful video programs help drive buyers from their first touchpoint with an organization down to the last, sellers and marketers need to communicate the value of video to their organization—to be able to say that video is, in fact, worth the investment—and they need better ways of reporting on the metrics that help tell that story. With a sophisticated video program, B2B sales and marketing professionals can more effectively tell their stories, engage the senses, humanize how they communicate, and, most powerfully, personalize the customer experience.

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