Video provides a more human and explanatory touch to marketing and allows brands to authentically connect with their audience base in ways that acknowledge the current customer attention span. By utilizing video, brands can share more succinct messages and offer a deeper insight into what they do by pairing audio, visual, and copy to create the perfect brand message.
There’s so much chatter around what video marketing can do for business-to-consumer brands. But how influential it can be for a brand with a business-to-business customer base deserves just as much conversation.
Video marketing can help B2B brands stay top of mind for potential customers in what can often be a long, drawn-out buyer’s journey. It can also offer a more profound understanding of what a brand stands for, what it can offer its customers, and how it evolves.
Let’s explore six ways video marketing provides deeper insight into what a company is all about.
6 Ways Video Marketing Provides Deeper Insight into a Company’s Message
Show Your Customers You Know Them Through and Through
The success of any brand relies heavily on how well it knows its customers. When you know your customers, you can create better products and services for them. You can create a brand they’ll genuinely love. More importantly, you can create content they emotionally connect with, particularly video content.
If you can create videos that decision-makers can resonate with and tailor them to each stage in the buyer’s journey, you can show your customers that you know them through and through.
How You’re Going to Change Customers’ Lives
Video marketing can also help you tell your customers how you’ll change their lives. B2B clients are more inclined to make purchases with brands that can show them how their lives and/or businesses will get exponentially better because of their products and services.
Product demonstrations, testimonials, and live Q&As can show potential customers how their companies can benefit from what you have to offer.
Highlight Your Brand’s Core Values
Videos are also great for highlighting your brand’s core values. If there’s one thing that draws potential customers to your brand, it’s similar values. Short-form videos that talk in-depth about your brand’s core values and mission can influence a potential client’s willingness to get to know more about your brand.
Prove Your Uniqueness
B2B brands are launching left and right these days. So, it’s vital to do everything you can to stand out from your competition. Video marketing can help you prove your uniqueness. High-quality, entertaining, and educational videos that raise brand and product awareness can set you apart.
Honor the Informed Customer
B2B brands need a healthy mix of inbound and outbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing allows customers to discover and learn more about a brand through their own research. On the other hand, outbound strategies are those that don’t require a customer to do any research to come across your brand. Instead, you go to them.
You can use videos to your advantage in both strategies. For example, you can put together a few videos for digital advertisements to reach customers with an outbound strategy, and create vlogs on your website for an inbound marketing approach.
Share Your Long-Term Vision
Videos are fantastic for sharing your long-term business vision with B2B customers as well. When your brand’s mission evolves, you’re developing a new product line, bringing on new partners, or elevating your services, videos can help you divulge these things to your audience in a fun, engaging way.
Tips for Video Marketing as a B2B Brand
As we see, you can learn a lot about a brand through videos. However, if you want to capitalize on the power of video marketing, you must first attach goals to your video marketing strategy. What do you want to achieve with your video marketing overall? You’ll also want to attach individual goals to each video you publish.
After you set goals for your video marketing strategy, define the steps you’ll take to achieve each goal. Be as detailed as possible. Each step should be actionable and trackable.
Implement the following two tips as well:
Be intentional about your tools and platforms
You must have the right tools to create polished videos for your video marketing strategy. Go for it if you can afford a high-quality camera, tripod, and lighting system.
If not, start with what you have. You’d be amazed at what you can do with a smartphone, a small space to film, a free video editor, and a lot of imagination.
It’s also essential to determine which platforms you want to post your videos on. Pinpoint which videos will go on your YouTube channel, website, email campaigns, and social media. And be sure to track the performance of each video and platform so that you can make necessary adjustments to your strategy for better results.
Create video content for each stage in the entire buyer’s journey
There’s a lot of focus on creating video content for brand awareness purposes. But B2B brands need to focus on creating video content for the entire buyer’s journey, not just the beginning.
Create videos for the awareness, consideration, decision, and retention stages of the buyer’s journey. First, note how the B2B buyer’s journey differs from the B2C buyer’s journey. Next, jot down video ideas for each stage. For example, you could create brand videos for the awareness stage and explainer videos for the consideration and decision stages.
Then, determine which videos you want to create first and get started on them.
You’ll have to experiment with different kinds of videos to see which ones stick in your buyer’s journey stages. However, if you stay consistent, you’ll find the right balance for your unique B2B target audience.
Conclusion
Video marketing is just as powerful for B2B brands as for B2C brands. It’s all about understanding who your ideal customers are, their journey to becoming actual customers, and creating videos that will resonate with them at every stage in it.
Also, track the performance of every video in your strategy. Analytics are integral to ensuring your video marketing efforts are generating ROI.
Take what you’ve learned in this article and build an impactful video marketing strategy for your B2B brand.
Technology illustrations by Storyset
Jori Hamilton is an experienced writer living in the Northwestern U.S. Her areas of expertise and topics she typically covers revolve around business productivity, marketing strategies, and web design. To learn more about Jori, you can follow her on Twitter: @HamiltonJori