According to Hubspot, 85% of enterprises utilize video as a marketing strategy, which is unsurprising given that mobile video consumption grows by 100% every year. While blogging and long-form content are important components of any marketing plan, they aren’t enough if you want to grab your target market’s attention. But how can you make good use of B2B video marketing? Here are a few tips.
Create a strategy.
The adage “failing to prepare is preparing to fail” couldn’t be more accurate in B2B marketing. The most important aspect of your success with it is your plan. In this sense, ensuring that your marketing plan interacts seamlessly with all of your other marketing platforms, such as blogs or social media, is critical.
Simply said, video isn’t a stand-alone marketing strategy; it needs to work in tandem with the rest of your efforts.
Begin with the funnel.
A great place to begin is to search for ways to include it in your current marketing funnel. And, because the video is better at establishing a personal connection with clients over other types of content, it will be more successful to make them for clients early in the buyer’s journey. This is a fantastic way to assist or educate your prospects on significant industry and business challenges while also establishing your firm as a thought leader.
Whatever stage of video marketing you’re in, it is essential to a good video strategy to make sure that the visual content you develop corresponds to precise moments in the client experience. Your material must fulfill their needs and include a call to action that encourages them to take action.
Create personalities for your target audience.
Understanding who you’re talking to is the foundation of every successful marketing approach. And video is no exception. Before you can develop video content that your target consumers will engage with, you need a clear image of them and their position.
Begin any video marketing campaign by building customer personas. This will assist you to tailor the content you generate for certain groups of your target audience (which will make it more effective), as well as confirming what kind of material you’ll need to develop in the first place.
Think about the sorts of videos you want to make.
There are various types of video content you may develop to fulfill the demands of your clients at each level of your funnel, just as there are several customers for whom you should consider generating video content. It’s worth remembering that the more diverse your material is, the more your market will see you as a thought leader in your field. So shake it up a little. Just make sure it is still in line with the rest of your approach.
Make a storyboard for your video
It’s crucial to plan out your video material ahead of time if you want the completed result to strike home, just like it’s important to have a sound approach when it comes to video marketing.
A decent narrative and storyboard are essential for success. The screenplay is what the presenter (or the narrator in the video) will say, whereas the storyboard is a visual blueprint of your video from beginning to conclusion. What you need to film should be based on your narrative and storyboard.
Make use of video to supplement your textual material
When making a video, we generally suggest starting with the script – after all, it’s the foundation for whatever may happen in it.
The good news is that if you currently have a written content marketing plan in place, you’ve already completed the majority of the effort required to write a screenplay that will provide genuine results. A majority of executives prefer to watch a video rather than read text, so making videos to accompany the information you’ve previously produced will allow leads to consuming it in their desired format.
This method also greatly reduces the amount of labor necessary to generate a video. For example, the script may be based on the textual material from a top blog post (which should already be written communicatively), and the storyboard can be based on the visuals from the article.
Make sure you’re using the correct platforms to distribute your work.
Promotion, like every other type of B2B marketing content, takes effort. So, once you’ve finished making your video, the next step is to show it to your audience.
For B2B, social networking, particularly LinkedIn, is always a good place to start. On LinkedIn, a majority of executives say they exchange videos with coworkers on a weekly basis. As a result, placing it there enhances the likelihood that your target audience—and the genuine decision-makers within it—will notice it.
Subtitles are also important in this situation… Because most people scan through their social media feeds without turning on their speakers, adding subtitles enhances the likelihood that they’ll stop and view it.
Adding your films to your Youtube account (or another video hosting platform) also makes it simple to embed them in other places, such as your website and blog. This makes integrating their dissemination into your entire content strategy much easier.
Conclusion
If there’s one thing you should remember from this post, it’s to make sure that each video you make has a defined function inside your funnel.
It’s not enough to make marketing videos just to “do video” – they have to serve your clients and complement what you’ve been doing on other marketing channels if they’re going to help you generate leads.
