How to use video in your B2B marketing strategy

By Laura Holland

The Power of Video for B2B Marketing

Did you know that viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch a video compared to 10% of those reading text? 

That’s why video centric platforms like TikTok have boomed in popularity over the last five years and why other social media sites are now investing much more heavily in video experiences, like LinkedIn who recently started trialing a dedicated video feed in their mobile app.

So with the biggest B2B social networking platform getting in on the act, how do you start integrating video into your strategy?

Types of Videos for B2B Marketing

There are lots of different ways you can use video marketing to help promote your business, especially in the B2B sector.

Product Videos
Showcasing what your product or service is, and what benefits it offers to prospective clients or customers not only directly engages your target audience but also helps to establish your presence within the market, boost your SEO for your niche and create trust around your brand.

Explainer Videos 
Educational videos should be at the core of your video marketing strategy, not only do they help to increase the understanding level of your offering to the audience but 

Customer Testimonials
Testimonial videos are the best way to legitimise how good your product or service is. It’s very easy for brands to talk about how good they are but have a real person talk about the benefits your service or product has given them, that’s when you’ll start seeing an uptick in enquiries.

Company Culture Videos
Whilst company culture videos tend to be used more for attracting talent into the business it is also very attractive to potential customers who more and more want to buy from companies with an ethos that is aligned with their own. This is where these types of videos really come into their own.

Webinars and Live Streams
Webinars and Livestreams are a great way to acquire leads and data for future marketing purposes (such as email marketing) but you can also repurpose these after the event. For example, creating short-form clips of key points and pairing with an in-depth blog is a great way to boost engagement and traffic to your website.
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How To Create Engaging B2B Video Content

Now you know what types of video you can create. You've probably got a few ideas of what you want to do, but how do you make it engaging?

Identify Your Target Audience
You’ll have an understanding of who your target audience is from your wider marketing strategy however you’ll need to drill down a little further when it comes to video content marketing. To do this start off by looking at the audience analytics on Linkedin which will give you an idea of industries and company sizes - this will help you tailor your video content to ensure it resonates.

You can take this one step further with paid by looking into LinkedIn’s Predictive Audiences and Audience Expansion options.

Tell a Compelling Story 
The secret to all good marketing is the story. Like all good stories you need a beginning (the problem that needs to be solved) a middle (how your product/service can fix it) and and ending (the results/key stats/customer testimonials). Following this structure will help you to keep to your messaging and not go overboard with the timing of the video.

Keep it Concise and Engaging
As mentioned above, you don’t want your video to be too long - in fact, most people drop off after the first 30 seconds. So do make sure that you’re not losing the audience within the first few seconds.

We recommend the following:

• Don’t start the video with a sting, go straight into your point
  
• Start the video with relatable question or issue that’s prevalent within your niche
  
• Make sure you add captions, it’s estimated that 85% of videos are watched on silent.
  

Incorporate Branding Elements
Do make sure that branding elements are incorporated into the video, this could be as simple as a logo in the corner, but it’s important to ensure that the video is attributable to your company as it is shared far and wide.

How Do You Optimise B2B Videos for SEO and SGE?

Keyword Research
Conducting thorough keyword research will really help to drive the reach of your video further. It will also help you to understand the trending topics and problems that your target audience is having but you can also utilise it to help boost your SEO.

There are a few ways you can conduct your research:

• Keywords by high volume: This will help you find out the current trends within your niche and create content to address this.
  
• Low competition keywords: This is your jackpot. These are terms that perform well within your niche that currently don’t have a lot of content created around it.
  

You can use tools like Ahrefs, Moz or Semrush to compile your research.

Video Titles and Descriptions Help With SEO and SGE
Once you’ve completed your keyword research you can use these words and phrases within your video titles and descriptions. Once you’ve uploaded to your website or social platform it will make discoverability of your content much easier for people to find, as well as helping to boost your SEO.

Transcripts and Closed Captions For Your B2B Marketing videos
Ensuring that you add closed captions and transcripts not only helps with accessibility of your content but it is also indexed for SEO purposes as well, so even though it may seem like a lot of extra work it really can pay dividends with your search strategy.

Video Sitemaps 
This one may be a bit of an unknown to a lot of marketers, but you can create and add in sitemaps to your video. You may have already seen something similar in action when you go to YouTube videos and click on their different ‘chapters’ that's essentially the premise of video sitemaps.

You can find an in-depth article and best practice around sitemaps on Google’s development site here.

Distributing and Promoting B2B Videos

Now you’ve created your videos following the steps and guideline above, it's time for the fun part, promoting them!

Where your focus is will depend heavily on your objectives and goals for the campaign, but the below is a great starting point.

Leverage Your Website and Blog 
The best place to promote your video is your website. Your website is the shop window to who you are, what you do and how you make a difference.

Keeping your website content fresh and up to date also really benefits your SEO with users spending more time watching video than any other format.

Social Media Promotion

Promoting your B2B marketing video on social media will not only help to enhance your brand position within the industry but also build your authority with your existing audience and customer base.

It’s also a great opportunity to encourage employee advocacy and maximise the reach of your content.

Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing campaigns will give you the advantage of doing a lot of A/B testing and seeing which videos resonate with your targeted audience.

For this you can take into account bounce rates / open rates and click rates, some emailer programmes also offer heat maps which offer great insights into what content your readers were spending the most time.

Paid Advertising Strategies
We touched on this a little earlier, but you can utilise your video for paid campaigns and target your desired audience, again like the email marketing you can also do A/B testing to see which content resonates more, and adapt your campaign accordingly.

You may find that audiences on different marketing funnels prefer different types of content and you can plan accordingly.

Measuring the Success of B2B Video Marketing

It can be tough to prove the ROI of the time and resources that going into planning and creating video campaigns, the following should help you do so - make sure that these are agreed upon at the start of the project.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Before you create the content 

Video Analytics and Insights
Each platform will have its own analytics dashboard, but the below are great starting points to understand what resonated with your audience and what didn’t. This is useful as even if you have a C-suite that finds it difficult to understand the ROI they will understand thought processes and learnings that can be taken forward into the next campaign.

If you’re looking for a partner to help create your video campaigns, or just looking for some guidance, please do get in touch. Email: [email protected], or call us on 020 3357 9740