How to improve your B2B video marketing strategy

Summary

More B2B customers are watching online video to make important purchasing decisions. The current environment is therefore promising for developing a B2B video marketing strategy for improving the buying experience of business decision makers and for ensuring a higher return on investment. In this post, we’ll show you how.

What role does a B2B video marketing strategy play?

For the B2B marketing funnel, decision makers and end users are usually not the same person, which means that the brand (marketers and sales teams in particular) must select individuals in management and who, more importantly, have the authority to influence purchasing decisions. This can include a wide variety of professional roles, from researchers to those at the C-level. 

In a recent post, we explained how the increased complexity of the sales journey has made marketers’ responsibilities more complicated. Such complications, which are largely due to mass digitization, have resulted in incredible opportunities for growth and development for the entire B2B organization: streamlined and efficient processes, numerous and more centered negotiations, improved quality of interactions. 

Within the B2B marketing universe, a carefully thought-out, data-driven, and communications-clear B2B video marketing strategy is now indispensable. Integrating video into landing pages, websites, social media posts, and emails can generate much higher user engagement than other types of content across all stages of the journey. 

The end game of a B2B video marketing strategy – beyond goals related to contingencies, individual initiatives, or different business departments – is to be able to build comprehensive and personalized customer experiences. 

We will see that even in the case of B2B marketing, interaction with customers (increasingly personalized and automated) extends well beyond the funnel to all business functions involved in meeting the needs of the target audience before, during, and after the purchase: from fulfillment to customer care, to billing. Videos deployed across digital touch points therefore need to be configured so they can offer truly serviceable, comprehensive, informative, useful, and operational content.

The topic is incredibly complex, but we have collected three tips to improve your B2B video marketing strategy.

1. Segment customer needs to create personalized experiences

It may seem like a cliche, but it’s worth repeating at the beginning of any new project: the starting point of any B2B video marketing strategy is to know your target audience as accurately as possible.

“Consumers” (to be understood here as opposed to buyers) usually base their decisions on rather vaguely defined factors such as price, perceived quality, or distinctive features of a product. When evaluating a product or service, corporate buyers, on the other hand, must take into account more complex and specific requirements that meet the production standards of the individual production entity: price and payment terms, service levels, legal and tax considerations, logistical needs, etc. For this reason, B2B relationships are often more complex than B2C ones. 

In addition, compared to B2C market end customers, business buyers tend to adopt a more rational and emotionally detached approach to purchases, guided by objective criteria and a thorough analysis of options.

An individual consumer, even if he or she has consulted forums, read reviews, and sought the advice of referrals, makes his or her own purchasing decisions. B2B purchasing, on the other hand, often requires input and approvals from many stakeholders, each carrying their own interests, all the way up to management (from the C-level managers of different departments to the company’s stakeholders). B2B thus takes place in a network of continuous buyer-seller relationships and inevitably refers to “long cycle” business models.

Segmenting customers by their needs and buying behavior allows companies to create personalized experiences for each group.

Customer needs vary widely: from those of small businesses with purchasing patterns that are difficult to predict, to the demands of multinational corporations with analytical and technological purchasing processes. Despite not insignificant differences, B2B customers generally fall into one of the following three categories of personas (each category is distinguished by key characteristics for building personalized experiences):

• “One-click” customers: include smaller accounts that tend to transact business in a consumer mode. They are expensive to serve on a large scale and often lower-tech.
• Analytics customers: refers to large accounts that collect market information to inform purchasing decisions. These customers require highly personalized service from vendors.
• Unique customers: typically large accounts that require even higher levels of personalization than analytic buyers because they face a range of non-market challenges, such as extensive regulation or stringent security standards.

2. Align video content with channel and funnel stage

When creating our video content plan, we will have to take into account both the specifics of the target audience we have mentioned and two factors, both of which are fundamental: where are buyers located in the sales funnel and on which marketing channel the video should be distributed.

Only after defining these two absolutely central aspects will it be possible to build content that is able to reach the target audience at the different stages of the purchase path (identification, research, intention, purchase, and implementation) and satisfy a real (though probably still unexpressed) need. Specifically:

1. At the high stage of the funnel (Awareness) – where buyers go from being unaware of a problem to recognizing it, to evaluating the cost-benefit of addressing it or not – we find top-of-funnel content that is designed to reach a broader audience: 

• videos on industry trends and thought leadership,
• company videos, 
• videos with an educational focus and training objectives.

2. At the mid funnel stage (Consideration) – where buyers explore their options, compare software, and select vendors – videos that offer product overviews or tell case studies perform best.

3. At the lowest stage of the funnel (Decision)—where conversions occur and the lead refines his or her purchase decision – video tutorials, free demos, and content with visual explanations of use cases, prove most valuable. Videos containing customer testimonials prove to be extremely effective to: 

• create action triggers, 
• support buyers at all stages of the sales funnel, moving them smoothly and frictionlessly through their buying process.

The three stages of the sales cycle are not separated by rigid dividing lines, and different types of videos can be used at multiple times, across different stages. It’s important to reiterate here that a sound B2B video marketing strategy should contain a mix of high-funnel videos focused on brand building and low-funnel videos designed to incentivize purchases.

3. Develop deeper relationships with potential customers

We’ve said it many times before: the B2B buying journey is no longer linear. To convince untold numbers of decision makers, brands need to take into account ramifications, backtracks and second thoughts, and requests for further insights. Buyers need to identify the problem and explore solutions and end up bouncing between different touch points before making (or not making) key decisions.

In such a context, capturing the attention of the target audience is only the first step. The real challenge lies in establishing an intellectual and emotional – and therefore more grounded (and radical) – connection through videos that not only inform and educate, but also resonate with viewers. Even in the case of B2B markets, customers who find a match with their values (in addition to judging the information they receive as relevant) are three times more likely to make a major purchase with fewer regrets (source: Gartner).

By creating micro-level buyer personas, you can more accurately determine the type of video content that buyers want or need to hear at crucial moments in their buying journey. From segmentation, it becomes easier to build an appropriate message with which to meet those needs. 

At this point, all the techniques that B2B marketers can use to gather judgments and opinions about the content enjoyed, from feedback to reviews, from comments left on the company’s channels to the body of data – appropriately organized and interpreted – that comes from interactions with existing customers play an essential role. 

4. Creating a credible brand through customer reviews

Customer reviews and testimonials function like a virtual handshake; they represent a somewhat sincere and free gesture that an acquired customer exchanges with a potential one. These real customers, who talk about products or services because they have already experienced them,give buyers confidence that those same products or services have actually been tested. Trust is created because those offering their disinterested testimonials are “insiders”: colleagues, industry experts, or professionals (perhaps well known in the environment). When combined with video, reviews and testimonials produce a powerful impact on the audience: 

• humanize case studies and marketing content that might otherwise come across as cold and depersonalizing;
• they create an emotional response in the individual user. 

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, more than 50% of customers cite “people like me” as the most trusted source of information about a given product: resemblance to buyers’ working lives triggers a powerful mechanism of identification, leading them to attribute credibility to the company.

B2B video marketing strategy: where to start to improve customer interactions

In conclusion, there are at least four courses of action that a B2B video marketing strategy must take to improve customer relationships: 

• Invest in in-depth relationships: to create effective videos, companies need to know who their buyers are, the reasons for each purchase, and the key factors that drive decisions. In-depth customer information drives interactions at every stage, including product design, engineering, and marketing.
• Aim for frictionless interactions: companies need to simplify the buying process for customers and they need to do so by facilitating seamless transactions through digital applications integrated directly into videos that automate certain functions, from ordering and payment to customer service access and user self-service account management.
• Pursue omnichannel integration: brands must increase customer choice across their preferred channels. Videos should be designed to take full advantage of the languages and technicalities of each media, while ensuring a consistent experience and view across all channels.
• Implement video production and distribution platforms: companies need to explore “open” and easy-to-use video production and distribution business models and platforms that through new data-driven products and services facilitate integration and collaboration across the value chain.

Adding video to the marketing mix can cut through the background noise and help brands make themselves recognizable, newsworthy, and memorable. Beyond technological developments – crucial, no doubt, but which alone would not be enough to meet the demands of increasingly competitive markets and the needs of such elusive customers – companies must develop and cultivate a digital presence that is authoritative and reliable through messages that are perceived as authentic.

They can also do this through a B2B video marketing strategy where each piece of video content is perfectly tailored to the business objectives and the expectations, preferences, and needs of each individual buyer (or qualified buying group).