YouTube for B2B: 5 best practice

Summary

In this post, we’ll discover the 5 best YouTube marketing practices for B2B companies!

YouTube: a real search engine

YouTube isn’t simply a platform that collects online video content. It’s also one of the most used search engines, right after Google. As the point of reference for every kind of audiovisual content, YouTube has more than 2,000,000,000 active users every month.

For exactly this reason, if you’re a marketer, a strategy based on video content isn’t just a plus, it’s necessary and indispensable. Does this also apply to B2B marketing? In a word, yes. Your potential customers are looking for answers on YouTube, and you need to provide them before a competitor does.

Already, 86% of B2B companies have made videos an essential tool in their marketing strategy. But let’s delve into the best practices that a company should consider when using YouTube for effective B2B marketing.

YouTube for B2B: two goals

Before we get into the details of how B2B marketing is structured on YouTube and why you should use it, there are two main reasons that should already convince you:

• Strengthen your brand: videos offer audiences the opportunity to interact on multiple levels, including emotionally. As the leading online video platform, YouTube helps build and define your brand identity and create deep connections with your target audience.
• Improve your search rankings: Google includes video in its search results, which generally rank higher than “normal” web page results. It seems that video is 50 times more likely to rank on Google, compared to text results (Brainshark). Consequently, publishing videos on YouTube increases the chances of being found on Google.

Storytelling

When we talk about the concept of storytelling, it’s natural to link it to B2C marketing that is aimed at selling products to individual consumers. For many, it’s not considered an essential and crucial strategy for B2B, but in recent years, the line between B2B and B2C has become increasingly blurred. Customers are independently looking for companies to target, and as a result, B2B marketing must adapt.

But what is storytelling? It’s kind of that secret ingredient that makes content marketing alive and vital. Without a story to tell, a strong narrative to follow, the audience won’t feel engaged. The goal of storytelling is to make the audience feel immersed in what they’re watching and engaged. So, whatever video you’re going to present, whether it’s a tutorial, a demo, or whatever, it’s always good to have a clear idea of the goals and the story you want to tell.

One successful strategy is to focus on the company’s staff, giving them a voice and visibility. This shows the “human” side of the business you’re presenting, triggering a mechanism of empathy.

Most often, the medium of video represents a means of entertainment and also of escape. With that in mind, telling the story of the company, making yourself known, is a good way to engage your audience.

Manage the channel with care

Having a YouTube channel isn’t just about posting content, it’s also about being detail-oriented. It’s not difficult to set up a YouTube channel but you’ll want to take special care when it comes to these aspects:

• A convincing description: every YouTube channel has an “About” section where you can insert a description of your activity. It’s your business card where you present yourself to your audience. If properly optimized with keywords and hashtags to boost SEO, you maximize the chance that your videos will reach a large portion of your audience. The description should be short, include a clear CTA, and have a link back to the website.
• Consistent banners and icons: your YouTube channel is just as important as the other communication channels, and as such, they should be consistent with each other. Make sure that banners, icons, and logos are consistent with those on your landing pages.
• An organized video library: don’t leave your videos scattered; to ensure that your audience easily finds what they are looking for, organize them according to their format in many playlists.

Categorize content

A B2B company, especially one that is well established, regularly publishes on its corporate blog. But that’s not enough, because if you have a YouTube channel, the whole strategy needs to be integrated with videos. And a YouTube marketing strategy won’t be successful if the videos don’t offer engaging content.

A starting point could be the content published on the company blog: you could produce similar content in the form of videos. Team interviews, discussions, customer testimonials, practical exercises, tutorials, or demos that in written form are often boring and perhaps not widely utilized. What’s important is that the content you produce is relevant and useful to your audience.

The goal of this type of video is to educate other businesses on certain topics and consistently show what you can offer.

In this context, playlists, which we mentioned in the previous section, come in very handy. It’s a practical and functional way to organize your content into different strategic categories. In fact, already in the design phase you should have a clear idea about the kind of video you want to create, the category, and its purpose. For a B2B company, playlists could look like this:

• Software – Awareness
• Troubleshooting/Tutorials – Capture
• Webinars – Activation
• Updates – Retention
• Case Studies – Referrals
• Product Demos – Revenue

If your playlists reflect strategic categories, your content will be useful at every stage of your customers’ buying journey, from awareness to revenue.

Adapt to new feature

B2B companies often make the same mistake: treating YouTube as a platform to set up their channel, publish content, and “forget about it.” On the contrary, when YouTube releases a new feature, the company must take it into account and use it to its advantage, integrating it into its B2B strategy.

For example, when the leading search engine, Google, releases a new algorithm update or SEO rules change, all marketers move in that direction. It’s the same for YouTube. As new features are released, it’s imperative to update your videos and your channel to take advantage of the latest optimization techniques.

An example would be the use of end screens, so-called “end cards.” At the end of each video, you have the option to add a screen where you can refer the viewer to another piece of content. Taking advantage of and using the features YouTube promotes in your strategy helps to improve click-through rates, impressions, and awareness in general, as the content is continuously optimized for the platform.

Implement your channel with ads

Paid advertising on YouTube is a fundamental aspect that helps support the growth of your channel. If you have just opened a channel of your B2B company on YouTube, you don’t have an audience yet. But thanks to ads, you have the possibility to reach new people, not only creating a wider audience, but above all, one that is composed of the right people.

YouTube has a refined ability to segment its audience, which will allow you to show your content to an audience that fits your brand perfectly. It is, for sure, a much more efficient and effective way to create videos, as opposed to randomly posting them in the hopes that someone will notice.

There are several ways to enhance your content:

• Display Ads or Video Discovery Ads: the kind of YouTube ads that appear to the right of your video and above the list of suggestions, available for desktop only.
• Overlay Ads: semi-transparent ads that can be found at the bottom of your video, also available for desktop.
• Bumper Ads: an unskippable ad placed before your video, lasting up to 6 seconds and also available for mobile devices.
• Skippable Video Ads: their placement is variable. They can be inserted before, after, or during the video; they last up to 3 minutes but are skippable after 5 seconds.
• Unskippable Video Ads: always have the same placement but unlike skippable ads, it will play at the end of the video and can last up to 20 seconds.

In addition, ignorable or skippable ads have the advantage of being viewable on any type of device and you only pay if the viewer reaches 30 seconds from the start of the ad. The goal is to create a compelling enough ad that reaches the viewer quickly, and as a B2B company you’ll need to do some selection work. The choice of video to run your ads in also depends on the industry.

Track progress

Once you’ve followed all these best practices, don’t forget to monitor how your videos are performing. With YouTube Analytics, you can access information on demographics, number of views, and traffic. This data will help you better define your strategy, while also highlighting your strengths and weaknesses.

Some examples of how to apply this include measuring the following:

• Subscribers, video views
• Lead generation, opt-in conversions from YouTube to the website
• Lead nurturing, getting into the sales pipeline, webinar sign-ups
• Subscriber-customer statistics
• verall statistics of likes and shares, “recommended” inbound video traffic

Following these YouTube best practices for B2B can be critical to an effective strategy!

Babelee

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