Video as a means to reach out and engage with audiences have been around for decades now. Be it ten second commercials or those masked as hour-long TV shows, we have all come across and have been influenced by this visual medium as a buyer. But the objective of this article is to identify strategies that small and medium sized B2B businesses can deploy to use video marketing to engage with their customers online.
To begin with, video marketing has become a lot more affordable over the past few years. Today, anybody with a computer or mobile phone and an internet connection can launch highly professional video marketing campaigns from the comfort of their homes. But affordability is not why you should get started with this strategy. There are several other reasons why a business should invest in video marketing.
High Engagement: Studies have shown that people are more likely to share and interact with your content if it is delivered as video as opposed to text. This is because our human brains are better at engaging with visuals and are in fact known to process videos 60,000 times faster than text. Also, the average internet consumer is known to watch more than 200 videos a month on an average and this number is only growing. If you are not investing in video marketing, you are potentially losing out on a channel that your customers are spending a lot of their time on.
Credibility: People tend to trust your content more when it is accompanied by video. It helps people identify with your brand and build trust. This is perhaps why national leaders appear on TV to deliver a speech in times of crisis or emergency. People tend to have more empathy and trust when a speech is delivered in video as opposed to audio or text.
So what forms of video marketing works for a B2B customer? Here are a few ways businesses can engage and reach out to their customers on video.
Webinars: Webinars are without doubt the most popular video marketing technique for B2B enterprises. Business customers demand constant hand-holding and while a dedicated account manager or a comprehensive knowledge base helps, a weekly webinar on various topics of interest help these customers identify the several ways your product helps them grow their business. Today’s technologies have made webinar production affordable and there are tools that allow businesses launch their own webinars without spending too many resources.
Hangouts: Popularized by Google Hangouts, this is a growing avenue for brands to market their product through online meetings. Here, a brand representative ‘goes live’ at a designated date and time and their followers and customers may reach out to them with industry or product related questions. While Google Hangouts may make sense for a consumer-oriented brand with thousands of followers, enterprise businesses with a smaller share of customers could instead use conferencing tools like ClickMeeting to connect for a Hangout with customers.
Demo & How To Videos: Customers love videos that help them understand how to use your products in the most efficient way. You may either produce in-house videos or tie up with prominent video bloggers and YouTube celebrities in your niche to produce videos demoing your product. Such videos have terrific engagement value and is not only a lead generation channel, but also helps engage and retain existing customers for your business.
Testimonial Videos: A number of studies have shown that adding testimonials from reputed customers can add massive social validation to what you do and can drive conversions. Videos from these customers add credibility to the recommendation that they provide for your business and can hence massively influence conversions on your website.
Are you in a B2B business? How do you use videos to market your business to customers? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
A good subject but light on the specifics of why B2B is such a great market now for video. There are a number of factors:
* Decision makers are increasingly consuming content on mobile devices and are looking for snack content. Video meets this need.
* Video can get to the heart of an issue quickly and in an engaging way. But it needs to be businesslike and relevant – in B2B content consumption is purposeful.
* Of course businesspeople are people too, so there needs to be some element of entertainment and creativity, with the amount varying, depending on the purpose of the video. But we always remember time is at a premium and make sure everything is to the point.
* Video should be planned and created to be part of an information journey. Contexts is as important as content.
Hope this helps.