The Ultimate B2B Video Marketing Guide for 2021 Marketers shouldn't forget that humans are visual creatures.
By Osama Khabab
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In recent years, video marketing exploded in popularity and proved how valuable it can be in the B2B sphere. According to statistics, 70% of marketers in 2021 believe that videos showed a positive ROI.
What is B2B video marketing?
B2B video marketing is a part of content marketing that involves planning, creating and sharing your content in video format with your B2B audience. These video formats can include social media videos, webcasts, video podcasts, live streams and more.
According to the aforementioned survey, in developing high-value content for businesses, 24% of marketers picked training videos, 24% chose promo videos, 14% went with demo/explainer videos, 14% selected live streams, 12% went with personalized videos, 10% opted for how-to videos and 2% picked customer onboarding videos.
B2B content ideas and tips
1. Share your experiences
To build your brand image, you can give a virtual tour of your premises to show the product development stages, or you can show the routine of an employee for one day.
2. Make it light
Generally, it's best to keep your video fun and light-hearted. You may be reaching out to other businesses, but at the end of the day you're still talking to a person. Don't create a corporate cliché of a video and instead use animation or capture behind-the-scenes action to engage your audience.
3. Show product solutions
At the end of the day, prospects want a product that solves their issue. Create video interviews with clients who have found your product to be really effective or simply put up how-to-videos on your website and social media platforms.
4. Have an emotional appeal
You may think rationality rules in B2B marketing, but there is still a need to emotionally connect with your buyer if you want your video to make a bigger impact.
The emotion in your marketing can be as subtle as making someone like your ad and trust your brand. In 2021, there is an increasing trend of having a humorous element in B2B marketing videos, whereas amazement and curiosity play an important role as well.
These emotions play a vital role in the way people perceive your brand. Your company values and your B2B relationships are dictated by your video ads, content and consumer experiences.
5. Make sure the video production is great
You need to create relevant, unique and captivating videos if you want your customers to watch them. For this purpose, make sure to use some good camera equipment, video editing software and hire professionals to help you out.
6. Have the buyer's journey in mind
Create a B2B video marketing strategy that considers the buying phases, participants, their needs, queries and goals.
Supporting content will allow the buyers to make better decisions about the product they want to buy from you.
Related: Your Buyer's Journey is Now Online. Is Your Customer Experience Digital-First Too?
Top 3 social media sites for B2B video marketing
1. LinkedIn
With over 55 million companies registered on LinkedIn, it's easily one of the best social media sites for B2B video marketing. In 2020, there were 10,000 B2B software pages on the site utilizing it to generate sales leads, specify product reviews and other things.
96% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic social media marketing, where 80% of them use LinkedIn ads. This is no surprise as companies get seven times more reactions and 24 times higher comments on their LinkedIn Live streams as compared to other regular videos.
Related: How to Stand Out on LinkedIn With Video
2. Twitter
In 2020, 86% of B2B marketers used Twitter as their digital marketing tool. This makes sense since Twitter's popularity has been increasing among B2B businesses because of the audience's indulgence in content consumption and industry news.
Ad views of brands have 26% more viewership on this platform as compared to others. Business messages on Twitter have a 335% more likely chance of being clicked in a Tweet if they are posted four times compared to if they are only seen once.
3. Facebook
With 2.74 billion active users on Facebook as of January 2021, 74% of these use the app for professional work. More than 90 million small-scale businesses use Facebook to advertise their products, with over 65% of B2B brands using the Facebook ads feature and 87% using the app as a marketing tool.
Top 5 video hosting platforms for B2B marketing
1. Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-sharing platform that allows creating high-quality videos to be shared easily with the audience, including live streams. It is the one of the world's leading all-in-one video software solutions.
2. Wistia
Wistia allows users to create professional business videos with advance tools, such as customizable players, detailed analytics, and easy-to-embed videos. It is designed exclusively to serve companies using video on their websites for marketing, support, and sales.
3. SproutVideo
SproutVideo offers video marketing, security and analytical tools to make video sharing more convenient. Businesses can make use of easy lead capture, marketing platform integrations, video SEO and more.
4. Brightcove
Brightcove is a cloud-based online video platform. Several multi-national media companies, businesses and organizations use Brightcove to create and share videos on the web.
It provides its users with features such as video management and marketing, strategic ad placement, video analytics and library, social media sharing, interactive ad capabilities, live video content on OTT devices and much more.
5. YouTube
YouTube is a free video-sharing website that makes it easy to edit, upload, and watch videos online.
It is one of the most popular sites on the web, and its visitors watch around 6 billion hours of videos every month.
The viewers can also like, comment and subscribe to channels to show support for the content. Users can even create and upload their own videos to share with others.
Related: How Facebook Can Help Promote Your YouTube Videos
3 examples of successful B2B video marketing
1. Cisco
Cisco is a great example of B2B video marketing. It shows that videos are not about high production costs, but rather about understanding your audience and then creating content that appeals to them.
According to Cisco's social media team lead, an average B2B video length should be from 60 to 90 seconds. With its catalog of more than 3,000 videos and a production rate of a thousand videos per year, B2B businesses can learn from Cisco to create videos that show solutions and sales funnel-targeted content.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot is great at multi-format video marketing, with a YouTube channel filled with case studies, customer success stories, podcasts and guides. The content creation of HubSpot reflects its sales funnels, with an average duration of 30-second how-to videos to 30-minute case studies.
As a SaaS marketing platform, HubSpot is an excellent example of how B2B brands can create specific and relevant content that drive conversions.
3. SAP
SAP's YouTube channel offers a personalized approach to video marketing with its content created specifically for any individual customer. This makes it convenient for brands to watch content that is more relevant to them.
SAP has been successful in targeting its audience at an emotional and engaging level and offers solutions that deal with the problems at their core.
By reading this article, I hope you've gained more confidence in approaching B2B video marketing and find it's not as intimidating as it seems. In fact, you may even enjoy it once you get started.
