How to Use Video into Your Content and Marketing Strategy

7 minute read

Upland Admin

Diving into video marketing is a powerful way to enhance B2B marketing strategy and customer interaction potential on many levels for any brand.

A video is easy to access and watch at any time. Colorful imagery and educational storytelling can help clearly demonstrate the features of a product or service while highlighting how it addresses pain points. Visual content can also be strategically broken down into small, focused segments to offer many points of entry and lead customers through a personalized buyer’s journey that improves conversion rates.

All of these aspects related to B2B video influence a customer’s willingness to enter the research process—and how quickly they turn from lookie-loo into a buyer.

Research shows, “97% of marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service, and 95% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service,” according to B2B Marketing Zone.

Even LinkedIn recently jumped all in on B2B video, reaching out personally to users about how to “captivate a professional audience with native video at every stage of the buyer’s journey.” From their market research and insights into online trends, LinkedIn can see how integrating video into B2B marketing strategy is a next level practice and is quickly becoming a competitive edge. Which is why they also provide specific DIY marketing tools to help you create videos from start to finish.

The question is, if you are going to use video as part of your B2B marketing strategy, how can you do it with finesse while reaching sales goals?

Creating Video Content That Elevates B2B Marketing Strategy

Knowing something is a good next step for your organization is only the beginning. B2B organizations need to clearly understand how content along the buyer’s journey can be enhanced by video and connect with the best resources to create quality, engaging content that serves a purpose beyond being trendy.

To create a high-quality, converting B2B video requires the same key elements as any other marketing content.

Focus, strategy, planning, and keywords. Remember, each video is a blank slate, just like any other marketing content piece. It needs a clear purpose and focus, keywords, and budget to build something that helps increase engagement and education along the buyer’s journey in a purposeful way.

Start by asking key marketing questions:

  • Who is the target audience?
  • Where and how are they accessing the video?
  • What pain points are they looking to solve?
  • Is there a way to weave existing content into a video script to ensure it aligns with current marketing strategies and campaigns?
  • What do you want your target audience to do after watching the video? Where are you driving them next?

Then, it comes down to good old creativity.

One of the biggest benefits of leveraging B2B video is how it can help you relate to different types of customers and their preferences. Not everyone enjoys reading. Some people like a mix of reading and video based on their mood. Others are more willing to watch a video when it’s shared by people they know and trust or through a social platform they use regularly.

So get creative with video in your B2B marketing strategy, as well as how—and where—you share it.

Making B2B video one aspect of a larger brand marketing strategy also allows the organization to keep moving forward with strategies already in play. Video can be leveraged strategically to connect with new potential customers and communities or as an accent piece to the current buyer’s journey.

Getting the Most Out of B2B Video Marketing

With fresh video content in hand, B2B marketers can add something very important to their bag tricks: a unique opportunity to amp up targeted marketing.

New and emerging technology makes it easier and cheaper to create quality short videos and pair them with advanced SEO targeting features inherent to video development. Video also provides contextual tools that enhance the viewing experience, including the ability to generate “clickable video” to drive traffic to specific items or services in an instant.

All of these things naturally boost video marketing’s potential ROI.

Using video strategically, instead of as a full-on marketing push, makes it easier to create a layered storyline that matches the buyer’s journey and drips video into the content release schedule in installments. This approach helps get the customer engaged and excited about what’s next and offers a whole new layer of insightful customer data to track and leverage for each video or the series as a whole.

In “Why B2B Marketing Strategies Are Evolving in 2018,” Meryl Draper, CEO of video advertising agency Quirk Creative, says “The key to video strategy for B2B marketers is to mix brand (top of funnel) videos with direct response […] (bottom of funnel) videos. […] Working together, these different videos can accompany the buyer through a longer purchase journey, initially sparking interest for brand retention and later offering the consumer more relevant, sales-converting information.”

Tips to Maximize Your Brand’s B2B Video Punch:

Storytelling

Tell a good story without being too polished.

What is the storyline? What kind of content would work best at each stage of the buyer’s journey? What customers can you enlist to contribute to video content by sharing their customer experiences with the brand?

Make ‘Em Laugh

Amp up the humor factor for relatability.

Underneath it all, B2B marketers are humans selling to other humans. Using contextual, brand-related humor as part of your B2B marketing strategy aligns with appealing to the human side of everyone in your target audience.

Be a Guide

Lead with the desire to educate.

People rely on video to help them do their jobs better—so focus on being as educational as possible. Break up video content into easily digestible bites that target one key topic or idea and serve as a tool to help others improve a skill set or work performance.

Choose the Right Tools

Leverage the best technical tools to balance budget and quality.

Creating quality video is more affordable with the variety of cloud-based options on the market that allow you to shoot the video, integrate music and photos, and edit it all within the platform. Check into Animoto, Moovly, Rocketium, and Wirecast as options. Also consider using video techniques like 360-degree video, virtual reality, and animation to set your brand apart.

In the Spotlight

Pick a spokesperson or team to feature regularly and develop an audience connection.

Connection in video is key. Customers relate to an industry leader or team as much as the video content, so feature talent that can deliver. Use graphics and B-roll to mix things up, and feature elements that support your brand’s tone (i.e., free-form casual or more formal and corporate).

Optimization

Optimize video content for search, format, and compatibility.

Similar to written content, your video content needs to follow a certain format to provide accessibility for diverse users and platforms and create a universal, quality viewing experience. Whether you’re posting a video online or sharing it through permission-based communication, consider the optimization and compatibility components before creating anything.

Data-Based Marketing

Measure and learn from the stats, then re-shape the approach or strategy as needed.

Tracking is only the first part of making the most of video in your B2B marketing strategy. It’s important to review and tweak a video strategy just as you would with any other marketing content. And remember to include a clear call to action for viewers within each video segment.

Adding video to your B2B marketing strategy is about more than creating video snippets and adding them to marketing outreach.

Take into consideration the creative and technical components of video, the resources required, and how to create content that’s a relatable visual extension of your brand message to connect with customers in a whole new way.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the latest news, tips, and tricks in B2B marketing.

Reliable products. Real results.

Every day, thousands of companies rely on Upland to get their jobs done simply and effectively. See how brands are putting Upland to work.

View Success Stories