81% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool, and that figure will continue to soar because 65% of marketers who don’t currently use video are planning on adding it into their strategy this year.
And it’s no wonder that video is so popular: 72% of consumers would rather use video than static text to learn about a product or service.
But, as with all forms of content marketing, churning out any old video isn’t likely to yield you many results. Instead, you need to understand the unique factors that make a video ‘good’.
Here are 4 ways to get the most out of video.
1. Don’t restrict your creatives
B2B design briefs often fall into a rut of requesting stale and ‘corporate’ imagery. This is largely because of the misconception that B2B purchasing decisions are based primarily on rational factors (whereas B2C customers buy based on emotion). Even though this comes from a desire to look professional and capable, the result can be bland.
Remember: businesses are made up of people, and people respond well to creativity. When developing imagery, but especially video, for your B2B campaign, take time to understand the people behind the business you’re selling to. Use buyer personas to get into the head of the decision makers you’re targeting. Understand their challenges and frustrations, and delve into what they’re looking for at each stage of the purchasing process. Use that knowledge to underpin your design philosophy – and don’t be afraid to inject creativity and personality into your visual assets.
2. Animate your product
Creating engaging videos in the B2B world can be a challenge because often the customer doesn’t care what the product looks like – they’re focused on benefits and what’s in it for them.
This is where animation can be effective. Create gifs and animated graphics that show how your product works. For example, if you create chatbot software, animate an example conversation to show how intelligent your software is.
You can also use animated video to bring infographics to life and highlight and visualise key stats about your product or service, such as the number of customers you’ve helped, or the increased productivity your product can be.
The advantage of animated video is that stills from the videos can also be used as static images to bring life to other pieces of content and add visual cohesion to your campaigns.
3. Focus on authenticity and quantity
1 billion hours of video are watched every day on YouTube alone, and 500 million people watch Facebook videos daily. People have a large appetite for video, which you means you need to be consistently creating and uploading fresh content.
That doesn’t mean you need to create big-budget features with high production values every day. Short, 30-second clips are enough to engage your audience and can be filmed yourself to keep costs down. Film experts in your business talking about industry trends or promoting your latest webinar, and then upload them to social media to promote your business, product, event or service quickly and effectively.
The crucial element to convey is authenticity – to show you’re people worth doing business with, that you understand your views and that they’ll have a rapport with you.
4. Think in terms of campaigns, not one-offs
When you’re creating all this content, you need to understand how it all works together to support the conversion process. That way you can measure the effectiveness and focus your resource on what works the best.
Here’s an example from a recent Engage Hub campaign. We created a whitepaper on chatbots and the customer experience and wanted to drive downloads. We broke the whitepaper down into infographics to make key findings digestible and drive curiosity in the full report. This gave us visual elements to promote on social media and in emails.
From the emails, infographics and social posts, users clicked through to a landing page. To make this landing page more engaging, we created a simple animation of a chatbot conversation. This extra touch increased time on page and downloads compared to having a static image.
Your challenge for your next campaign brief is to think laterally
Can a product specialist give a video recap of the key features? Can you do a Facebook Live demo? Are there stats you can animate?
Then integrate those assets into your promotion and see how it affects performance.
