The message is clear at this point: B2B organizations can’t afford to leave video out of their marketing efforts. More marketers incorporate video into their content strategies every year, and the results speak for themselves.

According to recent research by Wyzowl, 86% of video marketers say that video increases web traffic, 78% say that it has improved their annual sales numbers, and a whopping 94% say it helps users understand their products or services better. 

There are plenty of undebatable benefits involved with video marketing, but there’s a catch to it. It requires strategy. It’s one thing to develop a beautiful and engaging video, but that won’t do much good for your organization without a concrete plan to help you make the most of it.

So, how do you develop a B2B video marketing strategy to build your brand? It doesn’t have to be as complicated as it might seem at the outset. Instead, taking a basic step-by-step approach can help you build a successful strategy to promote your brand, grow your business, and generate exposure through video marketing.

If you’re looking to dive into the vibrant and fast-growing video marketing landscape, then here is everything you need to know.

Why Invest in Video Marketing?

Maybe you’re already satisfied with your existing content strategy. Perhaps your blogs, case studies, and newsletters are bringing in more than enough leads, engagements, and sales for your needs. Even if that’s the case, it’s still vital to incorporate video into your marketing efforts if you hope to continue connecting with your target audience.

Consider the following reasons that video marketing is becoming the primary B2B communication strategy:

  • Well-made videos can simplify the buyer journey and streamline the purchase process by seamlessly communicating product benefits.
  • Informative videos like explainer videos and product showcases make it easier for audiences to understand your brand.
  • Videos can boost your brand’s exposure by putting your product in front of a range of audiences across platforms.
  • Video tends to yield far higher engagement than written content, so video can be vital for engaging your audience.
  • Your existing content, such as blogs and newsletters, can be supplemented with video marketing that increases click and open rates.

Your Step-by-Step B2B Video Marketing Strategy to Boost Your Brand

Now that we’ve established the importance of video marketing in the B2B sphere, let’s walk through what it takes to develop an actionable strategy. The best B2B video marketing plans include the following steps:

1. Create Buyer Personas

Whenever you develop any piece of communication, it’s vital to determine who you hope your message will reach – and that’s precisely why buyer personas are essential to video marketing. Developing accurate and detailed personas is always vital for helping you maximize the impact of your videos.

When you create any video marketing strategy, your first step should be to perform in-depth market research into your target audience’s wants, needs, habits, and demographics to create comprehensive customer personas. This activity will equip you to target your video marketing efforts directly toward your target audience.

2. Make Videos For Each Step of the Funnel

Most potential customers won’t become loyal patrons the moment they discover your offering. Instead, most will have to go through the old-fashioned marketing funnel from need recognition to their first purchase. However, you don’t have to make your audience go through this entire process on their own. Instead, you can create videos to help them along to their first transaction.

Marketing videos are remarkably effective at helping push your customers through the marketing funnel, so make sure that you plan to create videos for each phase of the marketing funnel. For example, you might want to produce an introductory product overview video for the need recognition phase of the funnel or a deep-dive presenter video for the information search.

Simply targeting your customers with specialized videos based on their position in the funnel can have a massive impact on your engagements and conversions.

3. Reuse Existing Content in Video Form

After you’ve assembled your personas and planned out what kinds of videos you want to make, you’ll now have the daunting video production process ahead of you. However, making videos doesn’t have to be so scary – in fact, you might not even have to start from scratch! If your business already has plenty of blogs, white papers, case studies, and newsletters in your content archives, then don’t be afraid to recycle those posts and turn them into videos.

Reusing your existing content is a fast and effective way to flesh out your video library without having to break the bank on scripting and filming brand-new videos. Producing videos this way can be as simple as using the original content as a script and having a speaker read it over simple animations, graphics, or film footage. 

4. Identify Distribution Platforms

Once you’ve begun building a library of videos you’ve produced, your next step is to determine where you want to distribute them. This factor will vary depending on what you want to achieve with your videos. If you want them to reach as wide of an audience as possible, then you might want to post them natively on social media platforms like LinkedIn (remember that LinkedIn is easily the best social platform for B2B marketing). Meanwhile, if you want your communications to be a bit more targeted, you may choose to distribute your videos through email marketing or on your landing pages.

In any case, ensure that your chosen distribution method aligns with your preferred video marketing goals.

5. Measure Your Results

Lastly, after you’ve gone through all the effort of determining what videos to make and where to post them, it’s time to look over your campaign’s results and measure your success. Remember that every video should have its own unique measurement of success: you might want to check and see how many shares your social ad got, while you may be more interested in view counts of your general product overview videos. 

As you look through your videos’ analytics, take note of what went well and what could be improved. Then, apply those lessons to your next productions!
It’s always an intimidating prospect to develop any new kind of content strategy, but if you take it slow and focus on the most critical steps, you can steer your efforts in the right direction. After all, video marketing is the future of B2B, so don’t get left behind!

Photo by Sam McGhee on Unsplash

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