More and more businesses are benefiting from video marketing. Are you?
In the last five years, video marketing has exploded in popularity as businesses seek new ways to reach customers. It’s a great tool for every stage in the customer journey. You can raise awareness, boost engagement, create leads and more.
What you need is a proper strategy. Rather than a scattergun approach, you need a clear understanding of your audience and your objectives. This will inform everything else, from the type of content you create to when and where you post and promote it. Get this right, and you can see a real ROI.
We’ve written this blog to offer some advice on how to achieve that. At GetCrisp, we’ve worked alongside businesses on a wide range of B2B video projects. We’ve helped with everything from raising brand awareness to engaging and retaining existing customers.
Today we’ll cover our process and the steps you should follow to create a successful B2B video campaign for your team.
Choose your objective
When creating video content, you need to know exactly what you’re setting out to achieve before any cameras start rolling. It’s not like TV advertising, which is a form of catch-all, mass-market messaging. B2B video content is highly targeted. You’ll get fewer views than a TV ad, but a much higher percentage will be engaged – if you get your objectives in order.
When you’re considering objectives, it’s useful to think of them in relation to different steps on the video marketing sales funnel. We’ve put together this handy infographic showing four key stages, and some objectives you might consider to go alongside.
- Awareness: Using video to boost your brand and attract new leads.
- Consideration: Show the benefits of your service and cement your USP in a customer’s mind.
- Decision: Nurture any prospects by demonstrating how your services have helped businesses just like them.
- Customer satisfaction: Keep your existing client base informed and entertained with content that always reminds them that you’re there.
Once you’ve chosen your focus, you can tailor the video to meet this requirement.
Match your content to your objective
Now, when you consider those different stages and objectives, it should be clear that different objectives require video content. We like to use the approach promoted by video guru Jon Mowat. Jon divides video content into the four categories of hero, hub, help and go. Here’s the rundown:
- Hero: This is about getting an emotional response. It might make you laugh or think. What it’s about is getting a reaction and raising brand awareness. Most TV advertising is hero content.
- Hub: Serialised content that people return to. It’s permanent, and it’s about keeping your brand in mind and ongoing engagement.
- Help: This is about answering questions. In other words, it’s for customers who are already engaged and looking for support.
- Go: This is more short-lived content pushing for a direct response (think temporary promotions and sales).
What we like to do is match these video types to the objectives above. For instance, if we’re looking to raise brand awareness to generate new customers or help a new business, we’ll be looking at hero content. Since this is focused on new customers, it needs to get attention early on. It shouldn’t assume prior knowledge of the business, and it should always convey the benefits of choosing you.
Hub content, on the other hand, doesn’t need to be so flashy or emotive, because it serves another purpose. One style that we recommend for the decision stage is customer case studies. These are a chance to show off your expertise as well as evidence of other customers that you’ve helped.
The point here is that different objectives require different content. Get this right and you’re off to the best possible start.
Stay on target!
Although the best video content looks natural and not overly produced, don’t be fooled. Video content requires careful planning ahead of time to be successful.
Storyboarding your video beforehand helps avoid going off on a tangent, or the video itself losing focus. You might not want to script everything, but it does help to keep a strong focus on the goals we mentioned earlier. You also need to think about whether you’re making one video or many. Hero content might be a one-off. But if you’re doing hub content, you’ll need to plot out the whole series.
If you’re struggling to create a strong plan for your video, we recommend taking a closer look at your existing marketing materials for ideas. Generally, this content should have the same tone and brand voice as your video content should have.
Videos should always contain a call-to-action that guides viewers to the next step of your customer journey.
Put the plan into action
By this point you should have considered the purpose of your video, the audience that you’re attempting to reach with it, and a general plan of what will be shown and said. Now it’s time to put it into action.
You should have a rough idea of your budget, and whether this video is going to be professionally filmed and produced by specialists or created in-house.
If you go for the in-house route, then you need to consider the investment you need to make in equipment, time and resources to create your video. There is a whole host of brilliant free video editing software available, like VSDC and OpenShot. When it comes to filming equipment though, you can’t afford to go cheap, especially if your audience is looking for quality.
Get your content out there
Once you’ve created your video now comes the moment of truth, putting it out to the world! Again, this needs to be carefully considered, many platforms like Instagram have restrictions about the length or size of videos that you can upload.Get the basics right too. Different channels require different formats.
First of all, your website is a great place to start if what you’ve made fits well there. Video content has SEO benefits too. We recommend adding new videos to your site as they’re published, whether they’re case studies, user guides or recruitment videos.
As for where you host it, you’ll want to integrate with your existing PR and marketing channels. If you’ve got a big following on Facebook, for example, that’s an obvious place to post. The point is that video is one part of your broader strategy, and you should approach it accordingly!
Once your video is live, keep checking its performance. If you’re looking to generate leads and see a high click-through and conversion rate, well done, you’ve smashed it!
If you’d like to create your own B2B video marketing strategy, or are looking for a professional video marketing, don’t hesitate to get in touch! You can reach us at info@getcrisp.co.uk.