As a business owner, using video marketing opens up a whole world of benefits, opportunities, and advantages. If you get it right, your brand can become the go-to brand within the industry, and you’ll quickly notice your business leveling up in terms of thought leadership.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Even so, there are a few powerful video marketing techniques you can implement to build your brand today.
The Benefits Of Using Video Marketing To Build Your Brand
A massive 86% of businesses are using video as a marketing tactic. Considering only five years ago, 61% of companies were using video for marketing purposes; the world is highly responsive to altering their marketing strategy and including video.
But why is video marketing so popular? What does video marketing offer a brand?
Ultimately, the three key benefits to using video marketing are:
- Higher conversion rates – HubSpot has found that by including a video on your landing page, you’re able to increase conversions by up to 80%. That’s an immense increase with a straightforward video.
The reason behind this conversion incline is simple: videos help build trust. They’re interactive, require little effort, and allow the prospect to view the person behind the brand.
Remember, people buy from people, not robots.
- More traffic – Search engines like Google and Yahoo love videos. While solid written content is prime material for search engine optimization (depending on the optimization level), videos result in people spending longer on a page.
Think about it this way: YouTube is the second biggest search engine. With Google in front, YouTube has dominated most of the search engine space, exclusively with video.
With more traffic comes more visibility, and with that, more leads.
- Video builds authority – Again, we’re returning to trust. This is because every business thrives on trust. Should there be little faith in the brand, it’s unlikely to grow. Posting videos – especially those with valuable information required by the audience – is a solid strategy to become a thought leader within your field. This authority results in respect and admiration, leading to more sales.
There are many other benefits to using video as a marketing strategy, too. Your videos will contribute to your branding, allowing you the opportunity to solidify your brand voice and design. It also conveys a sense of modernization, showing your audience that you’re ‘keeping up with the times’.
One of the most effective things about video marketing is that it can complement your current marketing strategy. You can tie video into any marketing platform and reap the benefits.
But to do so, you must have a strong video marketing strategy.
Key Elements of Any B2B Video Marketing Strategy
Business to business organizations have a target demographic of other business owners. This could be specialized or niched by industry. When it comes to video marketing, though, the same strategies apply regardless of the niche. The system can be adapted for the specific business type, though the methods are the same.
Create Videos For Each Step Of The Customer Journey
It’s crucial to understand and recognize each phase of the customer journey. There are four stages of the customer journey:
- The awareness phase
- The consideration/ information search phase
- The decision phase
- The post-purchase phase
The types of videos you create and publish need to cater to each one of these phases. Each stage represents a different level of ‘readiness’ before a person can click the ‘buy now’ button. So, your videos need to act as hand-holders, gently leading a prospect to the next phase.
As such, each video needs to tailor toward this. This will influence the topics you cover, the video style, the written content surrounding the video, and the language you use.
But what types of videos work with each phase? We’ve broken it down, stage by stage, to ensure you’re able to accommodate every phase of the customer journey in your video marketing strategy.
What Type Of Marketing Videos Should I Create For The Awareness Phase?
The awareness stage is when a prospect first discovers your brand. They’re aware of your business. Consider how the prospect became aware. This could revolve around search engine optimization, paid ads, a blog, social media, or your website.
The videos you create for the awareness phase need to be stellar. It’s almost like meeting someone for the first time– you want to make a long-lasting, positive first impression. From the beginning, you need to convey your brand’s personality. Think carefully about how you greet your viewer, where your videos are located, and the content you’re providing.
With the awareness phase, the focus is on serving the viewer, therefore, you should tailor your videos to provide value for the awareness phase. Educational videos are prime for the awareness phase, but these educational videos need to address your ideal client’s issues.
Informational videos like ‘how to [do the thing that your audience struggles with]’ and ‘[fix a problem] in 5 easy steps’ are popular video marketing styles. If they’re unrelated to their pain points, the audience won’t relate, causing them to press that ‘x’ quicker than you can say ‘lights, camera, action!’.
It’s crucial to relate to your audience and create video content surrounding their pain points. Don’t give the entire game away, but consider the difficulties your awareness phase leads may face on a daily basis. Allow that to be your springboard.
Another way to ensure the topics you use in your videos are relatable is by creating an audience persona (but more on that later).
You should focus and invest your time in crafting a solid hook. You’ll need to capture your viewers’ attention quickly. With a slight swipe of a finger, your video could be forgotten about. Think about how many videos you’ve swiped through today. With so many businesses jumping on the video marketing train, there are very few available seats. As a result, you need to make sure your seat is appealing, comfortable, and the best seat on the train.
Ask questions, use emotive language, or tell a story as powerful hook techniques.
What Type of Marketing Videos Should I Create For The Consideration Phase?
The consideration phase is a critical stage for your brand. It’s in the middle of your funnel, and this is where many prospects shop around to find the best deal.
They are evaluating their problem, pain points and deciding how this problem can be solved.
It’s up to you to offer the solution they’re looking for.
You can do this through engaging videos surrounding product reviews and demos, as well as case studies. At this point, you’re proving to your prospect that your brand is not only an option but the option.
Ensure that your videos are filled with empathy. You want your viewer to nod their heads and think, ‘that’s so me!’ as you unfold the pain point. Then, when you position your product or service as the solution, the viewer is far more likely to enter the next phase.
The consideration phase is all about searching around for options. So, in your videos, you need to reiterate the benefits, features, and guarantees of your product or service. Show your offer in the best light, smashing through objections and comparing them to competitor’s products.
What Type of Marketing Videos Should I Create For The Decision Phase?
There are muddy waters between the consideration and decision phase.
To clarify, the consideration phase is when a prospect starts to consider using your products or services. The decision phase, however, is crunch time. This is the simple ‘yes, I’ll buy it’ or ‘no, I won’t’ stage.
Ultimately, the decision stage surrounds conversion.
So, your marketing videos need to tip your prospect over to the ‘yes’ space. You’ll need to squash any customer objections, highlight the key benefits, and make the sale.
Your videos could compare various products, offer a free trial, or show previous buyers or customers after purchasing your product or service.
What Type of Marketing Videos Should I Create For The Post-Purchase Phase?
Just because you’ve made the sale, your marketing shouldn’t stop there. It doesn’t end because someone has whipped their credit card out and bought your product or service.
The post-purchase phase is all about nurturing a previous buyer to achieve brand loyalty and become a household brand.
Your marketing videos, therefore, can surround the product or service they’ve purchased. Technical demo videos, such as ‘how to use your new [product]’ or ‘5 awesome things you can do with your new [product]’ are great video angles to take after someone has bought from you.
Develop Audience Personas
As a business owner or marketer, it’s absolutely essential that you pinpoint your ideal client/buyer. Without understanding who you are selling to, your content – whether that’s in the form of infographics, blog posts, social media posts, or videos – will be generalized and unspecific, resulting in less interest and thus lower revenue.
One way to ensure your video marketing is targeted toward your ideal client or customer is through audience personas.
What Is An Audience Persona?
An audience persona, also known as a target audience persona, is a written representation of your ideal client or customer.
With an audience persona, you create a fictional character who is the perfect person to purchase your offer. This written representation of your ideal buyer will help keep your marketing laser-focused. When in doubt, turn to your audience persona and ask yourself, ‘how would they react to this?’
An audience persona needs to include, (at the minimum):
- Their demographics
- Their goals (both related and unrelated to your products)
- Their pain points and challenges
- Their interests and hobbies
- Their everyday routine
Some business owners stick to categories that directly impact the brand but won’t include any unrelated factors. The problem with this is that their written content and video marketing may be unclear and won’t resonate with the ideal buyer.
For example, imagine you’re selling homemade, non-fat, gluten-free ice cream. Your audience persona demonstrates the perfect buyer, but you only stick to the elements of the audience that influence you. Therefore, you currently have:
- Female
- On a diet
- Gluten intolerant
- Wants to lose weight but enjoys ice cream
The fact that your ideal customer is also in her mid-twenties and enjoys listening to Lizzo has gone over your head. So, your video starts to appeal to women in their sixties. Suddenly, your targeting is off.
Use your audience persona to tailor your video content accordingly, focusing on the large, medium, and tiny details. Everything about your video should appeal to your audience, and for that to happen, you need to understand who you’re marketing to in-depth.
Recycle Your Existing Content
Creating new video content for social media, blog posts, websites, case studies, landing pages, email campaigns, and other platforms is time-consuming. While videos are highly effective and can increase your revenue, it’s essential to work smarter, not harder.
Filming a video requires time, and trying to generate new ideas for video content daily can sometimes feel impossible. That’s where recycling your content comes in handy.
Look over your blogs, social media captions, case studies, and other forms of content you’ve published in the past. You can use these as prompts for videos, summarizing what you’ve already said or written in video format.
It’s a good idea to add a few bonus points when recycling your content to ensure the topics are fresh and original from your written content.
Leverage Native Social Media Videos
There are 3.96 billion people who actively use social media in the world. We live in a social media generation, so leveraging this to promote your brand and increase your revenue is a solid strategy.
Incorporating video as part of your social media strategy is a beneficial tactic.
Native video means a video uploaded directly or filmed on specific social media platforms, like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.
If you were to share the video as a link from YouTube or Twitter, that is not a native video and will not perform as well.
Why? This comes down to the fact that native videos don’t interrupt the experience for the user. There’s no additional navigation or clicking that needs to be done before the video can be watched, meaning the engagement rate is more likely to be higher.
Using native social media videos will not only look better as there’s no link at the bottom, but it also offers improved insights and analytics. You’re able to see how many views the video has received alongside many other metrics that can help shape and develop your video marketing strategy.
When uploading native videos to social media, you should also note that you’re also enabling autoplay. Autoplay is a fantastic tool, as the video will automatically begin when someone scrolls near it. This means you’re more likely to capture the attention of a prospect without them having to show interest initially.
However, it does mean that you must pay attention to how you’re using powerful hooks at the start of your video.
LinkedIn should be your social platform of choice. According to HubSpot, LinkedIn generates 277% more leads than Facebook or Twitter. While there’s power in omnipresence, LinkedIn is a fantastic platform to start with, and it’s likely to generate more leads than other social media tools.
This is due to LinkedIn being focused on recruitment and business, whereas Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are more generalized, with people sharing photos from their business and personal life.
There’s far more business-related content published on LinkedIn, making it the perfect place to post video content for B2B marketers and business owners.
Use Videos To Promote Your Whole Business
With the right tactics, you can use video as a way to promote your business on YouTube, in your email campaigns, on your landing pages, and for promoting your blog posts.
The trick is to consider each platform carefully and the purpose of each video. For example, a video to sell a service or product would be far more effective on a landing page with supporting copywriting. However, a ‘how to’ video would serve better on a blog or YouTube channel.
Using Video As A B2B Marketing Technique: Conclusion
Incorporating videos into your marketing strategy is a powerful way to gain leads, build trust, and, ultimately, make more sales. However, you need to post with purpose and strategy, considering the customer’s journey, your buyer’s persona, and the channel you’re posting on.
Create a solid roadmap to video success with specificity, zooming in on the details.
There are numerous benefits to using video to build your brand, all of which you’ll reap once you have an effective video marketing strategy.
Author Bio:
Torrey Tayenaka is the co-founder and CEO at Sparkhouse, an Orange County-based video production agency. He is often asked to contribute expertise in publications like Entrepreneur, Single Grain and Forbes. Sparkhouse is known for transforming video marketing and advertising into real conversations. Rather than hitting the consumer over the head with blatant ads, Sparkhouse creates interesting, entertaining and useful videos that enrich the lives of his clients’ customers. In addition to Sparkhouse, Torrey has also founded the companies Eva Smart Shower, Litehouse & Forge54.