Top 5 Reasons Why You Need to Include Videos in your B2B Marketing Strategy for 2024
Content stands at the center of every marketing strategy, and B2B is no exception. It’s the backbone that supports marketing strategies and systems to yield exceptional results.
Content marketing trends have been evolving over the years, with videos steadily rising as a preferred choice for B2B companies. A study reveals that 87% of businesses planned to use video as a marketing tool in 2020. Imagine what the numbers would look like in 2021.
Given the convenience and Return on Investment (ROI) videos bring out, it’s an incredibly effective and affordable marketing tool.
Leedfeeder, a website tracker that tells you who visited your website, used videos for brand awareness and content marketing. As a result, they saw an increase in website traffic, prospect nurturing, and added knowledge.
Now, let’s see why you need to start using videos as part of your B2B marketing efforts in 2024.
5 reasons why you must include videos in B2B marketing
It’s not surprising that 62% of B2B marketers rate video as their go-to content format, followed by emails and infographics. It’s great for an online audience, and marketers have been using videos for different purposes like promotions, product explanations, customer testimonials, demos, and more that catch the audience’s eye and give a better understanding of the brand.
There are some contemplations about videos being effective in the B2B area but the way brands like Leedfeeder, Slack and Adobe have used videos to put across their message, it can be said with confidence that videos work better than most other content formats, especially in the B2B segment.
Well, let’s see why videos work well in a B2B marketing strategy:
1. Improves customer engagement and audience retention rate
Videos generally involve a story, script, images, brand messaging, and music, which appeals to the eye. Storytelling is known to wrap humans together, and when it’s combined with video, it turns into a powerful communication tool.
This increases customer engagement as the interest builds up. Moreover, since videos are long-form content once the audience is hooked, they stay till the end, thus increasing the audience retention rate.
As opposed to an image, a minute of video or less than that can give your audience a better insight into who you are, what you do, and the messaging you want to put forth. This humanizes the brand, one of the most integral aspects of 20th-century advertising and marketing.
With B2B businesses, the audience knows what you do on the outside. But with videos, you can offer them a multidimensional idea about your brand, thus connecting with them on a deeper level and going beyond just selling products and services.
This deepens the consumer-brand relationship, enhances loyalty and trust, and builds a personal connection with the audience, compelling them to engage with you more.
2. Cost-effective
Because of advanced technology, new video creation, and editing tools, it’s easy to create videos at a low cost. Moreover, if you have a good idea, you don’t need fancy equipment or editing software to make it first-class. The production cost is less, and you can create high-quality videos without having to worry about the cost easily.
Moreover, if you want to advertise these videos, it’s less costly because you typically pay for views and not clicks, as with images. So, you also save while publishing and promoting videos.
The idea and hook matter more than the way you produce videos and the equipment you use.
Considering you have a great message, an idea to communicate that message, and a hook to grab your audience’s attention. In that case, the Return on Investment (ROI) will be higher than the production and publishing costs combined.
This cost-effective aspect of video marketing makes it popular among B2B brands, making it all the more convenient for you to include videos in your marketing strategy.
3. Connect with your target audience at the various stages of the sales funnel
Content is an integral part of the sales funnel, the ideal journey that a prospect takes to purchase a product or service from your brand. It nurtures your prospects and makes them want to return to you, ultimately resulting in a sale.
Typically, there are 5 stages of the sales funnel:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Evaluation
- Engagement
- Purchase
If you want your leads to transition from one stage to another smoothly while losing fewer leads in the process, videos are the key. At every step of the funnel, you need to position yourself as the best in the market for which content is essential. If you use videos to nurture leads, they can gather a better and elaborate idea about you and how you can help them.
It’s true that customers care more about how your product or service will help them than the product itself. If you want to highlight benefits and appeal to leads at different stages, you can use videos to grab their attention and compel them to take action.
Every video uses a different story and approach, which can make or break your sales cycle. Here again, the idea is essential, but so is how you present this video and nurture your leads through the process until they make a purchase.
4. Supports distribution and SEO
Social media presence and SEO are integral parts of marketing efforts, and it’s amazing that video supports these actions in full swing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to rank high on Google. Google constantly crawls for content, images, and videos to see if yours is the right website to show users for a specific keyword. Suppose your website has content in different formats, such as written content, infographics, images, and videos. In that case, Google considers the website high-quality and shows it to more relevant users.
Moreover, since videos are long-form content, your website visitors spend more time watching them, which increases the time spent on the website, telling Google that the website has quality content, making users want to stay on the website. This is a good sign for SEO and ranking.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube push video content more than text and image content because the more time people spend watching your videos, the more time they will spend on the platform, which is good for them.
In 2016, almost 100 million hours of video were watched on Facebook every day, and these numbers have been ever increasing. This shows that once you create videos, promoting them on social media is a great way to position yourself in front of your target audience.
5. Helps in better targeting and retargeting
With videos, it’s easier to target your audience and refine the targeting approach through advanced methods. This improves targeting accuracy, ensuring that your video reaches the right set of people and yields the expected results.
Contextual video placement is another benefit that advanced targeting offers, which can substantially boost your video marketing efforts, and its potential Return on Investment (ROI).
The key to any type of content is to create it as per the target audience.
This aspect becomes much easier with video because, through that, the audience gets a lot of value than other content types like written content or static images.
Conclusion
B2B businesses can use videos to establish a professional relationship with their audience, present their products, explain concepts, or answer FAQs. For advertising, videos are widely being used because of a fair reason that it provides a more extensive playfield for brands to discuss their ideas and communicate the message to the audience.
Videos are a critical piece of your overall marketing strategy.
Videos are revolutionizing the digital marketing arena, and evolving with them is a smart choice. Moreover, the way brands are using videos today tells a lot about how many brands are willing to innovate and jump on the video marketing bandwagon.
To wrap it up, videos are the future, and for all the right reasons. From being cost-effective to giving your audience a chance to understand you better, it seems like the perfect strategy for B2B marketing in 2024.