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B2B MARKETING VIDEOS 101

bsp-admin-1 on June 28, 2019

In today’s B2B marketplace, video can play a powerful role in engaging and converting your target accounts. According to Wyzowl’s The State of Video Marketing 2018 report, 97% of marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service—and 76% say it helped them increase sales.

Not sure where to begin when it comes to B2B marketing videos? Here are some general best practices to ensure your content is as effective as possible—and a guide to the types of videos you can make.

VIDEO MARKETING BEST PRACTICES

There are a variety of factors and procedures you should keep in mind to ensure your video campaigns are as successful as possible.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

In order to create valuable B2B marketing videos, you must understand your audience and their needs. Ask yourself the following types of questions:

  • What types of information are customers looking for when it comes to your brand and product offerings?

  • Do you need to fill a particular knowledge gap?

  • What types of resources will help your point of contact create a powerful business case?

  • Which professional roles do your customers normally fill, and how can you develop characters and personas that represent them effectively?

DETERMINE YOUR DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY

Before you begin working on a script and overarching concept for a particular video, you should understand where this particular asset is going to live. After all, the video’s “home” should play an important role in determining how long it should be, what type of tone you should use for this asset, and more. For instance, a video for social should be much shorter than that for a landing page—and can be written in a much more fun and light-hearted tone.

ESTABLISH YOUR BRAND STYLE

While your videos can certainly vary in length and format, it’s important that all of your assets appear consistent. Before you launch your video marketing plan, make sure you come to an internal agreement on the look and style of these videos—as well as your overarching messaging (from both a product and persona perspective). By creating a consistent brand style, you can establish a visual identity amongst your audience, thereby increasing your overall “stickiness.”

ALWAYS INCLUDE A CTA AT THE END

So your customer or prospect just watched one of your videos: Now what? In order to maximize the ROI of these assets, you must always give your audience a clear next step to take. Create actionable CTAs that link out to relevant landing pages where you can earn a conversion—such as a product page or a Contact Us form field.

TYPES OF B2B MARKETING VIDEOS

In a world of endless video possibilities, it can sometimes be difficult to know which content types to prioritize—and how to incorporate these assets into the customer journey. While your specific video strategy should depend on your overall marketing and sales goals, creating the following types of videos can be a great place to start.

BRAND VIDEOS

A short video that provides a quick overview of your company, products, or mission statement is an extremely valuable top-of-the-funnel asset. These types of videos can give a behind-the-scenes look into your brand—highlighting the people and offerings that make it unique. Overall, these assets serve to help prospects understand the basics of what your company does and represents, allowing them to make an informed decision about whether they want to connect. You can think of a brand video as a more visually appealing and engaging way to get your “About Us” content out into the world.

PRODUCT DEMOS

Before your prospect even considers signing on the dotted line, they’re going to want to make sure they understand the full functionality of your product suite—and how your offerings will improve their day-to-day operations. While it’s always important to provide these types of details in writing on your product pages, you can really take it to the next level by showing your products in action. Create product-specific video demos that highlight specific functions, outline individual use cases, and answer frequently asked questions.

CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS

When you’re operating within the B2B marketplace, it’s important to remember that your point of contact will likely have to make a business case to his or her boss in order to invest in your technology. Of course, making these cases successfully requires multiple proof points that highlight your company’s value.

This is where customer testimonials can be extremely powerful. These videos should highlight one of your current customers’ success stories—calling attention to how your product(s) helped them to increase revenue, overcome a specific challenge, or reach a particular goal. This message will resonate on a deeper level when it comes from your customer’s own words.

WEBINARS

Another way to capture the attention of a target account is to demonstrate your company’s expertise. By creating informative webinars focused on the specific industry topics your audience is interested in, you can highlight the value of your partnership in an exciting new way. In a world where viewers are bombarded with promotional content on a daily basis, a thought leadership webinar can break through the noise. Whenever possible, choose an internal subject matter expert to lead the webinar, as doing so will highlight the level of knowledge your team possesses.

LIVE STREAMS

By adding live video into your marketing mix, you can grow your audience, enhance brand awareness, and build unique content that you can repurpose into video on demand (VOD) assets down the line. Not sure where to start? Consider live streaming interviews with in-house subject matter experts, scenes from the show floor at an industry event, or your team’s presentation on a trending topic. By live streaming directly to your social channels, you can increase your reach even further.

Overall, video can be a powerful tool for getting your brand name out there and increasing engagement with your current customers and prospects. By following the tips and best practices outlined above, you’ll be well-equipped to start incorporating more video into your B2B marketing strategy today.

FIVE STEPS TO EFFECTIVE VIDEO LANDING PAGES

bsp-admin-1 on June 26, 2019

Video landing pages are an effective part of marketing campaigns. After all, video is the most engaging media out there—and engagement is a key step on the buyer’s journey. But if you’re going to add video to your campaigns, you can’t just slap any video on any landing page and call it a day. Here are five steps to making video landing pages that actually work.

VIDEO LANDING PAGE DO’S

1. PUT YOUR VIDEO IN CONTEXT

Does your video align with the rest of the content on your landing page? If not, you run the risk of confusing your audience and turning them off. If your landing page is informative and educational, don’t add a video that’s focused on your product. Take a video-first approach in your campaign planning—that means you have video in mind right from the start, then build your landing page around the primary message within that video.

2. MAKE YOUR VIDEO BIG

Have you noticed how screens keep getting bigger?  Our phones, tablets, living room TVs and even movie theaters are all getting bigger. Video demands to be BIG, and the same is true for your landing page. Viewers love videos that fill the screen—and the fact is, when it’s big, they’re more likely to click “play.”

3. PUT YOUR VIDEO FRONT AND CENTER

Speaking of filling the screen, your video should be front and center when viewers arrive on your landing page. Do you have a hero banner at the top of your page?  Maximize that prime real estate and make it a video. You’ll quickly capture your visitors’ attention and keep it.

4. CHOOSE YOUR THUMBNAIL WISELY

There’s a hurdle to your viewers clicking “play” on your videos; they want to know if it’s worth their time before they start watching. You need to tell them exactly what they’re getting right off the bat, and a clear, helpful thumbnail is how you do that. You can even add text so it’s super obvious (example: “Three tips to maximize SEO”). Having a person in your thumbnail also entices viewers to click “play.”

5. OPTIMIZE YOUR LANDING PAGE FOR SEARCH

SEO is commonly overlooked with video content—but it shouldn’t be. Video Schema Markup helps search engines crawl your video content and deliver your pages to the right audience in search results. Check out our post on video SEO to learn how it’s done.

VIDEO LANDING PAGE DON’TS

We’ve gone over the things you should be doing, but there are also a couple things you should avoid when adding videos to your landing pages.

1. AUTOPLAY

When people go online, they want to be in control of their experience. When they land on a page and a video starts playing immediately (especially with sound on—yikes!), they’re understandably upset. Don’t set your videos to autoplay. Exception: If you are driving people to your video landing page from an email, autoplay is actually a better experience. Your viewers have already clicked the thumbnail within the email; they don’t want to click again.

2. LIGHTBOXES

Video lightboxes are pop-ups that take over your webpage. These are just another way of taking control away from your viewers; they can’t scroll away or look at any of your other landing page content while the video plays. Embed your video natively, within the landing page so that your viewers can interact with it however they choose.

New Feature: Live Analytics

bsp-admin-1 on June 18, 2019

“This function has been something that many people have been requesting for a while, and it has finally been implemented in Brightcove Live.
To explain this function briefly, you can check metrics specific to live streaming (such as the number of concurrent viewers and trends) during and after live streaming. Let’s check out the function right away.”

5 WAYS TO DEFEAT BUYER APATHY WITH MARKETING VIDEOS

bsp-admin-1 on June 12, 2019

Apathy is a lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern. It is synonymous with indifference. For B2B sales, apathy is a deal-killer. For B2B marketing, apathy is a non-starter.

Apathy may just be one of the greatest threats facing any B2B organization. Consumers have an abundance of other things to read and watch, and a plethora of other vendors to choose from in nearly every industry.

From where I sit, apathy is so scary because it threatens our core responsibility as marketers to create engagement, capture attention, drive interest, build loyalty, and ultimately drive action and change. None of that is possible unless a buyer is willing to lean in, engage with, and consume our content.

In short, we have to make buyers give a damn.

HOW DO MARKETERS USE VIDEO TO DEFEAT BUYER APATHY?

The antidote to apathy is curiosity. Curiosity is what makes human beings give something their attention, engage with it, and ultimately take action because of it. Curiosity is what ignites change.

For marketers, video has become a standard tool in our toolkits to drive curiosity among buyers. Eighty-seven percent of businesses now use video as a marketing tool, and more than ever (83%) say it gives them a good return on their investment. However, 90% of video marketers feel the level of competition and noise has increased in the past year.

How do we ensure our videos stand out? How do B2B firms use video marketing to break through to indifferent buyers?

A couple of weeks ago at PLAY 2019 in Boston, I presented a few ways to defeat buyer apathy using videos. Below, I’ve included five of these tips and some relevant examples, and my take on why they’re so effective.

1. KNOW YOUR NICHE, SERVE THEM WELL

Sixty percent of B2B brands admit they don’t understand their buyers, according to SiriusDecisions. Yet, buyers are 50% more likely to buy when they see personal value for them, or a positive impact on their career.

Before Eloqua was bought by Oracle for its marketing automation capabilities, it ran a video series about Modern Mark. It demonstrated exactly how well this brand understood its audience, and allowed potential buyers to see personal value through the eyes of this character, who was personally benefiting from the advantages Eloqua’s marketing technology delivered.

2. TALK LIKE A HUMAN BEING

One surefire way to make a buyer stop listening to your video is to speak the way our company boilerplates do, that is, heavy-handed and full of buzzwords.

A product demo from Lucidchart shows us the power of simply talking like a human being.

A customer testimonial from Slack achieves the same simple, approachable, engaging tone that makes you want to watch to the end. (When was the last time you wanted to watch a customer testimonial video through to the end?)

3. DRIVE URGENCY

Sure, we’re familiar with FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s a standard tool in the security and risk industry as we try to drive urgency among buyers. But fear-mongering gets old when every vendor in the space uses it. It also has a tendency to feel hyperbolic.

A video from Cisco took a ransomware attack storyline and flipped it on its head, exploring the attack from the perspective of the hacker themselves. It’s a script that makes your heart pound as you watch for its conclusion, and demonstrates how well Cisco understands each angle of this threat.

4. EARN TRUST

Forty-two percent of buyers don’t know which companies to trust, per Edelman. This was especially true in the world of SEO consultants before Rand Fishkin came along. The founder of Moz became known for being a transparent, educational resource among a sea of agencies keeping their SEO knowledge closely guarded.

To them, trade secrets were their secret sauce. To Rand, it became the foundation for a thought leadership platform that earned trust in an industry of secret tactics and shady business. His honesty led him to become the go-to authority on SEO, and his whiteboard Friday videos became a weekly example of this transparency.

In his book, Lost and Founder, Rand describes:

“We were called crazy and foolish for oversharing so much about the mechanics of the business. But we also became trusted, and, especially because the field of SEO and the broader world of tech startups are so often impenetrably secretive, it paid off.”

5. BE WHERE CUSTOMERS WANT YOU TO BE

One major driver of apathy is simply invisibility. Why would I watch your video if it takes remarkable effort to find it in the first place?

Are you gating all of your video content? Relying too much on email to promote it? Putting all of your eggs in the YouTube basket? Hiding it below the fold on some obscure page on your site, or blog post? Liberate your video content!

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers use sponsored content on social media to promote their content. In their study, this was the #1 paid content distribution method.

For B2B firms, I strongly recommend investing in video on LinkedIn. The platform now boasts 500 million members, 260M of which log in monthly. Forty percent of those users are on the platform every day. Note: These are not just job-seekers; 61M are senior-level influencers.

Per LinkedIn, these users spend almost 3X more time watching video ads than with static sponsored content. “Video is the fastest growing format on our platform right now, and the one most likely to get people talking,” said Pete Davies, LinkedIn’s director of product management.

Leverage this engagement to give your videos a boost, and consider trying their new live video broadcast service, LinkedIn Live. It’s a beautiful interface on both desktop and mobile—and is a great way to be exactly where your audience is.

Overcoming buyer apathy is one of many challenges B2B marketers face over the coming months. But, it’s at the core of what makes our job so exciting. It just takes creativity and empathy in our video marketing strategy.

BRIGHTCOVE PRODUCT UPDATES: JUNE OF 2019

bsp-admin-1 on June 7, 2019

This year has been busy at Brightcove HQ, between our trip to Las Vegas for NAB and our ninth Brightcove PLAY here in Boston. Not only have we been attending and hosting major video industry events, our product team has been busy behind-the-scenes, making updates and improvements to our products. These new features give you the power to collect richer insights, provide custom subscription options, and more.

LIVE TO FACEBOOK

Brightcove Live to Social now enables Brightcove Live jobs to be streamed to Facebook, with other social destinations soon to follow. This feature enhances Brightcove as a hub that connects multiple sources (cameras, encoders, etc) and multiple destinations from one place. Learn how to start streaming live to Facebook right from your Brightcove dashboard.

OTT FLOW MULTI-TIER SUBSCRIPTIONS

OTT Flow customers can now provide their subscribers with multiple content pricing and packaging options in-product—meaning content creators can now introduce unique content packages to potential buyers at different price points, or even blend AVOD/SVOD strategies as a means of upselling users.

UI FOR SSAI

Users of Dynamic Delivery and SSAI enabled can now create and manage ad configurations in the Admin module. Dynamic Delivery users with SSAI and Live enabled also have the appropriate controls available for Live SSAI. This update improves workflow by allowing you to see all ad configurations in a single view. Learn how to implement server-side ads within Brightcove Live.

AD METADATA

Using the Live Program and Ad Metadata API, customers can now integrate into their broadcast playout system or pass specific data for ad targeting. Providing more granular details makes your ad inventory more attractive to advertisers, increasing demand and CPMs.

IMA SDK NOW INCLUDES OPEN MEASUREMENT

The IMA SDK for Android now includes the Open Measurement SDK, an industry standard developed by the IAB and designed to enable third-party viewability and verification measurement for ads served to mobile and desktop environments. The open measurement SDK makes provisions for video controls to be considered friendly obstructions that are essential to the user’s experience, thus excluding them from ad viewability measurement.

3 REASONS WHY BRANDS NEED TO LIVE STREAM ON SOCIAL MEDIA

bsp-admin-1 on May 31, 2019

In the past few years, the evolution of video on social channels has skyrocketed. We started with only being able to host videos on YouTube with no live streaming capabilities at all. Now, not only can we can post videos to every social network, but we can live stream to almost all of them.  In fact, according to CMSCMedia’s Social Media Trends to Watch and Capitalize on in 2019 report, video accounts for 85% of total internet traffic in 2019 so far, with the live streaming market expected to double by 2021. Live streaming to your brand’s social profiles is incredibly powerful and here are three reasons why you should start now.

1. LIVE STREAMING ON SOCIAL MEDIA EXPANDS AUDIENCE REACH

Each social channel has a unique audience. Twitter is the go-to place to see real-time content, whether it is breaking news or a great moment in sports. Live streaming to Twitter captures the audience that wants to get the most timely information. Facebook is where viewers go to connect with brands, friends, and family. When streaming to Facebook, you’ll capture an audience who is looking to engage with you and your brand directly. And finally, YouTube is where many viewers go for long-form content. From how-to pieces to chaptered stories, YouTube is the platform for learning new skills and product enhancements.

2. LIVE STREAMING ENHANCES BRAND AWARENESS

A natural benefit of expanding your audience reach across the various social platforms is that your brand will reach new people. In addition, live streaming to social channels brings a sense of authenticity to your brand. Anything can happen when you’re live, giving your audience a reason to tune in and a sense that they’re watching real people.

3. LIVE STREAMING BUILDS UNIQUE CONTENT

By live streaming to social channels, you build new video assets that you can use again once the event is complete. For our recent Live to Social launch at NAB, we did seven show floor interviews live on Facebook, including two interviews with Brightcove Partners, four separate interviews with Brightcove’s C-Level staff, and Product Managers. Because we covered the evolution of video and where we think it will go in the future—a topic that’s timely and evergreen—we can use that content in future campaigns. In fact, you can check out our Live from NAB Showfloor videos on-demand now, in Brightcove’s NAB Facebook Live playlist.