B2B video marketing is proven to be a successful strategy to build brand awareness, increase lead generation, improve conversion rates, and engage with your audience. But what is it exactly, and how do you start implementing a video marketing strategy focused on B2B buyers?
To answer these questions, in this article we’ll discuss:
Finally, we’ll look at how you can use our platform, Vocal Video, to collect and efficiently record B2B marketing videos as often as you want and at a fraction of the cost of most videos produced by a film crew and professional video editor.
Note: If you’d like to kick off your B2B video marketing strategy with an easy-to-use and affordable video collection and recording platform, sign up here for a free Vocal Video account.
What is B2B Video Marketing?
B2B video marketing is the practice of creating video content specifically designed to promote B2B businesses, which is then used for lead generation and engagement with a corporate audience.
Some common types of videos used in B2B content marketing are:
- Customer Testimonial Videos
- Webcasts/Webinar Recordings
- Success Story Videos
- Thought Leadership Videos
- Video Interviews
- Explainer Videos
- Product Tutorials
The difference between a video content strategy focused on the B2B segment, as opposed to B2C, is that in business-to-business, potential customers usually spend more, but the buyer’s journey involves a longer chain of decision-makers. As a result, marketers consider that B2B marketing can take longer to convert and involve more time and money. In contrast, direct-to-consumer marketing is typically focused on persuading a single person to buy, which tends to make the journey from prospect to buyer significantly shorter.
Additionally, B2B buyers are often thought to be more knowledgeable about marketing strategies and have an overall perceived higher level of sophistication (although this depends on the type of products and services you sell and to which target audience). As a result, most marketers think you need to have higher production values for B2B marketing videos and the type of content you offer a B2B audience needs to be more in-depth. With all of that responsibility, B2B marketing teams often work with budgets that are a fraction of what their peers in the B2C (business to consumer) space are allocated, and must do more with less.
The Problem with a Traditional Approach to B2B Video Marketing: Cost and Time
Often, when we think of B2B video marketing, we think of high-ticket approaches — which includes highly polished corporate style videos featuring CEOs of satisfied customer companies, or beautifully shot explainer videos and product tutorials.
To produce these types of video, you typically need to:
- Hire a film crew or videographer, professional producers, and video editors.
- Choose a location for the video shoot.
- Manage getting teams of people along with your interviewee to show up in the same place at the same time.
This process creates great looking videos but is generally very expensive. According to a Vocal Video survey on the impact of video testimonials on marketing, most organizations spend $15,000 or more to produce one single testimonial video.
Click here to read our in-depth article about testimonial video costs.
The same study found that it takes 78% of marketing teams over 1 month to create a testimonial video and for 55% of marketing teams, it takes over 2 months. So time is another block to using video more regularly in B2B marketing strategies.
The video you end up with looks great but because of its cost, your return on investment (ROI) is reduced. Plus, since it’s focused on just one case study, customer story, interview, or testimonial, there are limits on how many different ways you can use it in your B2B video marketing campaigns. In short, traditionally produced online videos are expensive, time-consuming, and not as useful as they ought to be.
However, this doesn’t have to be the case. B2B marketing is still about selling to real people who want to see relatable video content, and to make it relatable, you may not always need a huge budget and sophisticated video effects.
How to Incorporate Video into Your B2B Marketing Efforts
There are a variety of types of video you can produce for B2B audiences. Below, we list a few and give examples of each, recorded by our customers using the Vocal Video testimonial app.
Testimonial Videos
Testimonial videos are often considered to be the keystone of any B2B customer marketing, digital marketing, or video marketing strategy. These short videos give your prospective customers a quick understanding of how your brand has helped people who are just like them.
When it comes to marketing for a B2B audience, you can use testimonial videos for your landing pages, newsletters, email marketing, social media platforms, and on professional channels like LinkedIn.
Example of a B2B testimonial video: New Relic
Observability platform New Relic asked its corporate customers — including the engineers that use it every day — to provide video testimonials relating their experience of using the software and why they chose to implement New Relic in their businesses.
Click here to read about and see more examples of client testimonials in websites.
Case Study Videos/Customer Success Story Videos
Case study and customer success story videos are usually created in article format but video format is actually more engaging. It’s more likely that B2B customers will watch a short case study video than read a written case study from start to finish.
Example of Customer Success Story Video: DemandBase
Demandbase, an account-based marketing (ABM) company, is focused on transforming the way B2B companies go-to-market with the leading account-based experience, advertising, sales intelligence, and B2B data platforms.
Jon Leiberman, VP of Content, told Vocal Video about the ROI of customer video testimonials, and how Demandbase also uses Vocal Video for employee stories and thought leadership.
Watch our video interview with him below:
Click here for example questions and a template for collecting authentic B2B case study videos.
Executive Story Videos
Making use of the stories and knowledge that your top employees can pass on to B2B customers and prospects is another way of promoting your brand with video. It establishes your company as an authority on its segment and makes it a go-to source of reliable and useful information. If you use brand videos of your top executives explaining new concepts or new products, you also make your company much more approachable and relatable.
Example of Executive Story Video: Comscore
Comscore uses video to promote their new company vision to the B2B market. A series of video interviews with their CEO, Chief Revenue Officer, and other executives, focus on explaining their new business vision, and the key concepts of their business to prospective B2B customers.
Click here to take a look at Vocal Video’s executive story videos template.
Product Launch Videos
New products need to be communicated effectively to B2B audiences but it’s difficult to provide social proof of a new product or service when you don’t yet have a customer base. This is where product launch videos are useful. They can include users who have tested your new product, as well as interviews with product designers, or others involved in product development.
Example of B2B product launch video: Wrike
Wrike, a project management software company, needed to promote a new product functionality called Wrike Spaces, which helps teams at larger companies organize projects and folders more efficiently and collaborate within the Wrike platform. Testimonials from committed users were not an option because customers had yet to consistently use the product, so the team chose to create product launch videos focused on the feature’s beta customers.
Thought Leadership Videos
Thought-leadership videos focus on establishing your brand’s authority on the sector it operates in. By sharing the in-depth knowledge your employees and brand advocates have on your product space, you make it clear to prospective customers that your team deeply understands your space, thereby increasing credibility and brand value.
Example of Thought Leadership Video: Google Cloud
Google Cloud uses video to share stories from its technical leaders about their vision of the future of cloud-based AI. In a series of videos featured on its blog, Google Cloud experts give tips to businesses and organizations about how to get started in AI and how to prepare for the changes it will bring.
Employee Videos
Employee videos are a way to showcase your brand’s values and culture. B2B audiences increasingly want to know about the ethics, sustainability, and working culture of the brands they buy from and video gives a genuine glimpse into the people behind the logo.
Example of B2B Employee Video: Wonolo
Part-time marketplace Wonolo regularly posts employee testimonial videos featuring its team members. These videos profile specific employees from across the company and why they chose to work at Wonolo. It also emphasizes Wonolo’s company culture, so that their B2B audience can get a full picture of the values of the company they are buying from.
Note: All of the above videos were recorded asynchronously using Vocal Video. The videos have been automatically edited to include text slides, branding, logos, and brand colors, as well as background music and captions (which is great for SEO).
Click here to read our guide about how to launch your video marketing strategy.
How Vocal Video Makes B2B Video Marketing Affordable and Quick to Implement
Vocal Video’s video recording platform has been specifically designed to let users produce professionally-styled videos at a fraction of the cost, and in a much shorter time than using traditional video production methods.
In fact, we created Vocal Video because in our previous roles, we found B2B video to be extremely time-consuming and expensive to produce. We decided to build our own video platform focused on affordability and ease-of-use.
Click here to read our founding story and find out more about why we built Vocal Video.
With Vocal Video, you get a professionally-styled, authentic, and engaging B2B video that you can easily embed on your website, use within social media campaigns, and more — without a big investment or hours of employee time required.
Here’s how you record and collect videos using our platform:
Set Up a “Video Collector” and Send Out a Link to Your Chosen Interviewees
When you decide you want to record a video for your B2B marketing using Vocal Video, the first step is to set up what is known as a “Video Collector”. The builder prompts you to add all the elements needed to create a professional looking B2B video:
- A welcome message or video.
- Your company branding, logos, and colors.
- Three to five questions you want to ask your interviewees.
- An optional incentive for recording a video (gift, discount, donation, or entry into Vocal Video’s monthly prize draw).
- A thank-you message and call-to-action.
Click to see our article with detailed information and tips on how to design video testimonial questions to get high-quality responses.
Building a Video Collector is even easier if you use one of Vocal Videos 45 Video Collector Templates, which give you suggested questions for a variety of use cases, including B2B Services Reviews, B2B Case Study Videos, B2B Saas Testimonial Videos, B2B Review Videos, and more.
Every collector you set up is kept in your Vocal Video account so you can use it again, or adjust to a different marketing campaign whenever you need it.
Finally, you send your interviewees an automatically-generated link that they simply click on to start recording their video for you.
Click here to find out more about how to request and get video testimonials from customers.
Get Interviewees to Record Videos on Their Own Device and On Their Own Time
We never ask interviewees to download any apps or software, or to sign up for our services. They use the video collector you created to follow a step-by-step recording process with easy to follow prompts and questions.
Your interviewee records answers to each question separately and gets time to compose their response before hitting record. They are also given the option to re-record if they want to change anything.
When they are happy with the recording, they click to submit the testimonial video to you.
You Receive a Pre-Edited Version of the Video
The high-quality video you receive arrives professionally-styled — even if you don’t edit it any further. The video will include your own logos and colors, text slides with questions, automatically generated captions, and a transcript, along with royalty-free background music.
It’s easier to watch and more engaging than raw video footage and comes with embed codes and share links — so you can share it by email, send by SMS, on a messaging app, or post it on social media.
Click here to find out more about embedding and sharing your Vocal Videos.
Optional Editing for Greater Engagement and Impact
You also get the option of editing your video testimonial further using Vocal Video’s built-in suite of video editing tools. Our tools are designed to be completely intuitive to use, even if you have never edited video before. You don’t need to wade through hours of tutorials because you can use our simple drag-and-drop video editing process, which you can master in minutes.
Here are some of the changes you can make using our video editing tools:
- Trim video responses to remove pauses and unrelated information.
- Change the order of responses (or ‘scenes’) in each testimonial video.
- Replace the default background track with your own track or one of our royalty-free options.
- Increase or decrease the volume of the music to different levels throughout the video.
- Edit the captions and the transcript.
- Splice several testimonial videos together to create a highlight reel.
Vocal Video: One of the Easiest Ways to Start B2B Video Marketing Campaigns
We designed Vocal Video to make B2B marketing video production friction-free, affordable and scalable, so you can use it to record and collect videos whenever you need them. Using our platform, you can launch a B2B video marketing campaign in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost of producing a professional video, and without foregoing quality and authenticity.
Vocal Video also lets you easily build a library of videos to use whenever you need them and makes it possible for video to be your go-to approach to B2B marketing.
If you want to kick off your B2B video marketing campaign using Vocal Video to record customer testimonials, case studies, thought leadership videos and more, sign up for a free Vocal Video account.