Do you need more killer video content? Just fill in the blanks

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You can generate killer video content, and lots of it, by planning the content for different roles at different stages along the customer journey map.

Are budget constraints keeping you from producing as much killer video content as you’d like? Maybe, like most marketers, you tend to think about video as the product-promotion content you need when you roll out something new.

Try thinking about video as something the customer wants on the buyer’s journey, and why. Whatever the content, he will prefer to sample “quick and easy” before delving into “detailed and difficult.” That’s an argument for making videos available at every stage.

The table below is adapted an excellent article, What’s a Successful ABM Strategy Without Killer Content?, by content marketing consultant Rebecca Smith of Heinz Marketing.

killer video content planning guide illustration

You could fill in the blanks here with all kinds of media — including killer video content. Source: http://terminus.com/account-based-marketing-strategy-content/

The table is designed to help marketers develop a content strategy (not just video content) for account-based marketing. According to Smith, content at the top of the funnel should be designed to help an audience who doesn’t know much about you and your solution. No hard sell.

In the middle stage, you want to distinguish yourself from competitors. But still no hard sell. That doesn’t come until you’ve developed trust.

At the bottom of the funnel, buyers now want to know all the reasons to buy.

If this approach makes sense to you, it will also make sense to think a little differently about product overview videos. It takes storytelling and visual pizzazz to hold the viewer’s attention throughout a recitation of features and benefits — how else could you deploy those creative skills?

Brainstorming killer video content

Most product overview videos (including the ones we make) attempt to dash through at least half the “funnel stages” listed in the table in under two minutes.

 

3 innovative ways to structure video content for sales engagement

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2-Minute Explainer image: How to structure video content for sales engagement to make it as scannable as text.
Structure video content for sales engagement to make it as easily scannable as text.

1.   Add video to non-video assets

There’s no getting around the fact that that text is cheap and efficient. That’s why most online “content” is text. To scope out a solution, you can skim text. You can skim video, too, if it’s interactive, or offered in bite-size chunks.  (I wouldn’t call anything longer than a minute bite-size). But most video content for sales engagement (or any other purpose) is not skim-able. You may need to watch a entire video to find out whether it contains any information you care about. And most people don’t watch marketing videos all the way through. So, what are the odds that the intended takeaways get taken away?

One way you can increase the number of short, high-impact videos in your content library is by looking for opportunities to add video to non-video assets. That is, instead of producing videos that stand on their own, make video snippets that amplify or explain specific features and benefits featured on web pages, in white papers, slideware, or webinars. You can animate diagrams and timelines. Instead of screen shots, use screen sequences that illustrate a task accomplished or user control.

2.   Make more targeted persona-based and industry-specific videos

Video is a relatively high-cost medium, but the relationship between length and cost is not linear. Some “scenes” are more elaborate, and cost more to make. A talking head can talk for hours without significantly increasing production cost.

Accordingly, it can be very cost-effective to create a package of videos. For example, two 90-second videos may cost about the same as one 2-minute video. Packages can be built around personas, industries, or the specific concerns of the target audience. Of course, cost still depends on the style and the content. But leveraging creative resources across multiple videos is a very cost-effective way to reach different audiences and reinforce your messages in different channels.

3.   Map videos to the customer experience

 

Conversational video content for sales enablement

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Happy customer inspired by video content for sales enablement.
Video content for sales enablement needs to help salespeople create engagement by forwarding the conversation.

Vidyard recently published an infographic that cleverly maps 12 types of video productions (explainers, product info, chalk talks, personalized, etc.) to the customer lifecycle and suggests appropriate levels of production values for each genre. It’s worth a look. But this “generic” approach to video is mostly geared to marketing content that is essentially promotional. I don’t think this approach works as well when it comes to video content for sales enablement.

Marketing content vs. sales content

CSO Insights research director Tamara Schenk, an authority on sales enablement, has noted that salespeople often complain that the content they’re given to work with is too product-oriented.  She says “it doesn’t help them engage on the level of business challenges, and doesn’t help them engage in different industries.”

The CSO Insights 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study backs this up with the finding that the quality and quantity of content has a remarkable impact (±15%) on quota and revenue plan attainment, adding that it’s a dangerous illusion to reduce the required sales content to only “marketing content.”

Sales enablement content types

Here are the types of content used in sales enablement considered the survey.

  • Email templates
  • White papers
  • Product collateral
  • Needs analysis template
  • Customer case studies
  • References
  • Sales presentations
  • Proposals
  • Tech presentations

All these items are used throughout the customer journey. Templates and white papers (65.3%) are the most used items during the prospecting phase. The others tend to be used more in later phases of the customer journey.

How to use video for sales enablement

While video is

 

What kind of video marketing strategy do you need?

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By focusing video on the customer experience, you end up with a better-integrated content marketing strategy, not a a better video marketing strategy.
By focusing video on the customer experience, you end up with a better-integrated content marketing strategy, not a a better video marketing strategy.

I’ve never liked the term video marketing.  It’s not so much the ambiguity — we can all agree that “video marketing” and “marketing [of] video” are not the same thing. What bothers me is that “video marketing” implies that a video marketing strategy exists in isolation from the rest of your online marketing strategy.

IBM recently published a white paper, “You Don’t Need a Marketing Video. You Need a Video Marketing Strategy.” The gist of it is, marketers should produce a mix of long, short, and live-streaming videos. Then deploy them with marketing automation software on a powerful distribution platform (IBM Cloud Video is mentioned) in order to “reach your target audience.”

A video marketing strategy with empathy

What I think is missing in this sort of strategy is the lack of compassion for the customer.While consumer branding videos can be nearly 100% entertaining (like Red Bull’s delightful Danny MacAskill’s Wee Day Out), few B2B budgets are up to that. And, is this kind of strategy really going to work for a company that sells complex tech solutions and services like, for example, IBM?

LeadGen expert Brian Carroll of B2B Lead Blog is a proponent of empathy in B2B marketing, the idea that we should all take a step back and consider marketing as something we’re doing for customers, not to them. He points to a Forrester Consulting finding, “65 percent of marketers struggle to employ emotional marketing as they turn to automation to improve customer engagement.”

As you plan out a video, it’s certainly worth asking questions like

  • Do my customers really enjoy being marketed to?
  • Are my videos personalized for the customer, or do they feel like mass market advertisements
  • Do I have a lot of data on what interests customers? Viewing data? Any data?
  • How does this video help build a relationship?

Video from the customer point of view

If you’re researching a solution, 

 

How should a B2B marketing video feel?

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B2B marketing video should make people feel smart.
B2B marketing videos should make people feel smart.

“Feelings” in a marketing video? Nearly every B2B marketing video, including many we’ve made, begins by describing the buyer’s problem to be solved, and then goes on to extol the seller’s solution. The underlying feeling, if there is one, usually begins with unhappiness about the status quo. But most people are not eager to risk changing the status quo, either. So it’s worth looking for other emotional strings to pull.

Is marketing something we do to people?

Brian Carroll is a respected advocate of applying empathy in B2B marketing. He poses the question, is marketing is something you do to people, or something you do for them? The truth is that few of us relish being on the receiving end of marketing under any circumstances. But Brian’s question goes the the heart of the matter: we’re apt to market to people, with more consideration for our message than for how the person on the other end feels about it.

A B2B marketing video pleasure principle

Because we all live with video as a pervasive entertainment medium, we’re apt to evaluate any video on the basis of how entertaining we think it is. But who watches B2B marketing videos expecting to be entertained? And how well do B2B marketers understand customers’ entertainment preferences, anyway? All we can be certain of is that viewers don’t click on a video hoping to be bored. Beyond that, they probably expect useful information, not pleasure.

But one of the pleasures video is extremely good at delivering, besides entertainment, is the pleasure of understanding something we didn’t understand a minute ago. You’ve probably had the experience of watching an animation of some elusive scientific concept — space-time continuum, say — and feeling that, at long last, you’ve got a handle on it. That’s fun. And it’s fun that can be delivered in “marketing” content.

Editorial agility: how to make a lot more B2B marketing videos on a flat budget

 

Video as customer experience: watching with customer’s eyes

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Try watching video through the customer's eyes to understand video as customer experience. It's not easy.
Watch your video with the customer's eye. A different frame of reference may suggest new approaches to videos for B2B marketing.

Is watchability the best frame of reference for B2B marketing videos? B2B buyers click on a marketing video expecting to get something out of it, and willing to pay for it in the currency of the Internet: their attention. To gauge video as customer experience, consider whether customers will come away feeling that they got what they paid for.

Video is just another way to say something

“What are we trying to say here?” is a question that sometimes gets overlooked in the course of building out a video. Video gives you many distracting ways to shape the message: animation, on-screen interlocutors, dialog, graphics, text, emotional cues (including voice, color palette and music). It’s easy to get caught up in the process of tweaking these variables when your focus is on producing a video that feels lively to you and your colleagues. But you need to step back from time to time and try to watch it from the customer’s point of view.

The customer arrived at this video expecting insight and useful information. It’s quite likely that uppermost in his or her mind is the question “how long will it take?” Even an explainer video under two minutes in length can seem to take too long to come to the point — especially if it starts out by describing things you already know about, or find uninteresting.

This is even more likely to happen if you think of video from the point of view of someone producing a TV show.

 

Take advantage of these 2017 B2B Video Marketing Trends

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2017 B2B Video Marketing Trends open up new opportunities for increasing customer engagement and improving the customer experience.
The trends in video open up a number of new moves to use video to create more customer engagement in 2017.

In a recent post I wrote about three B2B Video Marketing Trends I’ll be watching for in 2017.

  1. More conversational. Less advertorial.
  2. More formats
  3. More app-like

Actually, I’ll be doing more than watching. I’ll be working with clients to find ways to take advantage of these B2B video marketing trends. All three lead toward more engagement and a better customer experience. And that’s where all business is headed.

More conversational. Less advertorial.

This is in line with the trend toward a “video-first world,”  as envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg.   The more pervasive personal video streaming and messages become, the less relevant categories such as webinar, slideshare, explainer, tutorial, and commercial become. Video is simply part of the sales conversation.

Here are three things you can do in 2017 to make videos that are more engaging:

  • Get subject matter experts to record answers to frequently asked questions instead of making presentations. Add titles and graphics.
  • Record Skype conversations with customers.
  • Add video animations or slides to SME blog posts

More formats

Did you know that vertical video ads on Snapchat have up to 9 times more completed views than horizontal video ads? With more and more video being viewed on mobile devices, is makes sense that people aren’t going to want to turn their phones horizontal to view every video that comes along.  If you’re just trying to explain a value proposition and or teach a customer something useful, there’s no compelling reason to do it sideways.

In fact, one could argue that turning your phone sideways detracts from the customer experience. The vertical format favored by 200 million Snapchat users  will become increasingly relevant as more web videos are viewed inline on iOS devices, courtesy of Apple’s iOS 10.

It’s certainly not difficult to record videos in portrait mode. Or to edit in graphics and animations. Give it try. Put some on your FAQ page. Re-use on Snapchat.

More app-like

Here’s an example of a video that’s feels a bit more like an app than a video, simply because it allows the viewer to manipulate it.

 

B2B video marketing trends 2017

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The key to B2B video marketing trends in 2017
The key to B2B video marketing trends in 2017? More video! (But not necessarily a bigger budget.)

My favorite video marketing advice for the New Year is this: “Video Will Account for 79% of Global Internet Traffic by 2020 (So Increase Your Video Marketing Budget NOW).”  Cisco is the source of the percentage forecast. Tubular Insights (formerly ReelSEO) is the source of the conclusion inferred from it — and I hope marketing managers can convince their CFOs of its logic.  As it happens, when I googled  “B2B video marketing trends 2017”  and a few similar terms,  none of the results came up with predictions specific to video. I got articles about B2B content marketing, B2B digital marketing, B2B online marketing and the like. but no B2B video. Strange, because, an equally logical inference that could be drawn from Cisco’s “79% of traffic” forecast is that content in media other than video will be comparatively irrelevant. Just kidding. But, any way you look at it, video is getting to be a bigger deal online. Here are the B2B video marketing trends I’ll be watching in 2017.

More conversational. Less advertorial.

In mid-2016, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced “We see a world that is video-first, with video at the heart of all our apps and services.” The working out of this vision is quite obvious on Facebook’s apps and services like Facebook Live and Facebook Messenger. As this trend grows,  people will increasing value video as a medium of conversation, not just entertainment and advertising. Marketers who want to capitalize on this trend should think how they can make video part of the sales conversation.

More formats

B2B video marketing trends include less familar video formats

One inescapable B2B video marketing trend is the proliferation of formats we’re seeing in social media. Source: Social@Ogilvy Key Digital Trends for 2017

I highly recommend Key Digital Trends for 2017, a thoughtful and great-looking SlideShare from Social@Ogilvy. It has a lot to say (slides 45 to 56) about the “video first world.” (Unusually, it also deals with ethical concerns of marketing in this world.) Among the trends noted by Ogilvy is the proliferation of video formats. Especially relevant to marketers on a budget is the vertical format which will become increasingly relevant as more web videos are viewed inline on iOS devices, courtesy of Apple’s iOS 10.

More app-like

Did you know you can make just about any marketing content —  infographics, even white papers — interactive?