B2B - Business to Business Video Marketing Tips

Here's a slew of great advice and tips for businesses looking to add real cache to their marketing efforts through business-to-business (B2B) video.

ReelSEO has published an article from David Murdico, a partner at an LA-based viral marketing agency.

Note how content shifts from 'wild and wacky' in videos aimed at consumers to 'smart and clever,' as people who view the video will be more apt to pass it on to decision-makers without feeling embarassed. In other words, a balance needs to be struck between a humourous outlandish concept that gets attention and something that's professional and still communicates the main message and core benefits of your service or product.

Also of note is Murdico's recommendation to create videos around pain points that potential viewers may have that your video (and the subject of your video) will address and solve; you can then create keywords around those solutions. YouTube offers captioning and subtitle features that create more text-searchable web moxie for your video -- and the video's title, description, and tags can also be carefully honed around search campaigns.

Ultimately, the main ingredient in all of these is careful, thoughtful planning.

The main portion of the article from REELSEO is below:

Establishing B2B Goals and Objectives

A successful B2B online video marketing campaign will have both goals and objectives. Goals are predicted end results like “more sales” and “increased brand and product awareness.” Objectives are short term and include targeted video views, video posts and re-posts, specific mentions online, comments and website traffic.

1. Establish objectives that, if achieved, will reach the goals you have set.
2. Establish goals that, if achieved, will warrant the investment you are making.
3. Establish objectives that will achieve the goals.
4. Measure the achieved goals against the investment to determine ROI.

The Creative Approach for B2B Video

1. Target the creative concepts toward the end buyer. This is a person, or people responsible for purchases within the brand, business or organization. What type of content will inspire them to pass along the video and your message?
2. Create videos in which they can see themselves and the problems they face… preferably in a fun or funny way. Allow them to relate to and share with others in your primary and secondary demographic.
3. Target the creative concepts toward the viewers who influence them from both the Business and the Consumer worlds. Think in terms of primary, secondary and tangential influencers.
4. Smart and clever vs wild and wacky: Arm influencers and co-workers with videos they will want to, and can actually share in the workplace without feeling embarrassed for liking them (even though they probably do).
5. What factors influence their purchasing decisions?
6. Create content that will entertain and make them aware of your brand, products and services without being overtly salesy. Most people don’t share commercials.
7. Establish a balance between entertainment value and marketing message.

The B2B Viral Video Marketing Approach

1. Target: Establish your target audience, direct influencers, tangential influencers. Where do they find information on the business products they buy? What blogs and publications do they follow? Target toward the end business consumer, target toward the viewers who influence them from the B2B and the B2C worlds to touch on something likely to be passed from one target audience person to another and also from outside the loop inward.
2. Put enough budget behind the marketing of the campaign in the beginning to sufficiently seed the videos to the right viewers. The idea is to go from “paid” views to “earned” views by creating a scenario in which viewers are sharing the videos voluntarily, for free. Each earned view cuts the cost of a paid view in half and assures more accurate targeting.
3. Invest budget or time into blog and publication outreach, social network marketing and paid placement on highly targeted online publication and social networking sites like Facebook and youTube to stimulate views and conversation. Again, you are ultimately going for lots and lots of “earned” views.

Search Optimization For B2B Video

1. Create video content that addresses common concerns and problems your B2B customers/clients are facing. Establish which terms they will likely be searching for to get answers and include them in your creative.
2. YouTube subtitles and/or closed captions create a searchable text version of your video so everything said in the videos becomes searchable.
3. Optimize the videos (titles, descriptions and tags) for search so that when your target buyer is looking for a solution to their problems, they find your videos and the conversations they are generating under the search results.
4. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine next to Google. Google owns Youtube. Therefore, YouTube offers a powerful way for your brand, products and services to be found by the people looking for answers.
5. Don’t discount the video SEO value of other video sharing sites. They are important as well.

Video Sharing In a B2B Marketing Environment

1. Sharing: A person (business or other) shares a video with your target buyer on their social networks, sends a link to a webpage, a Twitter re-tweet from a corporate Twitter account, a post on a business’ Facebook page, a LinkedIn groups and business discussions, a personal email knowing your buyer would “appreciate this” and myriad other ways.
2. Search: When purchase deciders within a business search for solutions to their problems

Overall, we should look at B2B online video marketing much like we look at B2C online video marketing but with a slightly more narrow focus. Remember, businesses are people too!