Videos have now taken over the B2B world. More and more B2B Businesses are now taking the time to create fun, engaging, and meaningful visual content to establish a connection with their audience and drive business, especially as they try to sustain their business in a post-covid world. 91% of marketers feel Video is more important for brands in light of the coronavirus pandemic. [Source: Wyzowl]
What is Video Marketing?
As the name implies, Video marketing is a type of content marketing that involves planning, creating, and promoting your content in video form with your target audience. The video formats can include social media videos, webcasts, video podcasts, live streams, and more. Marketers across the world realise the potential of Video. 87% of marketers reported that videos had shown a positive return on investment throughout 2020. [Source: Wyzowl]
Why incorporate video into your B2B Marketing Strategy?
Videos are an excellent way to convey your brand’s message easily and entertainingly for the audience to understand. Today’s video landscape is redefining how we consume content online. More & more brands are now resorting to developing snack-sized, memorable, and measurable video content instead of blog posts, as videos have now grown to become the most preferred format to gain new knowledge fast. There are so many reasons why videos should form a significant part of your overall marketing strategy. Even before the pandemic, videos were quickly becoming the preferred method of consuming content, but in 2020 this trend became increasingly more popular. With a majority of the world’s population spending more time at home, this gave us the chance to consume more content online.
That said, below, we have outlined some of the main benefits of using video marketing for your B2B Business:
Capturing Audience Interest
Videos are a great way to spark interest & engage with your potential customers. 62% of B2B marketers believe that Video is one of the most important types of content for capturing audience interest. Your target audience in a B2B context are usually people who tend to do more research online before purchasing a product or availing of a service. You are going the extra mile to capture your users’ interest by creating short & engaging explainer videos that provide an overview of your company’s products or services, webinars that answer the customers’ problems. This way, you are giving your audience something they want and keep them coming back for more.
However, to make your Video stand out, it’s essential to ensure the quality of video content you produce is high. Try to include real people, use a professional quality video camera, and above all make sure your video conveys a compelling story.
Increase Quality Traffic To Your Website
In many cases, small local businesses lack marketing exposure. This is mainly due to the significant amount of online competition from larger firms that use online marketing and smaller companies placing their marketing efforts in the wrong places. Smaller or local businesses tend to focus their efforts on blog posts and articles. However, many of them don’t know that search engines love video content. When attracting quality traffic to the businesses website, sharing video content can be far more effective. In fact, videos have become the most popular choice for content consumption today. In 2020, 96% of consumers increased their online video consumption, and 9 out of 10 viewers said they wanted to see more videos from brands and businesses.
Viewers tend to spend longer on websites when watching videos. This automatically sends an alert to Google saying this is valuable content, which will lead to a higher search engine ranking. The bottom line is, videos have the power to attract more organic & direct traffic to your website, improve customer retention rate & enhance SEO compared to any other type of content. In fact, according to a report by Cisco, 80% of internet traffic will be linked to video marketing in the near future.
Excellent Return on Investment
When it comes to creating content online, Video marketing is undisputedly a great marketing tool to increase ROI for your business fast. That is because videos offer a quick, simple explanation that allows people to easily understand the brand’s message. Unlike other marketing strategies, video marketing can turn even complex data into digestible information thanks to its remarkable features.
Compared to other forms of content, marketers can assess the commercial impact of their video marketing further by monitoring & measuring key metrics such as video views, feedback, engagement rate, conversion rates etc.
This provides B2B marketers with enhanced marketing insights that can help improve future video performance and their marketing strategy as a whole. With the help of more advanced video hosting solutions, marketers can gather more insights & conclusions from the data provided. According to research carried out by the Aberdeen Group, organisations that use video marketing grow their revenue 49% faster than organisations that don’t use video marketing. When used strategically, video marketing has proven to have a tremendous impact on ROI, with a proven track record of boosting brand awareness, improving conversion rates & lead generation.
Better Conversion Rates
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million!
Including a video on a landing page can increase conversion by 80%.
Incorporating video content into your marketing strategy will help provide higher levels of engagement from your audience and significantly increase conversion rates, as they allow customers better understand your products and services and build trust at important stages of the buyer journey.
Its proven that visitors who watch videos stay on a website twice as long and visit twice as many pages as those that don’t consume video content. (Source: neilpatel.com)
Here are a few different video styles for each stage of the sales funnel that can help increase your conversion rates
- Product videos
- Company brand/promo videos
- How-to or tutorial videos
- Customer testimonial videos
Videos are more likely to be shared by the people it was sent to when compared to any other type of content. Therefore leaving the viewer with a good impression of your business is vital to generate conversions through video marketing.
Video Influences Buyer Decisions
Today’s consumers have developed a greater preference for easily accessible and digestible video content that they can ‘consume’ on the go. And through the years, video content such as how-to videos have become significantly more popular than videos posted by celebrities or influencers. When learning about a new product or service, consumers prefer watching videos over reading about the product or looking at pictures. Videos build trust and immediately grab the viewers attention with eye-catching visuals like no other form of content, therefore having a significant influence on customer behaviour & buying decisions.
In a survey conducted by Animoto, 93% of consumers said video is helpful when purchasing a product & 71% of them have purchased a product or service after watching a brand’s video on social media channels.
Videos are great for SEO
Google loves videos! If video marketing is used correctly, it can drastically improve your SEO strategy, allowing you to outrank online competitors in search results.
According to Moovly, your website is 52 times more likely to show up on the first page of Google if you have a video embedded. Google decides the order in which websites are ranked by the amount of traffic they receive. Videos allow you to encourage more users to visit your website, and drastically increase the time spent by your website visitors on your site, which signals search engines that your website has good content. In short, video helps other key ranking factors that Google considers, such as session duration and the number of backlinks referring to your domain.
Remember: Videos can boost your search engine rankings, which means more people will visit your website. But investing in high-quality video content that speaks to the user’s search intent should be your key focus.
Conclusion
Video is one of the top priorities for marketers and companies in 2021. An increase in conversion rates, enhanced SEO strategy and an excellent return on investment are just a few of the main reasons to invest in video marketing. Still, as we have highlighted, it’s also transformed the way how people consume content online.
At IMS Marketing, we have vast experience in helping brands enhance brand awareness & search rankings by harnessing the power of videos. Get in touch with us, If you need help creating a top-notch video strategy to improve your SEO rankings, our team of digital experts are here to work with you to find the perfect solution.
Check out some of our previous work here: https://www.imsmarketing.ie/work/