If you hang around with marketers long enough, you’re bound to hear the old maxim, “content is king.” Whether you agree with that statement or not, there’s no denying that the current king of digital marketing content is video. As a big gun in your B2B marketing arsenal, video produced specifically for social media empowers you to showcase your products and services, raise brand awareness and educate target audiences, all while building trust and credibility.
How dominant is video as a marketing medium? Some quick numbers tell the story. In its 2021 Annual Internet Report, Cisco projected that video content would account for 82 percent of all internet traffic by 2022, a significant shift to online video consumption driven by its effectiveness in capturing and engaging web audiences.
Fresh stats show that Cisco’s predictions were solid. A 2023 survey by animated explainer video production company Wyzowl found that 87 percent of businesses use video as a marketing tool. This includes widespread adoption of B2B video marketing among companies spanning the gamut of industries. The same survey found that 93 percent of marketers using video said it’s an important element of their marketing strategy, emphasizing its wide reach and measurable impacts.
How should social media videos fit into your B2B marketing mix?
HubSpot’s State of Video Marketing 2023 report found that 87 percent of B2B marketers use video as a marketing tool—the same figure Wyzowl published for all marketing—and 93 percent of those B2B marketers say video has empowered them to achieve their overall marketing goals. Researchers also found that video is the most effective B2B marketing format for generating leads, increasing brand awareness and driving sales.
These strong results from different studies should be no surprise. After all, B2B marketing videos tailored to social media deliver the same value and benefits as the broader category of video marketing for B2B, including reaching your target audience, building relationships with potential customers and increasing sales. Let’s take a closer look at how the magic works.
Top three benefits of optimizing your B2B social media video
Elevate brand awareness. Remember show-and-tell from your early school days? It’s just not the same without the showing part, is it? The ability to show and tell with moving images and sound such as voiceover narration and background music in one easily accessible online package is the main reason video is today’s best medium for introducing a brand and its offerings to potential customers.
Americans spend an average of two hours a day on their phones and a lot of that time goes to watching internet videos on a plethora of platforms. That plenitude of screentime is similar in most wealthy countries. Multiple marketing studies have found that video posts generate up to 12 times more views than text and image posts combined. A recent study by design firm Renderforest reported that 81 percent of users surveyed prefer videos on social media over other content types. Still images ranked behind at 68 percent preferring them while only 31 percent of users prefer text posts.
The clear preference for video over still images and text is a big part of why optimizing your B2B marketing videos for social media dramatically improves their chances of getting watched by people who are interested in your brand, including new prospects who were not previously aware of your brand.
Boost engagement. After you have defined your target audience—more on that just ahead—optimizing your B2B marketing videos for social media will make them far more likely to be watched, shared, rated and commented on, within and beyond your target audience. Impressions are nice, but successful social media posts also get finger taps and mouse clicks. Engagements are the building blocks of digital relationships with your potential customers. Laying a solid foundation of optimized B2B social media video content fosters a sense of community around your brand.
Multiply lead conversions. The whole point of investing in a long-term strategy is to acquire new buyers. Optimized videos increase conversions by providing potential customers with more information about your products or services. When you optimize your videos for social media, they are more likely to be watched all the way through, which can lead to more sales.
A big reason videos sell better is that people retain more information when they hear and see it in a video as opposed to looking at a still image and reading text. Why? Videos can provide a dynamic experience for viewers. Videos are more conducive to storytelling. They get closer to our conscious linear experience of reality by combining movement, audio and text to create immersion or verisimilitude, making for a more memorable experience, including captivating narratives driven by compelling characters.
Additionally, because they can engage the brain’s senses of sight and sound in real time, videos can be more effective at explaining complex concepts and processes or abstruse ideas.
Now that we’ve established why you should be producing optimized B2B marketing videos for your brand’s social channels, how should you get started? Even if your marketing team doesn’t have an expert in video production or social media, there are things you can do to capitalize on the advantages of social media video marketing for B2B.
- Set marketing goals. Decide and document exactly what you want to achieve with your B2B social media video production strategy. Is it increasing brand awareness, generating more new leads or driving sales by improving your conversion rate? After you define your B2B video goals, you can formulate a plan to hit your marks.
- Identify and define your target audiences. Who exactly are your B2B videos trying to reach on social media? Once you know who your target audience is, you can tailor your videos to their interests and needs. Limiting target audiences to one per video is a good best practice to follow so you’re delivering the right message to the right viewers, meeting them where they are on social media.
- Choose the best platforms for your social media marketing videos. Not all social media platforms are a good fit for every type of B2B video content. Some social platforms are better suited for one type of video than another. For example, long-form videos work better on YouTube and Vimeo but Instagram is a better place to post short-form videos. Videos shot on a mobile phone with vertical orientation play better on TikTok than on LinkedIn. Using a design app or website like Canva equips you to format your B2B social media marketing videos correctly for each social media platform.
When you’re ready to execute on your B2B marketing strategy for social media videos, you’ll need to know the best kinds of videos to produce and the best ways to incorporate your videos.
Get help using video to improve your social media marketing efforts
The trend of videos getting the most engagement on social media shows no signs of slowing down or reversing, so if you’re not riding the social media marketing video train, now is the time to get onboard.
Contact us today to take advantage of our over two decades of experience in using emerging technology to create high-quality content and reach today’s B2B customers wherever they are, including online. Let us help you stay ahead of the curve.
