John Davis
If you’re not investing in B2B video marketing yet, now’s the time to start. The same old content marketing strategy just doesn’t work in today’s world. If you want to stand out among countless other tech companies, and position yourself as a category leader, you need truly impactful, visual content.
The stats speak for themselves, 71% of B2B companies already use video marketing to engage, connect with, and inform their target audiences. Plus, the technology revolution is making it easier for companies to create high-quality content at scale.
Organizations have access to extended reality platforms for immersive videos, AI tools that can convert existing content into visual assets, and even virtual avatars. Whether you’re creating explainer videos, thought leadership interviews, or demos, video is the future of marketing.
The question is, how do you use video to your advantage? Here’s your guide to captivating your audience with B2B video marketing best practices.
The Evolution of B2B Video Marketing
Despite the fact that around 92% of internet users worldwide watch videos online every week, countless B2B companies still overlook the value of video content. Sure, some companies would churn out the occasional product explainer video, but they barely scratched the surface of visual marketing. That’s starting to change.
Today, B2B customers, particularly those in the technology industry, are looking for more tailored guidance, behind the scenes insights into companies, and engaging, human-led content. Expensive corporate videos might be getting less views, but authentic, educational content, like journalistic reports, one-on-one interviews, and visual testimonials are becoming increasingly popular.
B2B buyers are gravitating towards companies that go all-out to answer their questions, address their pain points, and forge emotional connections. B2B video marketing helps tech brands do this, driving higher conversion rates, and greater brand loyalty.
This shift in buyer preferences is being accompanied by the rise of new technology companies can use to streamline the creation of optimized, multi-channel assets. With AI, companies can now create more targeted, personalized, and engaging videos faster. They can even use AI to generate in-depth insights into what their audiences want and need.
B2B video marketing can even help companies navigate new challenges in the digital marketing world, helping them to rise to the top of the search engine result engines, and claim clicks in an era dominated by AI overviews and zero-click searches.
The Core Benefits of B2B Video Marketing for Tech Brands
B2B companies are catching on fast: video marketing isn’t just a flashy trend—it’s the Swiss Army knife of business communication. It’s engaging, memorable, and increasingly essential in a crowded, cluttered digital landscape.
For technology companies, the biggest benefits of B2B video marketing include:
1. Increased Brand Awareness and Engagement
As the tech industry grows more competitive, earning customer attention, and positioning yourself as a category leader with scroll-stopping, eye-catching content is essential. Human beings are naturally visual creatures, which means videos grab attention and stick in our minds for longer than text.
For instance, pages with videos keep customers engaged for three times longer than those without. Video gives you an engaging way to convey your brand’s message and personality to customers, highlight your technology benefits, and demystify complex content. It’s the perfect way to keep customers engaged, and build the foundations for long-term connections.
2. Boosting Buyer Trust
We’ve mentioned this before, but skepticism is the new normal among B2B customers. Buyers just don’t trust companies anymore. But video can make an impact more than other forms of content. It gives you a chance to show your products and services in action. That’s exactly what tech buyers need when they’re making high stakes purchasing decisions.
With the right B2B video marketing strategy, you can actively demonstrate to companies what kind of benefits your products and services can deliver. That’s far more likely to generate trust than lists of features or technical specifications.
3. Better Customer Insights
If knowledge is power, video analytics is a superpower. Unlike page views or clicks, video engagement data gives you a clear picture of what your audience cares about. Tools like heatmaps and retention graphs show where viewers linger or drop off, helping you fine-tune your content strategy.
For instance, if your demo video shows a spike in replays around a particular feature, you know what to highlight in future marketing messages. These insights allow you to craft content that speaks directly to buyer preferences, making your marketing smarter and more targeted.
4. Enhanced Category Leadership
Various forms of video give you numerous ways to connect with your B2B audience throughout their buyer journey. Companies can use videos testimonials, case studies, and reviews to attract new customers with social proof. You can turn to video to educate, entertain, or inform your audience, while demonstrating thought leadership and credibility.
Tech companies can even use B2B video marketing content to support and guide their existing customers. Videos are a great way to onboard new customers, and assist them with understanding how to use new features. With a multi-level strategy, you improve your chances of standing out as a true category leader in your industry.
5. Exceptional ROI and Conversion Rates
Year after year, studies show that B2B video marketing delivers real bang for your buck. Over 90% of marketers say video has helped them improve their ROI, and 87% say it drives more sales and leads. Videos are also extremely versatile. They work well on a range of channels, from landing pages and email messages to social media.
Beyond that, as mentioned above, video is fantastic for boosting your brand’s visibility. Thanks to AI-generated overviews and hyper-saturated SERPs, the competition is fierce. But videos can still appear at the top of the search results, and help you earn backlinks, increase time on-page metrics, and more, giving you greater ranking potential.
B2B Video Marketing Best Practices for Tech Brands
So, you know why B2B video marketing is so important – particularly now. The question is, how do you create a marketing strategy that delivers incredible results. Based on our own experience creating strategic content campaigns for tech brands, here’s your step-by-step guide for success.
Step 1: Figure Out What Your Audience Actually Wants
We’ve mentioned this before, but there’s a serious disconnect between what tech companies think their customers want, and what they actually need. Your customers don’t just want to see you showcase features for a new product. They want to know how your solution is going to solve their problems and help them reach their goals.
That means you have to find out what your customers are prioritizing – what their pain points are, and what their target outcomes might be. You can do this in a bunch of ways. For instance, you can transcribe conversations with existing customers, send out surveys, or even speak to your sales team.
The key to success is going beyond the stats and actually listening to your audience. Pay attention to the questions they’re asking, the factors that affect their purchasing decisions, and even how they prefer to consume video content (long form or short form?)
Step 2: Match your B2B Video Marketing Strategy to the Buyer Journey
If you really want to engage your B2B customers, you can’t just focus on trying to convert customers at the last hurdle. Your videos should subtly guide customers through the buyer journey, helping to inform and guide their decision making process.
This means experimenting with different types of video for different journey stages. For instance:
- Awareness: During the awareness stage, you might experiment with educational videos that teach viewers about your products, services, industry, and brand. Thought leadership videos, like interviews and roundtables, can help draw attention to your authority too.
- Consideration: In the consideration stage, focus on differentiating yourself from the competition. Don’t just share product videos, provide a behind-the-scenes look at how your products work. Don’t just mention happy customers, post and share video case studies, testimonials, and success stories.
- Decision: When your customers are ready to make decisions, help guide them to the ideal product with detailed product demonstrations, technical guides, and behind the scenes insights. You could even use short promo videos to feature deals.
- Post Purchase: After your customer makes a purchase, keep them engaged with video how-to guides, tutorials, announcements on new products and features, and webinars. Focus on helping your customers get the most out of your products.
Step 3: Set Specific Goals for Success
At Today Digital, we discovered long ago that vanity metrics (views and impressions) don’t really move the needle. If you want to make sure your B2B video marketing strategies are working, you need to set specific goals, and define the right metrics to monitor.
For instance, when you’re trying to capture new leads and opportunities with product videos and thought-leadership content, you might measure engagement rates. You could focus on social shares, average view duration, and completion rates.
When you’re trying to convert leads, you can look at which videos drive customers to your website, encourage them to reach out to your sales team, or contribute to purchasing decisions. Tools like Google Analytics and customer surveys can help with tracking those results.
Don’t stop at tracking views or likes. Measure how your videos drive leads, sales, and revenue. It’s the clearest way to identify what’s working, refine your approach, and showcase the ROI of your video strategy to stakeholders.
Step 4: Develop Your Content Creation Strategy
Now it’s time to develop a robust content creation strategy. The first thing you need to do here? Align your teams. Bring your sales, product, and marketing teams together to share insights and ideas. Get them synchronized around the same “approved messaging” statements, brand guidelines, and the performance metrics they’re going to be tracking.
Then, consider how you’re going to create your videos. Working with a professional publication can help if you want to create more professional-looking interviews and roundtable pieces. However, remember that you can use AI tools to your advantage too.
There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you create AI avatars to present your products to customers, customize your videos to different customer segments, and even improve video quality. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the latest technology.
Step 5: Decide Where to Share your Video Content
Once your video is ready to shine, the next step is deciding where it will get the most attention from your target audience. Not all platforms are created equal, so pinpointing where your B2B customers hang out is essential for effective outreach. Platforms to consider include:
- Industry publication websites: If you’re adding thought leadership articles, reports, and interviews to your B2B video marketing strategy, partnering with an industry publication is a great way to make those pieces stand out. Your journalistic partner can help drive more attention to your videos across channels, and boost your credibility.
- Social media platforms: In the social media world, LinkedIn is the best place to share high-quality videos, snippets from events, and product demonstrations. X (formerly Twitter) is better for timely updates (like recent news reports). Channels like TikTok, Instagram, and even Facebook are generally better for culture-led content.
- Video sharing sites: YouTube is the go-to for earning visibility with B2B video content. Viewers consume more than one billion hours of content on the platform each day. However, you can experiment with channels like Vimeo for increased reach too.
On top of all that, you can add your videos to your paid search and social ads, your website (alongside blog posts and other content), and even your email marketing campaigns.
Step 6: Promoting your Videos: Boosting Traction
Creating and publishing great B2B video marketing content is just the beginning. You also need to actively work to ensure this content reaches the right audience. The first step? Optimize your video for the search engines. Include closed captions, integrate keywords into titles and descriptions, and add tags to specific content. Beyond that:
- Leverage social platforms: Post your videos on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Use attention-grabbing captions and hashtags to increase visibility. Make sure you tailor each video you share to the preferences of customers on your chosen platform.
- Collaborate with influencers: Partner with B2B influencers, journalists or thought leaders in your industry. Their endorsement—whether through shares or comments—boosts your credibility and extends your reach to new audiences.
- Pitch to publications: Craft a compelling pitch for journalists and news publications. Highlight your video’s unique aspects or relevance to their audience, securing valuable media coverage and backlinks. These companies will help extend your reach and your credibility.
- Pay for a boost: Platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube are B2B advertising goldmines, with 75% of B2B marketers relying on LinkedIn ads. Target specific buyer personas, set a budget, and create engaging ad campaigns to boost engagement.
Step 6: Analyzing Results and Adjusting your Strategy
Once you launch your B2B video marketing campaigns, you need to ensure you’re tracking the results. Go back to the goals you set when you started the process, and highlight the key metrics you want to monitor. This could mean checking out engagement rates, completion percentages, and even conversions you can link back to your video strategy.
Dive into creative experimentation. Use A/B testing to experiment with different elements in your videos, like length, thumbnails, call-to-action buttons and messaging. Monitor the results you get from different video types across various channels for deeper insights into your audience.
As you continue to build on your marketing strategy, pay attention to the trends and changes happening in the industry. Watch your competitors for insights into what they’re doing right and wrong when they want to convert, engage, or just connect with leads.
Upgrade your B2B Video Marketing Strategy
B2B video marketing isn’t just a trending topic anymore. If you want to stand out in an industry as competitive as the technology space – you need video. The right strategy will help you to earn customer trust, build your position as a category leader, gather insights and stand out in the evolving work of digital marketing.
With the tips above, you’ll have the insights you need to start creating more powerful, engaging, and valuable video strategies. However, if you need a little extra help, reach out to the Today Digital team. We can help you create a marketing strategy that revolves around video content, elevates your thought leadership, and generates leads faster.
