B2B marketing can play a huge role in a company's success. Unlike consumer-focused companies (B2C), business to business brands sell their services or products directly to other companies. With any marketing strategy, the goal is to target your specific audience. For B2B marketing, the emphasis is more on building trusted relationships and networking. It's important to keep in mind that B2B is different from B2C marketing, which focuses more on transactional relationships. As ever, we recommend using video as a top B2B strategy. Keep reading for three ways to utilize B2B video.
1) Know Your Audience
This might sound a little obvious when it comes to advertising, but the difference between B2B and B2C is absolutely crucial for digital marketing success. The tone and aesthetic of your video needs to reflect not only your brand, but also the type of businesses you're trying to attract. You need to present your company as approachable and personable. The success of B2B marketing is the ability to build rapport and maintain strong relationships with your (potential) partners. Who you know is everything--be sure you know the right people, and that they know the right things about you. Check out this B2B video we created for a clear example of what we mean. The video clearly addresses the specific audience in a handful of ways. For starters, the opening shot is of business people going to work, which sets the tone for what type of other companies are being targeted. The video also immediately talks about working WITH employees. Because the product would be purchased and implemented by the C-Suite, the branded video addresses them directly. Last, there is a huge focus on how "user friendly" and streamlined the process is, because this tech brand's target consumer are non-tech companies.
2) Address the Pain Points
Pain points are persistent problems that regularly inconvenience your customers. Check out our brand video, which is also B2B. Because our business offers comprehensive services, our target consumers have a whole mess of potential pain points, which are addressed right away. We list common business goals and their pain points. The video quickly jumps into a call to action, with the expert explaining how our business can help the viewer's business with these points. We include statistics to establish credibility and underscore that we offer effective solutions tailored to a company's needs. Angela then explains the steps a potential client would have to take in order to make branded videos themselves, stressing how impractical an option that is (pain points on pain points!). The B2B video makes it clear that our business will handle ALL of the pain points that we talked about for the viewer's business. Make sure yours does, too!
3) Utilize SEO Keywords
As is with pretty much all digital marketing, SEO (search engine optimization) is the name of the game. There are multiple free online programs that help boost your SEO with keyword analytics, keyword generators, and more. You can also just mess around by searching different relevant terms for your business and noting what autofill and/or related searches pop up. However you're brushing up on your SEO keywords, you need to do so for online users at various levels of familiarity with your field of expertise/product/company/brand/etc. Have you ever Googled an incredibly vague search for something you knew nothing about, only to be seemingly magically redirected to the exact right thing you needed? Think of the keywords you would need to reach your target partnership that has no idea how to find you. You'll also need the SEO buzzwords for people both inside and outside of your field. All of your keywords need to be used both in the title of your video and in the actual dialogue/voice over. (Pro tip: Enabling closed captions not only makes your videos more accessible, it also helps search engines scrub them for search results.) That might sound like a LOT, but check it out in action--here's an example of a B2B social media marketing video that we made for a client. The client looked up Google search terms to create the video. The first line in the clip is a question being spoken in the way Google search results come up. They repeat the keywords such as "patent" and "sell a product" while still answering the question and sounding natural. Using SEO keywords like this make it far easier for potential partners/target audience to find you.
Do you have a specific video question? Schedule a free video analysis call at bit.ly/callawv