Great videos to use for B2B and SMB marketing.
Here are some of our absolute favorites types of videos to incorporate into a good B2B or SMB marketing strategy.
Customer Story
“Share the experience”. Your customers can be your greatest advocates, so share their story. But be careful to NOT make this a product-focused, feature dump! Let your customer share their experience and their story while your brand provides the backdrop. This will let the video content be more genuine and allow your target audience to connect on a more personal level.
Case Study
“Share the details”. A great video case study provides your target audience the data they need to make a decision, while simultaneously showcasing your brand narrative and unique value proposition. The key to making a case study video engaging is to be very concise with the information being shared, it’s a fine line between an informational video and a self-centered bore-fest!
TIP: If you’ve decided to create a video like this, ask yourself and your team two things: What problem do we solve for our customers? AND Where does our target audience engage the most?
Product Demo
Ultimately you want that “face-to-face” demo, but what can you do mid-journey leading up to that? Broad demo videos of your solution are a great tool for a variety of marketing channels. If you’re creating an in-depth demo video, consider producing it in such a way that it can easily be atomized into smaller pieces. Remember to lead with the solution and not the feature.
Brand Story (AKA Brand Doco)
Here’s a way to communicate who you are and what you stand for as a brand. The brand documentary delivers that message internally as much as it does externally.
TIP: If your team is struggling to figure out what the brand stands for and who you are—you’ve first and foremost got a foundational exercise to get through to determine your brand narrative!
Webinars
To be fair, webinars aren’t exactly short-form videos, but that doesn’t make them less effective as content for your marketing. One thing about them is that they’ve been around for so long now that most brands do it all the same—so finding a way to stand out can be difficult!
A couple “do’s and don’ts”:
Don’t bore people to death with a PowerPoint presentation.
Don’t spend an hour talking about how great your product is and then expect a ton of hot leads.
Do provide value to your audience.
Webinars are an opportunity to show your brand as a subject matter expert and the go-to for useful and engaging content.
How-to’s
The key to these is to think of them NOT as a “how-to use your solution”, but instead “how-to solve a problem your target audience faces” (that just so happens to use your solution). With that mindset, a How-to video can work in multiple points along the buyers journey.
Tutorials
As part of a post-sale, customer retention strategy the tutorial is a perfect way to provide value through ongoing support. These ARE the “how-to use your solution” videos that should be available on-demand for your growing customer base.
Remember that not every video type is going to work for every channel your audience engages on. Also, larger videos can be atomized into smaller content and used on different platforms—for example, take a short snippet of a tutorial and post it on your stories. Lastly, every video you create must have a goal in mind and be intended to work together with your entire marketing strategy.
Happy content marketing!
