If your content marketing strategy includes white papers, blog posts, videos, etc. you might want to rethink it. Video isn’t a content type like the others. When a customer clicks on a link to a white paper or a blog post, they have a pretty good idea of what to expect. But video, not so much. Sure there are different types of videos: webinars, thought leadership, explainers, tutorials, and so forth. But if you manage the video budget along these lines, you’re leaving money on the table. To realize the full value of video, think video content management.
Who benefits from video, anyway?
Why should a B2B company make videos at all? Not because people like to watch a lot of video. Not to create buzz or convert someone. You benefit from a video only if customers benefit by learning something that helps them make or confirm a buying decision.
A good starting point for video content management, then, is to ask, “What content should we be creating to help the customer?” This will open up new ways of thinking about video and its uses:
- Could we make this white paper easier to understand if we turned a complicated diagram into a guided tour?
- Could we help ensure continuity of operations (a customer benefit, for sure!) with “knowledge transfer videos” in which old hands share hard-won know-how.
- Could we personalize videos? Or help sales personalize messages to customers by explaining why a particular video is relevant to a particular customer’s business.
- Could we work with sales to make sure we have a quick and authoritative response to each frequently asked question. Not every response needs to be video; but, as a visual medium, video is frequently the quickest and easiest medium for customers.
Video content management for distribution, production, data, and search
Clearly, every video you produce is content that needs to be managed along with all the text, presentations, and other stuff you produce. But digital video has heftier technical production and distribution requirements than other media. Video platforms, like those on this top 15 list, are useful for distribution and for collecting viewing data to feed into CMS and other sales/marketing systems. If customer education or capturing tribal knowledge is a high priority, take a look at Panopto. Developed at Carnegie Mellon and widely used in education, it offers lots of tools for turning expert knowledge into consumable video.
A video content management platform might also include tools, such as transcription, for making video content easier to find and share. The obvious customer benefit is the ability to find the answer to a question buried deep inside a webinar or demo. But sales teams will also be able to find more relevant video material to share proactively.
