We most often think of short videos in the context of outbound marketing as they are included in most product introduction packages. After all there’s no quicker way to communicate essential features, benefits and points of differentiation. But, what about using short B2B content marketing videos to change perceptions – instead of focusing on features and benefits. Below, we show how two companies are building video marketing content around ideas.
Compuware Creates Videos for Featureless Technology Solutions
Not all technology solutions are products with features.
Sometimes the marketing task is to introduce an idea, or to get an existing customer to think about solutions in a different way. Compuware, a large (~$1B sales) U.S. software company, has been a top provider of tools for mainframes since the 1980s.
Now, Compuware is big in mobile solutions, application performance management, cloud computing, services, and lots more. The company now puts a good deal of effort into thought leadership campaigns. Their “thought leadership” video was designed to divert thoughts toward Compuware solutions and capabilities the viewer may not be aware of. Hence the diverting style.
This particular video saw its first use at Detroit’s OpenCo Business Conference and will find its way into many other venues and content collections as time goes by.
Coreo Downplays Features in Favor of Ideas
Corero Network Security‘s application was best-known for protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, the ones that shut down transaction-oriented websites (banks, shopping, online games, etc.) by flooding them with bogus requests. One of Corero’s case studies provides a dramatic account of a financial institution that had been under a persistent DDoS Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack for days. Fortunately, their IT department had a Corero device in their shop for evaluation — they installed it in 45 minutes and ended the attack immediately. Good story, especially since DDoS is one of the best-known and most dramatic types of security attack.
Now, they didn’t create a video that showcases this application’s features and the success story.
Why?
Because, one problem with new product introductions for security solutions is that consequences of security breaches are so well-known by prospects. There are already so many, many doom-and-gloom videos (some produced by us) depicting lost revenue, lost customers, brand damage, and penalties that it’s almost a waste of time to bring them up at all.
So, even though Coreo has an amazing case study that they can feature, they redefined the problem in terms of “unwanted traffic” rather than in terms of attacks. Unwanted traffic might be a competitor continually checking your prices to update their own. Unwanted traffic may not bring down a site, but it consumes resources without producing revenue and can slow down transactions with paying customers.
In this video below, the visuals help to define “intrusions” in terms of “unwanted traffic” in order to call attention to new product features.
Putting ideas into people’s heads, as opposed to putting across new information about something they are vitally concerned with usually takes a little extra imagination and hard work. Because, as mottos posted all over Edison’s invention factory proclaimed (quoting Ruskin) “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
Using B2B content marketing videos for thought leadership positioning is just one way to use a 2-minute explainer video.
