Producing more targeted explainer videos

How messaging and branding hurt your business Let’s assume that you work for a technology company with a viable brand and a professional marketing operation. Which of the following does more to make your brand central to the business lives of your customers: Advertising, corporate identity, and PR? Or Everything else employees do? Sure, branding […]

New Buyer’s Journey Videos

I’ve been writing recently about videos for  the buyer’s journey. We tried to capture the essentials of these ideas in the video linked to the right. It’s under a minute long, so I won’t give away the plot except to say that targeting different interests on the buying team seems to us to be a […]

My eight best explainer video content tips

I’ve been working with clients to make videos that help their buyers make decisions about enterprise technology solutions for some time. Here’s a summary of the best tips for video content I’ve shared recently. 1. Make several videos from one. Why? It’s very cost effective and simple to slice and dice even the shortest video […]

Making explainer videos for the buyer’s journey

A trend we’re seeing in the production of information marketing videos is that our clients are increasingly interested in making explainer videos for the buyer’s journey “consideration phase.” This is the point where prospects think they have the problem pretty well defined — now they are trying to get a handle on their options for solving […]

How can video content address group dynamics?

An interesting post at Forbes.com by Patrick Spenner featured this chart. The gist of the article is that: What prevails in the technology decision-making process is group dynamics — politics, fear of sticking one’s neck out, inertia The probability of buying plummets the instant the second team member comes on board There’s another steep decline when the […]

Planning an explainer video: 6 questions to ask

For many marketers, “budget”, quickly followed by “timeline” are the first things that come to mind when the subject of videos comes up. Here are a few things well worth considering before you even start to worry about either budget or timeline — because they can affect both. Here are six good questions to ask […]

Six B2B explainer video “worst practices” (including some of mine)

Until recently, video was rare on the Internet, and people were grateful to find it because the prose (at least on tech company websites) was so dreary. A video on the home or product page was high-impact communication.  That was the case when we started making 2-Minute Explainer videos in 2004.  Now, video isn’t just […]

B2B technology sales cycle and marketing videos

The concept of a sales cycle (or process) generally refers to a buyer and the various mental states he passes through on his way to a “buying decision.” But, should we focus on a “buyer” or a B2B buying team. B2B Buyer or B2B Buying Team? An intriguing post on Gartner’s blog suggests a different way […]

B2B video teams instead of committees

I was asked in a LinkedIn group discussion, “If you don’t use storyboards, how do you develop the finished product, particularly if a team is working on it?” A creative process and a business process B2B video is as much a business process as it is a creative process. Like many business processes today, there’s […]

The collaborative process for creating video marketing content

The most important thing According to a recent survey conducted in the LinkedIn B2B Technology Marketing Community,  the three most important elements of effective content are “audience relevance” (71%), “engaging and compelling storytelling” (56%) and “triggers a response/action” (56.7%). Source: 2013 B2B Content Marketing Trends Report Request a copy here: http://www.slideshare.net/hschulze/b2b-content-marketing-trends-2013 These were the only […]