Tag: increase marketing content

 

“Socialize” your video content for tech buyers

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Video content for tech buyers should recognize that most don't want to be marketed to. They are looking for ideas.
Video content for tech buyers should recognize that most don't want to be marketed to. They are looking for ideas. Image courtesy of Women of Color in Technology

Most video content for tech buyers seems to ignore the fact that regular people spend more than 100,000,000 hours every day watching video on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has said he expects that Facebook will soon be 100% video. In other words, video is a medium used for everyday social communication. That makes sense — it’s just another thing we do with a smart phone.

By comparison, however, most video content aimed at tech buyers doesn’t feel at all like social communication for regular people. It feels forced and sales-y. Kinda like commercials on TV. So here are some ideas for using more video content that fits more naturally into the way today’s buyers communicate.

Use video to activate other media

Marketers surveyed by Ascend2 ranked the importance and effectiveness of common video types as follows:

  1. Customer testimonials
  2. On-demand product demonstration videos
  3. Explainer and tutorial videos
  4. Thought leader interviews
  5. Project reviews and case studies
  6. Live and on-demand webinars
  7. Video blogs
  8. Event videos

This list makes sense. But look at it from the buyer’s perspective. Buyers don’t want thought leadership, they want new ideas. They don’t want testimonials, they want to find out how your solution works for people like them. So why not enrich your other content with ideas from your thought leadership videos and anecdotes from your testimonials? You can incorporate snippets from existing videos in emails. Brighten up your product sheet PDFs with testimonials. Use video or animated gifs to describe your procedures and methodologies instead of lame PowerPoint animations.

When is branding really necessary?

Scrolling your newsfeed past the stuff in that isn’t super-appealing accounts for a lot of social media activity. One of the things most likely to be scrolled past is the spiffy opening animation for your corporate video. Or your spokesperson earnestly addressing the camera.

The opening frames of a video need a great hook to stop the scrolling: something, alluring, funny, or surprising. Captions combined with graphics or live action video tell the viewer a lot right off. So does a great title. Your animated logo, probably not so much. 

Remember the context

Another aspect of branding worth noting is that most B2B videos will viewed on the brand’s website, YouTube, Facebook, or somewhere else with brand identity to spare. No need to spend those critical few seconds of viewing time on it.

 

Chapterizing videos? Why aren’t you doing it?

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What are your reasons for not chapterizing videos? Consider any of the following situations.

chapterizing videos#1. You are a new employee. Your Employee Orientation Package contains links to a number of webinar recordings, executive presentations, solution demos, and tutorials — several hours’ worth, say — that you are urged to watch to help you get oriented. You are given only the title and a very brief summary of the contents of each video. Which would you prefer to do?

  1. Open each video and watch it to the end
  2. Open each video and watch it until it starts to seem irrelevant to you and your job, then go on to the next one
  3. Open each video, review its chapter headings, and click on links to segments of the video that seem especially relevant to your job, or things you had hesitated to ask about, or had not thought of.

#2. You are a marketing executive. You’re working on a new messaging document. You vaguely remember that a highly technical 90-minute video put together by the engineers included a segment about an intriguing use case. But the engineers are not available today, and you need to submit the document by noon. What would be your preference?