B2B Video Marketing: The Complete Guide for Marketers

B2B video marketing is one of the hottest tools you can use to build relationships with current and prospective customers and spread the word about your products and services. More than half of companies in the B2B market have committed to digital marketing, and video is a critical component of this strategy. If you’re not already using B2B video marketing, add it to your marketing “to-do” list for the following year.

From a sales perspective, there’s a huge (and incredibly obvious) difference between B2B power players and their B2C counterparts. Sure, both are trying to sell a product, but one is directed at individual consumers outside the corporate world, while the other aims to speak to an audience of industry professionals.

But from a content perspective, is there really that much difference between B2C and B2B marketing?

Not as much as you might think.

What is B2B Video Marketing? 

Let’s get some basics out of the way: B2B video marketing is an integral part of your overall digital strategy where you create and distribute video content–from Connected Television (CTV) ads to product spotlights and industry thought leadership. Some of the many video marketing benefits include boosting your brand awareness, informing and engaging current and potential customers, adding value to existing customers, and much more. You can publish them on social media, distribute them through an email newsletter, or host them on your website. 

Why is B2B Video Important?

Video is the most popular pastime on the internet. In 2022, an estimated 82% of all internet traffic consisted of online video. People tend to engage with video longer than other forms of content. B2B marketing videos help build your customers’ connection to your brand. 

These videos let you position yourself as an expert in your field, allowing you to share your knowledge with others in the industry, including potential customers. It also gives your brand an opportunity to thread in relatable authenticity that engages consumers in a way you may not be able to do with just blog content. Video marketing can also lead to a higher conversion rate – people who watch videos are more likely to purchase than those who don’t watch a video. 

What Makes a Great B2B Marketing Video? 

Anyone who has spent time watching commercials during major television events knows the power of a good video. Outstanding videos resonate with the audience and make viewers more likely to remember your business, but what makes a B2B video great?

Fortunately, you don’t have to spend millions of dollars and hire celebrity spokespeople to make an excellent B2B video. The best B2B marketing videos shine a light on how your business can solve customers’ problems. With a solid video marketing strategy, you can create videos that resonate with your target audience and drive people to do business with you.

How to Create a B2B Video Marketing Strategy

Get started on the path to video marketing success with a proper strategy. Follow these tips to guide your plan. 

Set Clear Campaign Goals

Having a goal to “make a B2B marketing video” won’t get you far. When you set up your video marketing strategy, set specific goals and KPIs for each video. Do you want to see an increase in ROAS? Are you looking to generate more followers on social media? Identifying these goals will shape and inform the types of videos you make. 

For instance, if your goal is to build brand awareness, you might choose to make a series of videos that touch on your company’s history and then create a series of case studies featuring testimonials from past clients. This would give new clients a feel for your business and how you can help them. 

Define Your Target Audience

You need to define your audience to get your video production in front of the right people. Choose to appeal to people by their job description or their level at the company. Your videos would include a different message if you’re appealing to decision-makers versus end users of your product or service. 

Knowing a target audience also helps you decide how to distribute your video. For example, if you’re planning on creating an informational video to share your knowledge, you might send out an email to past customers directing them to a YouTube video. If you want to raise brand awareness and attract new customers within your industry, your best bet may be to distribute your video on LinkedIn, as that is the leading platform for industry professionals. 

Decide on What Story You Want to Tell

Once you’ve defined your goals and target audience, you can figure out what story you want to tell, and how you want to tell it. Our B2B storytelling guide can help with this. Pick your central message and build a story around it. Audiences find emotional content highly resonates, so consider how you can leverage emotions in your story to generate engagement. Studies have shown that approximately 50% of industry professionals are more inclined to purchase a product or service that utilizes emotional appeal to demonstrate personal value. If you can determine to whom you’re telling the story, you can then outline the essential points to hit to make the greatest impact. 

Decide On Your Platforms

Your chosen platform will inform the specifics of your video. Some social media platforms have limits on how long your video can be. Social media, in general, is made for a shorter attention span, so if you’re planning on distributing your videos there, you would likely keep them short to be most impactful. 

On the other hand, if you’re summarizing a webinar or hosting a video on your company website, you would be free to play with the length and style. Social media video marketing is very powerful and doesn’t have to be complicated.

Keep Creative Requirements in Mind

Each platform, from social media to CTV, has different requirements for the creative. This refers to the size and format of each video, its audio settings, and other factors that enable the video to play on a website. Before making your video, look up the creative requirements for your chosen platform so you can be sure your own will conform. You can learn more about social media ad specs and CTV ad specs using our detailed guides.

Take Your Budget and Timeline Seriously

When you’re busy running your business and helping customers, it’s tempting to skip marketing. But pushing back your video production timeline to do other things gets costly. When you’ve set up your strategy, assign a project manager to keep everyone on time and within the budget. 

You might be tempted to add a variety of components to your video, like locations, props, etc. However, these factors can break your budget if you don’t plan for them. Have a fixed budget so you can stay within your parameters. 

Polish and Perfect

Your first few video marketing ideas probably won’t be perfect. Learn from each video. Take some time to recap what worked and didn’t, so you can make each video better than the last. 

Test, Measure, and Analyze

When your video ad examples are done, test them to see which generated more traffic than others. Analysis of outcome details, including engagement, the time people watched each video, and others, will help you refine future videos. When shooting videos, make small changes and test these versions against each other to see which ones perform the best. 

5 B2B Marketing Video Types (With Examples)

Both B2B and B2C brands leverage content as a means to sway consumers away from competition and to grow awareness and trust in their brand. After all, video marketing is all about finding unique ways to memorably convey your core message, value props, and product benefits. 

But that doesn’t mean the core types of video B2B and B2C brands use are endlessly interchangeable. For instance, it will be harder for a SaaS company to leverage UGC-style videos because the product is so intangible. Conversely, if you’re a B2C eCommerce store, product video marketing content will likely perform better at achieving your campaign goals than Case Study videos.

When we spoke to Charles Derupe, Sales Tools and Content Manager at Square last year about the brand’s approach to video content, he told us, “At Square Sales, we use video as a really powerful tool for storytelling. It helps our sales reps contextualize and inform the sellers that we are selling to. In addition to that, we also use video for internal onboarding training to really understand Square as a product.”

What this means is that there are multiple types of video content across the funnel you can use to drive awareness, engagement, conversion, and to strengthen your brand.

You come to QuickFrame because we’re video professionals, so take our word for it when we say that if you are a B2B brand, these are the best, high-performing types of B2B marketing videos you need to add to your content library.

Explainer Videos

B2B explainer videos are exactly what they sound like. They are visual descriptions of what your product is, and how it works. These could be live-action shoots with hired talent or animated videos with on-screen text. You can even feature your own sales or marketing team to establish trustworthiness while driving your narrative.

This video type works so well for B2B marketing as an Explainer video focuses directly on the problem your customer faces, and then deliberately highlights the solution you offer. 

Check out these stats on the efficacy of video, and Explainer videos specifically:

• Video’s ability to engage users is why 68% of consumers prefer watching videos to learn about new products or services, as compared to articles or infographics. 
• 96% of people have watched an Explainer video to learn more about a product or service.

This type of video is particularly popular with B2B brands that offer intangible products, like services, tools, or apps. Depending on what part of the funnel you are trying to target—and what channels your Explainer video will live on—you can get incredibly granular with the type of information you include.

Animated explainers, like this one QuickFrame enabled Databricks to create, are the perfect format to simply convey platforms and processes that can be otherwise confusing to demonstrate.

Case Study Videos

You know your business best, but social proof can be incredibly influential. That’s where B2B Case Study videos come in. 

Similar to a B2C Customer Testimonial video, Case Study videos allow your clients to give first-hand accounts of the success they achieved working with your brand.

In essence, Case Study videos use your audience to sell for you. These videos validate your product and brand with real client opinions. You can effortlessly showcase the confidence others have in your product, all by using your clients’ positive experience.

Case Study videos establish a level of credibility with audiences you are trying to target while communicating your brand’s value. Your clients become both the storyteller and the story, so choosing figures from your target demos is key. 

If you service companies across multiple verticals, make sure that you have unique Case Study videos that can speak to each of these audiences. With a relatable and believable “star,” a Case Study video can be incredibly successful at driving a prospect to convert. 

This Case Study for QuickFrame uses the success story of our partnership with Self to organically illustrate the benefits of partnering with our brand.

Social Direct Response

It’s reported that 87% of video marketers say video gives their brand a positive ROI, and nearly eight out of ten marketers feel that video has a direct, positive impact on sales. This translates into video being perfect for B2B direct response social campaigns.

B2B direct response social videos are conceptualized specifically for social media and are often produced with specific platforms and performance marketing plans in mind. They offer a clear CTA to spur action and are designed to get your audiences to act, directly driving leads or sales.

These types of B2B videos are made to look like native video advertisements to specific social media platforms so they are often less polished than other video types to blend in with a viewer’s feed, and they usually cost less to produce. 

This social ad for CBRE Loan Flow leverages on-screen text to drive their core messaging inspiring–you guessed it–a direct response from the viewer.

Culture Videos

B2B culture videos highlight what life is like at your brand. These videos are meant to make potential customers, partners, or employees want to be part of what you’re doing. Culture videos can take many shapes, from Brand Commercials that focus on your core values, to a recruitment tool, attracting new team members to your company.

B2B brands can use culture videos to showcase their organization from the inside out, making a company feel more accessible and trustworthy. Use Culture videos to focus on the people that make your business run. If you’re a socially conscious company, this is an exceptional way to humanize your brand and inspire loyalty in potential clients and consumers.

Plus, Culture videos can do double duty. Not only can you use them for your B2B video marketing efforts, but they can also come in handy in employee recruitment efforts. 

This video QuickFrame enabled Cruise to create seamlessly conveys their commitment to an inclusive culture by racking focus on their diverse talent pool that makes up their brand’s DNA.

Need help making videos? See how our video production platform can help your business.

Content Marketing

All of the video types covered so far focus heavily on your brand or offer. B2B content marketing videos take a different approach, aiming to position your brand as a thought leader in your space.

Think about topics of interest that your brand can speak to with authority and then create content to share your unique knowledge and POV. These videos shouldn’t really be about your products. 

Instead, focus on providing value to your audience through education. Content Marketing videos are more subtle, but when strategically deployed, can establish your brand as a trusted authority.

These types of videos can also be good for SEO as video can increase organic search traffic with the right optimization. 

This educational video QuickFrame enabled Fast Company to create leverages the publisher’s thought leadership expertise to convey their belief in the rise of mobile business centers.

Producing B2B Marketing Videos to Scale

If you want to effectively reach and grow your audience, you need to be publishing a constant stream of smart, targeted video in more places than ever before. Your content needs to simultaneously solve for increasing competition from industry rivals and decreasing attention spans from your target audiences. 

You may be thinking, “That sounds expensive.” But creating B2B marketing videos at scale doesn’t have to be costly. Being strategic with a performance testing plan can bring objectivity to the traditionally subjective process of creative concepting, turning trial and error into methodical testing. And that’s exactly the way QuickFrame approaches video creation.

Our unique platform offers you everything you need to produce memorable videos within your budget and schedule. It gives you access to data-driven insights and creative analytics you can use to make videos that resonate with your audience and convert.

In a matter of weeks, our approach can reveal which creative approaches are performing best at achieving your campaign objectives. With each round of performance testing, you zero in on the creative approaches that work for your brand—all while driving your KPIs.

With QuickFrame, you also get access to a collective of makers and production companies, all with the skill sets you need to produce high-quality, on-brand videos.

B2B Video Marketing: Final Thoughts

Video is quickly becoming the dominant communication medium:

• As of 2021, 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 
• 93% of marketers say that video is an important part of their content strategy, the highest percentage of any year since 2015.

This growth is in part due to how our appetite for digital media intensified in 2020. Now, B2B marketers are facing more competition for consumer eyeballs than ever before. That means that you need to increase the frequency with which you create and publish B2B marketing videos to make sure your campaigns continue to perform. 

Don’t believe us? Read our analysis (via The Drum) of our client’s videos to see how quickly–down to the day–campaign performance can begin to dip if fresh creative isn’t introduced. Your creative expires much sooner than you think. 

If you want your B2B brand to stand out in a saturated content landscape, you must heavily invest in building out your video content library. As you can see, the best B2B marketing video types are the ones that can touch upon every aspect of your business, not just the product that you are selling. Use these video types to paint a more vibrant picture of your company, from your culture and ethos down to how you work with clients.

Traditionally, video production costs have been too expensive, or ads are too subjective to be scalable. That’s why QuickFrame created a corporate video production solution that unlocks more audience-specific, high-performing videos faster and more cost-effectively than ever before. To learn more about how you can affordably create videos that can support your B2B marketing efforts, check out our Solutions.

It’s not too good to be true. It’s just how we do business.

READY. SET. CREATE. Download the Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing for Brands