4 Things Every B2B Video Marketing Strategy Needs to Succeed

You just got the green light to go all-in on video marketing for your company. Congratulations! Now, it’s time to put in the work and get the results you need. So, what’s your next move? While you may be tempted to dive right into making videos, the short answer is that you’ll need a strategy before you can do anything else.

A thoughtful video marketing strategy is critical for B2B marketers. Putting together a plan of action for your B2B video content will inform the type of videos you create and help you understand how they connect with, or impact, your overarching business goals.

As you begin drafting your video strategy, here are four key components you should be thinking about. These include detailed customer personas, stage-specific video ideation, key performance indicators, and promotional planning. Read on to learn more!

1. Detailed buyer personas

What made niche television programs like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Twin Peaks so successful? These shows knew their audiences. The content catered to viewers, who became loyal over time and helped spread the word amongst their communities.

Developing B2B video content is really not all that different from creating great television. The primary goal is still to connect with your target audience — except in your case, the audience is mostly made up of businesses looking to achieve something specific by working with you.

How then do you make sure your videos are connecting with the right people at the right businesses? If you haven’t done so already, you start by creating detailed B2B buyer personas. Your personas will allow you to understand your buyers and how to reach them. Then, depending on which persona you’re targeting, you can create videos in a tone and style that matches your buyers’ preferences.

The goal when creating personas is to discover specific information about where your ideal video consumer works, their official title, their function within their business, and more. Even if two people work at the same SaaS company, the video needs of someone working in digital marketing will differ from someone in social media marketing — thus, you would have two separate personas.

To ensure you’re covering all your customer needs, come up with at least three to four B2B buyer personas that your business wants to target through its video marketing strategy. Consider looking into demographics and psychographics as well. These two types of market segmentation data are essential for video content because they offer insights into your audience’s personality and characteristics (psychographics), as well as statistical data about them (demographics).

2. Stage-specific video ideation

Like a strong blog post, which typically seeks to inform, engage, and/or convert, brand videos need to serve a greater purpose beyond simply entertaining people. For B2B companies, crafting video content for each stage of the customer journey will help engage viewers at every part of the sales funnel.

“For B2B companies, crafting video content for each stage of the customer journey will help engage viewers at every part of the sales funnel.”

Ideally, you’ll want a strong blend of top-of-funnel (ToFu), middle-of-funnel (MoFu), and bottom-of-funnel (BoFu) video content to attract consumers at these different stages and provide value for them, no matter where they are in their decision-making process.

Top-of-Funnel (ToFu) video content

At the very top of the sales funnel, it’s all about brand awareness and discovery. Use video content that will educate consumers on a particular issue, trend, or topic or even highlight your brand’s area of expertise.

ToFu video content examples: How-to videos, industry interview video series, trend videos

Middle-of-Funnel (MoFu) video content

In this stage, your consumer has identified a solution they’re looking for or a problem they’re trying to solve. They’re actively pursuing different B2B solutions that will best fit their needs and comparing them against each other.

Bring them closer to your brand by using videos that position your brand and product as the best solution among competitors.

MoFu video content examples: Product comparison videos, product tutorial videos, explainer videos

Bottom-of-Funnel (BoFu) video content

It’s finally time to take all that effort you’ve put into guiding potential customers down the funnel and make a sale. Videos at the BoFu stage should nail down your product’s value in detail and show customers how other companies have successfully worked with you.

BoFu video content examples: Case study videos, testimonial videos, webinars

When creating video content for the various funnel stages, you should have different expectations of your videos, depending on which funnel stage the audience is in. For example, the primary goal of a ToFu video is to drive awareness while a BoFu video is about that final push before making a sale.

Because of this, the type of Call to Action (CTA) you set inside each video type needs to be distinct. CTAs should reflect the primary goals of your video marketing strategy at each customer journey stage. For example, if your goal is lead generation, include a CTA that motivates people to give their emails.

“CTAs should reflect the primary goals of your video marketing strategy at each customer journey stage.”

You also need to make CTAs worth your viewer’s while. Entice them to take action by offering valuable content marketing materials and/or discounts that will get them more excited about your brand and product. A BoFu example might be providing the viewer with a code for a free product demo they can sign up for after watching the video.

3. Key performance indicators (KPIs)

B2B videos aren’t just meant to entertain viewers — when done well, they elevate your brand. But how do you know if your videos are effective? A mix of key performance indicators (KPIs) — both qualitative and quantitative — can give you a sense of the overall performance.

Quantitative KPI examples → what they track

• Leads generated → new leads
• Call to Action (CTA) clicks → conversions
• Products sold → new product sales

Qualitative KPI examples → what they track

• Brand influence → brand reach among different audiences
• Brand engagement → customer engagement with your brand
• Product education → overall customer understanding of your brand and products

If you want to track KPIs accurately, you’ll need a video marketing platform with that capability. Wistia helps brands dig into quantitative analytics about their videos, including the percentage of viewers who clicked play and CTAs clicked.

Tracking qualitative analytics is a little more challenging, as it’s not solely based on empirical data. That said, monitoring things like social media comments and likes are good places to start when determining brand influence and engagement.

4. Promotional planning

While creating strong videos should absolutely be a priority, they likely won’t reach your target audience and boost your brand without a plan to promote those videos. Plan out how you’ll share your videos on different channels to increase the visibility of your content.

With so many decision-makers at B2B businesses active on LinkedIn, the professional social media network is ideal for sharing B2B video content. Dropping short videos on your LinkedIn brand or company page can bolster lead generation efforts with people who are already within your desired target audience.

Another factor to consider when creating your promotional plan is SEO (search engine optimization). You might associate SEO with blogs, but it’s also a significant part of a well-developed video marketing strategy. Make sure your video is optimized for search, so you don’t miss out on valuable traffic and leads. Review some quick video SEO tips so you can start getting the most of your content today.

Ready to launch your B2B video marketing strategy?

Now that you’ve got all the pieces of your video marketing strategy in place, it’s time to start making some videos! Check out our guide to video production to help you with all the basic knowledge you need to get your brand videos done right.

As you create content, be sure to use a video hosting platform to track your video performance. Wistia gives users immediate insight into video content performance and what is — and isn’t — working for your overall video marketing efforts. This ensures you can make data-driven decisions over time and iterate accordingly to get the most out of your video content.