Video has quickly become the number one way to connect with buyers, viewers, and followers. For B2B sellers, a strategic video marketing approach tailored to a target audience can provide one of the highest ROIs for their brand. And an interactive video strategy can be just what’s needed to take a marketing campaign up a notch, improving lead qualification, stimulating the sales cycle, and maximizing return on various video assets.
Video Marketing Strategy Basics
Any video marketing strategy, interactive or not, should include certain stages.
Creation
Create quality content that’s relevant, to the point, and hooks an already impatient audience. A smart approach is to plan B2B video content that can be reused and repurposed.
Distribution
Be it on YouTube, Facebook, or embedded on your website, determine where your audience consumes their content. Use proper optimization for search engines, including publishing times, custom thumbnails, keywords, and transcripts.
Measurement & Optimization
Powerful analytics that cover everything from reach to video engagement and monetization are a must. An online video marketing platform allows you to continually capture customer insights which, in turn, help you make smarter decisions that lead to increased audience engagement and revenue.
Interactive Video as a Key Tool for B2B Marketers
Interactive video content is a better way to educate, entertain, and engage your target audience than “traditional” video experiences. With static video content, the customer’s role is passive; they’re left to their own devices in understanding how a solution might address their specific needs. With interactive video, a customer actively engages with the content creating a feedback loop with the brand guiding the viewer to the relevant content he or she cares about.
In other words, it’s a marketing campaign strategy that puts a premium on customer input, creating a two-way dialogue that delivers a personalized experience from start to finish.
3 Ways to Activate Video Audiences
- Get the Click: Try satisfaction and sentiment feedback such as a thumbs up or thumbs down in product or promotional videos.
- Empower the Viewer: Using chapters and resource links in how-to and explainer videos creates an active learning environment for your prospect.
- Guide the Journey: Add branching or “choose your own adventure” with personalization to advertorial videos to take your B2B storytellingup a notch.
A Results-Driven Interactive Video Strategy
Still trying to understand why you should you make interactive video a part of your marketing strategy? Video helps to differentiate your brand’s message and explains complex ideas in a way more people can easily understand. Video also improves recall – people are wired to process visual information with movement and remember stories (it’s how we learn!).
Here’s how to plan your interactive videos:
First, define your goal. What response are you trying to achieve? What metrics will be used to measure success? Common goals include:
- Building brand awareness
- Educating buyers
- Generating leads
- Demonstrating a new product or service
- Making a sale
Once you know the objective and have honed in on your video marketing KPIs, it’s time to define your target audience. For example, if you’re hoping to clinch a sale, the video should be aimed at the people who have purchasing power. Likewise, education videos won’t be embraced by decision-makers who already know the landscape.
These first two steps are common of any content marketing initiative, know your goal and audience, but then you need to answer, How?.
Finally, create the content they care about.
Create these types of interactive videos to address common business problems:
Market to prospects with techniques like personalized interactive webinar invitations. Data collected from quizzes, surveys, and types of downloads help cut through the clutter your audience has grown used to. When customers see their name they’re more likely to stay engaged because they feel they’re part of the story.
Sales oriented content may include interactive branching videos. Similar to video games where you “choose your own adventure,” they allow buyers to decide their own path by answering questions designed to pinpoint the ideal solution.
Product demonstration videos help you deliver a better customer experience, onboard more effectively, and close more sales. When used to explain the features and benefits of a product or service, they are an exciting visual way to help customers understand how you solve their challenges and why they should buy from you.
Customer success videos such as analytic dashboards let users track their success with a product. Buyers can interact with personalized overlays or hotspots updating them on their progress.
Activate, Motivate, Measure
The possibilities with interactive video are endless. Not only can it be used across every stage of the customer journey, it can be utilized by multiple departments across your Enterprise organization. From branching to customer polls and calls-to-action, you can use interactive video at all stages of the funnel to solve a buyer’s problems.
Understanding your audience and what they care about is knowable if you just ask. Instead of using analytics to measure time viewed or video completion rates and inferring their engagement, you can use in-video interaction points and annotations to request feedback and engagement. The data from these interactions is much more rich and actionable than those from your standard online video platform.
Once you figure out these key interaction points, your video marketing becomes more effective—every Enterprise team can benefit, from marketing and sales to customer success and support. Other internal-facing teams like communications and learning, HR, and finance can easily find ways to use interactive video, communicating better while gaining insights.
All brands want to create memorable content that engages. Interactive video, with its wealth of options, may be your best way to do just that.
It all starts with a well-defined strategy.
This post was originally published on client site, HapYak, as How to Create an Interactive Video Strategy for Your B2B, in September 2018.
