Video is an effective way to engage buyers in tech B2B markets. B2B marketing and sales cycles typically depend on a lot of information over a period of time. The information is often difficult to understand quickly.
Through voice, images, titles, motion and sound, video excels at educating and compelling technical personnel looking for a new product or service. Publitek employs video at many steps along the B2B customer journey, and we’ve learned a few ways to get the most of the medium.
Building awareness through Edutainment
At the very beginning of the customer journey, your customers need to know you have a product or service that may meet their needs. When they are searching for information, be there. But engineers don’t like sales pitches, they want to be informed. Popular topics will be well represented in major video channels. So build awareness, one approach we take is “edutainment” – providing education in an entertaining format that can be found and shared.
Our most recent video series for Mouser leverages the fact that engineers and other technical people like to be challenged and to solve puzzles. So we adopted the familiar “Two Truths and a Lie” party game to create the “Two Facts and a Fiction” video series. In each episode, a viewer is introduced to a thriving area of technology, such as tech in agriculture and medical wearables. Then the viewer is asked which one of three statements is not true (the fiction). This simple idea makes the video more watchable and memorable, and gives Publitek plenty of opportunity to build intrigue on Mouser’s social channels, where our audiences, and awareness of Mouser’s markets, continues to grow.
Reaching new contacts with paid video campaigns
When you post the video on your channel, you deliver this content to the audience that already follows you and those who find the content via hashtags. What about the rest of your market? Using Paid Video promotion, you can target a specific tech B2B audience to see your content over a defined time period. For example, you can deliver a specific content to well defined Industrial Engineers for the month before an event.
Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and Tik Tok offer robust paid video advertising options, allowing advertisers to target: specific job titles, industry topics, demographics and interests related to your business, ensuring that your messages reach the right audience. You can find out more about how to boost the visibility of your videos here.
Building preference through tech explainer videos
Once a prospective customer is aware of your value in the market, the next step is differentiation.For technical audiences, this means explaining the features and benefits of your product or service. “Tech explainer videos” are a genre that do just that: explaining technology in a way that is clear, efficient and focuses on USPs. We recommend that the material be written and produced for a business audience to make it useful to a range of decision makers, and to protect your IP. Also, keep it less than five minutes, so interested viewers are more likely to watch to the end. This animated video we did for Ascend Elements is a good example:
Establishing trust with business decision makers
When your prospects moves into the decision phase of the customer journey, you want the senior members of their team to have confidence in your company as a leader in the industry. Buying decisions depend on trust for the long term, not just speeds and feeds for today’s challenges. Video is great for corporate-level storytelling because you can connect emotionally as well as rationally with your customers.
Another video project we did for Mouser helped the company maintain its position as an important member of the electronics supply chain. Mouser asked Publitek to produce a video for the 2022 ECIA Conference, welcoming members back to the conference after it was postponed during the pandemic. This video did not talk about Mouser’s many technical advantages. Instead, the “We’re Back” video subtly reinforced Mouser’s commitment to entire electronics industry. This video, incidentally, won two Communication Arts awards of excellence.
Integrate video into your programs
We’ve touched on four ways video informs your customer journey. There are, no surprise, many ways video can make your programs and campaigns more rewarding for prospecs and your bottom line. Need help? We can help you define your customer journey and the opportunities for video to make the journey more memorable and effective. Get in touch with us.
