Most B2B marketers already know that video is an effective medium for digital marketing. The barriers to creating videos are usually surrounding the cost, quality, and amount of work it takes.

If you need to make a case for creating marketing videos, here are some helpful facts:

• 87% of marketers say video has increased traffic to their website
• 80% of marketers say video has directly helped increase sales

Increasing traffic and sales are pretty much the standard key metrics that most marketers are measured on. And video is a powerful way to help you reach those goals to increase brand awareness and boost B2B lead generation.

So how can you best leverage online videos to reach your target audience?

Timing is essential with B2B buyers

Good timing is a critical element in reaching b2b businesses. Your target companies and audience are usually looking for ways to achieve their KPIs while they’re at work, which is why serving them videos while they’re on the clock makes perfect sense.

The key is to have a strong and relatable video pitch while your target audience is in the middle of a project or dilemma. Timing and relevancy will help you connect with your future customers and promote a solution that solves their biggest pain points, with the goal to drive conversions, of course.

Sounds easier said than done, I know. Here are a few more actionable tips to reach your ideal customers, along with some B2B video sales pitch examples for inspiration.

1. Make sure your video answers a relevant question

People typically spend at least a couple hours of their work week catching up on industry news. Which is why

Understanding your target audience’s biggest pain points should be the main basis for most of your video content—and probably most of your marketing efforts.

If you already know the most pressing questions that your most coveted decision makers are searching for, congratulations—you’ve got the ammo to create a bounty of B2B sales videos that are bound to captivate the people with the highest potential to convert.

For brand awareness and demand generation, think about search intent

By tying your video pitch to a popular query searched by an ideal prospect, you’ve got the makings of a great mid-funnel B2B lead generation machine. While not all video is made for search intent, video can be a powerful tool for brand awareness and demand generation. Just remember to use video SEO best practices so that they’re optimized for search engines to help you organically generate quality traffic.

Don’t forget to tie the search intent to the call to action so that you can lead your leads to the very bottom of the funnel. Videos about product comparisons, how to choose a tool for [insert your product category], or how to get internal buy-in for a new type of product are examples of videos to push at this stage.

If you don’t know those burning questions, do your homework. Pro-tip: Don’t rely on those made-up buyer personas. Instead, the Jobs To Be Done framework is a great way to learn about your audience.

The most effective B2B marketing videos aim to inform, educate, and empower your prospects to do their job better. Videos are also a great way to help existing customers use your product or service and increase customer retention.

Here’s an example from SimilarWeb that answers the surface-level question “why should I invest in the Levi Strauss IPO?”

In this video, SimilarWeb doesn’t directly promote itself. Instead, SimilarWeb showcases digital insights about Levi’s that you’re able to glean with their suite of web analytics tools. Their tool is something that potential investors who do diligent research—a target customer segment—would find valuable.

SimilarWeb helps to answer a more important question, “what companies have the most potential to invest in?”

More relevant leads learn that you can get insights into more companies (ones that they may want to invest in!) by going to SimilarWeb and performing an analysis.

Check out our case study with SimilarWeb to learn more about their approach to video!

2. Create videos that cover industry news to build thought leadership

If you’re like me, you probably spend at least a couple of hours each week checking out what’s new in the world of your industry. Keeping up with the latest news and trends is especially vital in marketing.

Many successful B2B content marketers understand this and dedicate a good amount of their time covering (and optimizing) news videos around the industries of their target audiences. News videos are an easy way to build thought leadership in the space.

Marketscale, a leading agency that focuses primarily on B2B customers, took this strategy to the next level by launching over 15 publications dedicated to the niche industries that their various B2B clients work in. Their team uses Wibbitz to scale video coverage around each industry across each of their publications—along with the videos they create on behalf of their B2B clients.

Get a glimpse of MarketScale’s b2b video strategy in action by watching this short video for their Food & Beverage industry publication, which covers a story about McDonald’s:

“We know people today engage with video more than any other form of content – 20% of people will read a blog, but 80% of people will watch a video. So there was a huge opportunity to transform how we were creating content and what we were creating. Instead of writing long-form blogs, we could create video blogs that analytics showed had a significantly higher rate of engagement.”

Emily Rector, Director of Operations at MarketScale

If you’d like to learn more about how MarketScale uses video to transform blog posts to video blogs at scale, check out this case study.

3. Capture people’s attention when they need a break from work

Breaks are a highly coveted part of the day, where most people don’t want to think about work. It’s an opportunity to recharge and reset, so you should think about this context when pushing videos around this time.

Most people catch up with the news or social media and probably need a good laugh. So if you’re going to pitch your solution during this time, you’ll probably want to make your video short, digestible, entertaining, and worth sharing during the inevitable water cooler talk.

Just be wary that these types of videos typically fall into your top-of-the-funnel content. Unfortunately, this means you can only rely on them for B2B lead generation up to a certain degree, as they may not lure in the most qualified prospects.

But, if you can generate a big enough buzz with your video content, it has the potential to be picked up by media outlets looking for newsworthy stories. This exposure can thrust your company into the public eye in a massive way which can help you catch people during their break—and beyond.

Here’s an example of how BNP Paribas Real Estate creates a non-salesy video approach that’s newsworthy.

This video highlights BNP Pariba’s new digital augmented real estate technology that enables people to have meetings across the world with holograms and mixed reality.

By promoting groundbreaking technologies with live video coverage to illustrate the concept, BNP Paribas can attract various news outlets.

This video is a fantastic example of an indirect B2B sales pitch that also plays to the audiences’ emotions. It has all of the makings of attracting journalists and potential customers who could benefit from this advancement without coming off as salesy.

4. Post your brand videos where your target audience hangs out

This is an obvious one, but if you don’t know where your ideal customers hang out, here are some helpful stats from TechJury about where people hang out:

• An average user spent 2 hours and 24 minutes per day on social media in 2020.
• 50.1% of the time spent on mobile was done using social media apps in 2020 – so don’t forget to optimize your videos for mobile!
• Facebook is the most popular channel, with people spending an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes each day.
• Youtube users spend an average of 40 minutes per day on the platform. If you’re creating videos, creating a YouTube channel is a no-brainer.
• Instagram users are spending a daily average of 28 minutes
• Pinterest has also incorporated video capabilities in their “pins,” and visitors are spending an average of 14.2 minutes per day scrolling through ideas

By now, you’ve hopefully got a good amount of ideas to kickstart your b2b video marketing strategy. To help you with video creation pain points, Wibbitz is an easy-to-use online video editor that will help you quickly create videos without any professional experience needed!