9 Videos B2B Brands Must Embrace to Enhance Their Marketing Efforts

If you are a B2B business owner or marketer, you may somewhat understand the importance of video creation in your marketing efforts, but you might not fully grasp how to master the different types of B2B marketing videos.

If this is the case, a little information can go a long way in helping you reach potential partners and customers.

To keep current customers, gain new leads, and educate and inform through your B2B video marketing efforts, you need to be more creative than your competitors. Your best bet to be successful is to gain an understanding of the many types of B2B videos you can create.

This understanding of multiple video types will allow your marketing efforts to be unique, engaging, and unpredictable.

9 B2B marketing videos that’ll help you educate, inform, and sell

If you don’t know where to start, that’s OK. We’ll walk you down the road to B2B video marketing enlightenment. Here are the video types you need to know about for your B2B marketing efforts:

1. Product demos

Perhaps the best way to help your audience to understand your product is to show them exactly what it is and how to use it. When you do so, always remember to emphasize what it is about your product that will make life easier for the B2B entity to which you are marketing.

The good news about product demo videos is that people love to consume them. As long as you can tap into the right target audience, product demo videos can be a huge advantage for your organization.

A study by Wyzowl shows that 73 percent of consumers want to watch a short product demo video to learn more about services and products. Similarly, 88 percent say they have decided to make a purchase based on a brand’s video.

So, what makes a great product demo? Let’s take a look at a good example from SurveyMonkey.

What are some lessons learned from this product demo video?

• The video uses a visual at the beginning to help set the stage for the “why” of the product — in this instance, the “why” is because “curiosity sparks innovation.”
• The video uses music and visual elements to give a sense of excitement and intrigue. These elements help SurveyMonkey more seamlessly move through the video and tell their story.
• The video shows several features but doesn’t spend too long on any single feature. Rather than bore potential customers with details, the video intrigues its audience with opportunities that entice viewers to dive deeper and learn more.

2. How-to videos

How-to videos are great B2B marketing opportunities because they allow you to promote your product or service in a way that is natural and consumable. The best how-to videos lightly and subtly mention or show how your product or service allows a potential customer to solve a problem without saying the name of the product every five seconds.

The key to making a good how-to video is a little bit of restraint. You need to remember that if your video isn’t digestible, it won’t serve its purpose.

Focus on really explaining to your audience how they can accomplish something with only brief mentions or visuals about how your product or service allows them to accomplish the task. Take this video from Adobe, for example:

What marketing lessons did we learn from this how-to video?

• The video is brief. It was only as long as it needed to be without a lot of extra fluff.
• It was instructive and easy to follow.
• It used SEO terms to answer a problem for which people were seeking a solution.
• The product — Photoshop — was secondary in this video. The most important element of this video was that it provides viewers with a simple and easy-to-follow answer about how to make an animated GIF in Photoshop.

3. Behind-the-scenes

You may wonder how a behind-the-scenes video will have a direct result on your B2b marketing efforts. As is true with so many elements of B2B marketing, sometimes the work you do to build relationships is just as important — or more important — than the actual work of “marketing” your products.

This principle is as old as B2B marketing itself. So, when you develop behind-the-scenes videos, resist the urge to “market at” your potential customers and instead invite them to get to know you and your brand.

Some types of effective behind-the-scenes B2B marketing videos might focus on topics such as workshops, holiday events, lunch meetings, project updates, new hire bios, office projects, etc. Basically, these behind-the-scenes videos give your potential B2B partners a chance to get to know you.

What did this behind-the-scenes video do well?

• The video isn’t fraught with calls to action or overt marketing tactics. In its purest form, the only thing this video really does is teach you how candles are made and distributed.
• The length of this video is pretty short — but that is really all this video needs to be. There is no magical time limit you need to align with — but never go longer than your audience has the ability to stick with.

4. Tutorials

Although a tutorial video and a how-to video may seem similar on the surface, once you dive into the strategies of why and when you would create these videos, the differences become obvious.

Whereas a how-to video shows your potential B2B partner how to solve a problem that may lightly touch on the service or product you offer, a tutorial is much more overt and specific about how to use the product you want your B2B partners to use.

A tutorial’s goal is to show in detailed and specific ways how your product or service is used. The development of tutorials is just as important for customer satisfaction as it is for lead generation.

Once a B2B entity has purchased your product or services, you want to make your solutions easy to understand and use. Creating tutorial videos to answer consumer questions is a great way to accomplish this. This example from Slack shows exactly the kind of value a tutorial video can provide:

Why is this video effective?

• It is specific to Slack and how customers can use the tool.
• It quickly gets to the answers to customers’ questions.
• It focuses exclusively on how to use the tool or service you have a question about.

5. Customer testimonials

Although you may be able to tell a powerful story, your ability to be viewed as impartial is non-existent, given the fact that you obviously want to promote your products or services.

However, your existing customers can help tell an even more powerful story that intrigues new customers and encourages them to take action to learn more.

When developing a customer testimonial video, you may be tempted to over-script what is said because you want your customers to adjust their words to align with the video you have in mind. Don’t do that.

Your best bet is to start off learning from your customers and getting an understanding of how they feel — and then craft a video idea around their authentic thoughts. This example from Hootsuite shows how a customer testimonial can be more interesting than you might think:

Among other things, this video was effective at:

• Allowing the customers to naturally tell how the service provided by Hootsuite benefitted their company
• Included additional music, clips, and other elements that made the video engaging to watch.

6. Case studies

The most effective case study videos have an element in them that will delight or inspire the audience who is consuming the video.

By observing others who are using your product or service, you will likely learn of new opportunities or outcomes that your service inspires that you would never have known before the case study.

Slack has shared an amazing example of when it hired a production company to produce a video. After getting to know the service, production company employees actually started to use Slack’s service, and the case study video became about them.

What worked well?

• The case study gives a real-life example that is told in an interesting and engaging way.
• The first-person narrative makes the case study more of a story rather than just a collection of information.

7. Brand videos

Rather than focus on a product or service in your B2B video, you may instead choose to develop a brand video. A brand video is exactly what it sounds like — a video about your brand. In these B2B marketing videos, don’t get stuck in the minutiae about the advantages of your products.

Instead, talk about who your brand is, what its mission is, and where your brand finds purpose and meaning. The purpose behind these videos is to introduce potential partners or customers to what drives your company — not what your company sells. ZoomInfo gives one example of this.

What the video does well?

• This video focuses on why ZoomInfo exists without going into lots of detail about specific tools or services it offers.
• The video also is succinct and defines the problem the company can help B2B consumers solve.

8. Event teasers/recaps

Events are excellent opportunities for B2B businesses to make connections, attract customers, and build relationships. But these opportunities don’t need to cease once the event ends.

In fact, if you create event teasers or recaps that share important elements from the event in consumable ways, you likely will reach many people who you might never have reached at the event only.

Now that many events are already virtual, your opportunity to create post-event content has significantly increased. For videos like this, you can focus on promoting the full event or you can focus on developing content from defined sessions or about specific messages.

What works with this video?

• This video is succinct but does a good job of helping the audience understand what the larger event was like.
• A little bit of light video editing goes a long way in being able to alternate between slides and speakers to give some visual variety.

9. Expert interviews

If your B2B brand is associating and partnering with other industry experts, your credibility immediately gets a significant boost. If you get an expert to sit down with you and provide insights that are pertinent and interesting to your audience, that’s even better.

The great thing about expert interview videos is that you don’t really need to prime the pump or script out anything.

Just rely on the experts to be who they are — experts. Perhaps every thought or idea they share won’t completely align with your thinking or your brand purpose, but that’s OK. Just exposing your audience to new opinions and ideas can be valuable.

What worked well?

• This video uses a combination of text and video to keep the content fresh.
• The focus is purely on the expert. Your role with these videos is to be the facilitator and the distributor. Let the expert be the expert.

Need help creating videos your B2B audience will find valuable and engaging?

From product demos to customer testimonials, talk to a content specialist at ClearVoice about developing a high-performing video strategy, including content and videographers, for your brand today.