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Content marketing experts insist that businesses need to be customer-focused rather than product-focused. This is true; your content can’t be all about you or what you sell. In the B2B space, however, this can get confusing. Sales teams need videos speaking directly to the benefits of products to guide leads through the funnel and close business, but based on content advice, marketers are now questioning whether it’s okay to go into a product pitch at all.
First, to clarify, you can definitely discuss your products, but you’ll need a combination of videos strategically placed along your buyers’ journey to strike the right balance. You should involve your sales reps in the content creation process so that you’ll see ROI for all of your video marketing efforts. Ultimately, your sales reps can help you create videos that not only entertain or evoke emotion, but also inspire action.
To meet the needs of prospective buyers and support your sales teams’ initiatives, start asking the following questions:
Based on feedback from our sales team, here are some approaches to creating content that’s not only customer-focused and helpful, but also moves leads through their buying process.
While top-funnel content aims to capture interest and build a subscriber base, mid-funnel videos are for educating prospects and helping them justify a purchase. These mid-funnel videos are only helpful when the content furthers a prospect’s evaluation process and helps them decide if you’re the right fit.
That said, help your sales team and create detailed product demo or tutorial videos. Even better, ask a customer to demo the product features they find the most worthwhile for their use case in a webinar and feature the webinar recording on your website. A product demo or tutorial from the customers' perspective acts as a sales rep that never sleeps.
A lot of time can be spent determining if leads are qualified, but you can actually engineer your video marketing/sales process to help you know exactly when a lead is sales ready.
Say you have four videos that coincide with the stages of your buyer’s journey. Each video leads into the next and you can qualify prospects based on how many of the videos they watch. A lead that watches three of four videos will have a higher score than someone who only watched 10% of the first video.
Additionally, you can set up a rule in Salesforce to notify your reps when a lead watches a set percentage of your content. In other words, once leads reach a certain threshold of content (maybe 75%), you can have your sales team notified immediately and prompt them to engage while you’re top of mind.
There’s nothing more customer-focused than a great client testimonial video, and this type of social proof backs up everything your sales reps tell your prospects. This content can be much more general than the product demo I mentioned and, instead of going into features, should focus on the broad successes that resulted from using your product. It’s best to leverage this type of video in the justification stage because you can showcase how your solution scales within a prospect’s specific industry. Create a solution-based story per industry and you can be sure your sales reps will get a lot of mileage from this content.
Even though sales needs product-focused videos, something has to interest folks to watch these in the first place. Get your creatives together and discuss some funny shorts you can make for email-nurturing campaigns. We’ve had a lot of success making comedic shorts to include in drip campaigns, newsletters, and blog posts and these are the stepping stones necessary to get everyone to the feature-heavy demos I discussed before.
If you’re using Salesforce, your sales reps can share videos with prospects, coworkers, and customers directly from the Salesforce interface (even with Salesforce1 on mobile!). What’s even more exciting is that after sales reps share videos, all video viewing history per lead is pushed into Salesforce so you can determine which leads are actually consuming your content, how much they’re watching, and how interested they really are. If you add video to your CRM, you’ll instantly help sales gain more insight and start closing even more business.
In short, a lot of us are seeing tons of great branding/awareness videos each day (The Red Bull stunt videos, anyone?), and this tends to skew our idea of the types of videos we need to make in the B2B space to drive action effectively. While we need to be creative for top-funnel videos, we also need to be practical and focus about 40% of our video content on mid-funnel content that helps prospects justify their purchase.
Michael Litt is the CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, a video marketing platform helping marketers measure the impact of their video content. Thought leader, surfer, and serial entrepreneur, Michael is passionate about content marketing and changing the way we engage and purchase with video. Chat with Michael on Twitter or LinkedIn to learn more.
Learn more ways to create content that drives results with the free Salesforce e-book below.
