The good news in video for sales is that it’s getting easier to make B2B videos that feel less like advertising and more like part of the conversation.

This is a result of several trends:

• more people using video in social media

• tools for making interactive web videos that behave like apps

• the need for more bite-size, targeted content in account-based selling

Here’s what I learned in 2016 that I hope will lead to better videos to drive sales in 2017.
 

1. Marketers are going to need more video, and more personalized video

Inbound sales, account-based selling, sales enablement — the trends in selling all call for more closely targeted video content. For example, take a look at this sales enablement add-on for Salesforce.
 

2. It’s now easy to turn web videos into apps

This is really easy to do, with online tools for making interactive video. The category “interactive video” is far too unimaginative and unsexy for what users can actually do with video and graphics equipped with interactive controls.

The user experience is much better than just clicking hyperlinks to load web pages. Instead, the viewer is using the same window to view video content, make choices, share information, watch new related content — not necessarily video — and do a lot of other stuff.  That’s “app-like.” And this superior user experience requires neither download nor install.

3. Users will be able to play video inline, with overlays, on iPhones

This is huge, because an awful lot of video is consumed on iPhones and iPads. Viewing web video used to interrupt the user experience because the browser loaded QuickTime.

A little-noticed feature in Apple’s iOS 10, called the playsinline property enables videos to, well, play inline in Safari. The user experience is seamless, and you’ll be able add clickable controls (see #2). Maybe start with “Add item to cart” button that shows up right in the HD video window. As does the cart.
 

4. Stock footage enhances explainer videos.

Most explainer videos use animation — they have done since 2004, when we started. Now there’s more stock video out there than ever before, and a lot of it is pretty cheap. Stock video can add depth and human interest to explainer videos — especially when so many of the animated characters you see come from stock sources.
 

5. The buyer’s journey has been deprecated.

Well not really. But, you see lots of thought leaders warning against the model that starts with a lead and ends with a sale. My favorite revisionist thinker about tech solution marketing is Gartner’s Hank Barnes. He describes the new reality graphically in “Beyond the Buying Cycle.” (Here’s an animated version of Hank’s model).
 

6. Group dynamics inevitably derail purchase decisions.

This is the subject of a remarkable Forbes article “You're Doing It Wrong: Demand Generation.” As soon as a second person joins the buying team, the probability of a purchase being made drops 50%. What it seems to mean for video production is that you should try to make sure the video functions to help create a consensus (not easy).
 

7. You can demonstrate empathy in marketing content without getting all emotional about it.

That’s because everybody’s getting worn out by too many impersonal marketing messages. As respected lead-gen guru Brian Carroll put it, “Good marketing feels like helping.” In video terms, once you start scoring every scene on how helpful it could be to a likely viewer, your videos start to take a different, more empathetic, direction.