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Category: B2B Marketing

How Long Should a B2B Video Be?

November 25, 2022 No Comments

When determining the right length for your video content, it becomes critically important to recognize the average attention span of the current audience. Have you heard that people’s attention spans are now comparable to that of a goldfish? That is a scary thought. How are we as marketers supposed to work with less than 9 seconds to tell our story to the target audience and convince them to take some sort of action?

In this blog, we are going to discuss the ideal lengths for B2B videos. The good news? You do have options.

What Do Studies Tell Us about Audience Attention Spans?

In reality, Dr. Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University has stated the following: “It’s very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is.”

So what are some of the stats on how video length has changed? Vid-yard conducted a study in 2021 and found that “The average length across all videos in 2020 was about 6 minutes—which is up from the 4-minute average of the previous year’s study.” They also saw “a 66% increase in the number of videos over 20 minutes in length.”

How Do We Adapt as Marketers?

The answer here is really that it all depends on the format, the topic, and who you are trying to reach. Consumers and B2B companies alike want a choice in terms of how much content they want to consume.

Offering your audience a variety of long and short-form content is the ideal way to go. If all of your videos run 50 minutes long, those not looking to learn more might feel like that’s way too much of a commitment and might choose to opt out instead.

In reality, the goldfish comparison is a MYTH. Since this isn’t a science blog, we won’t go into the specific data, but we’ll leave a link below for those of you who want to read more about the findings.

Considering that “Over 70% of business buyers watch videos to complete their product or service research,” it’s clear that a well-thought-out approach to your B2B video content strategy is key. We’ve compiled a list of the common types of B2B videos, best practices on length, and some tips to help you create your best videos by type.

Commercial or Promotional Videos = 30 – 60 seconds (Also known as Hype or Teaser Videos)

  • Good for brand awareness, lead generation, website or specific landing page traffic
  • Can work well for big events, virtual conferences and more

Commercials that run on TV can be anywhere from 15, 30 to 60 seconds but 30 seconds has been found to be the “Ideal Commercial Length” when taking brand recall into consideration.

30 seconds is the ideal time for a television commercial that’s creative, memorable, and engaging enough to entice the viewer to learn more—which is to say, to conduct research online, to contact you, or to visit an online or retail store and purchase the product or service.

Another measure of successful advertising is brand recall. Studies have shown that if the advertisement is able to engage all three memory banks – sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory in the minds of the target audience, the ad will translate better for brand awareness.

When it comes to commercials that run online, the trend is very different. Brands like Geico have mastered 6-second commercials, to the point that you rarely have enough time to skip them – but they’re the exception to the rule.

Studies show that “38% of consumers think online ads should be shorter than TV ads.” For online videos, keep them short and simple. Make your video length 15 seconds or less so viewers are more likely to watch it in its entirety. Video ads that are 15 seconds or less can also be used for Instagram Stories and Facebook in-stream placements.

Explainer Video = 60 – 90 seconds

Explainer videos present an analysis of a problem and establish how your product or service offers a resolution. Some consider these “top-of-funnel,” and recommend that they run no longer than 60 seconds. You can get away with 90 secs if the content is important and relevant to the buyer’s journey.

Expert Tip: Highlight Customer Pain Points to Introduce Your Solution in these types of videos.

Instructional How-To or Tutorial Videos = 2 – 10 mins

By this point, you have engaged your audience, and the goal now is to teach – not entertain. Or, perhaps they are customers, and the goal is therefore to teach them how your product or service works. A good rule of thumb is to condense your message and be concise and to the point so the videos will be appreciated and perhaps even shared with others.  These videos are ideal for YouTube and your website.

Product & Service Demo Video = 2 – 5 mins

The Walkthrough Videos offer a more substantial tour of your product or service and the recommended length for these videos is up to 5 minutes. It’s during this time that it’s appropriate to divulge more detail about your company and the results your product or service can provide.

For Demos, it’s best to produce shorter videos (in the 2min range) to demonstrate each aspect or feature of your product than to create one long video. The bite-sized content is easier for your viewers to consume, and you can always combine them into a playlist for viewers who may want to view all the content in one setting.

Case Study = 5 – 10 mins

Case study video length can vary widely, but viewers are likely mid or late-stage prospects who are apt to consume 5 to 10 minutes of video. You can always cut up longer video case studies into bite-sized 60 to 90-second testimonials, which are useful on your website, in email, and on social channels.

In a case study video, brands choose whether to stage a scenario or use a real example of customer satisfaction. In order to be successful with a case study, it’s important to outline the initial problem, solution applied, and results.

Research Says This Type of Video Closes More B2B Sales”

Prospecting Video = 30 – 60 seconds (We recommend staying on the shorter end)

Video prospecting is where a salesperson records and sends a short, personalized video to a prospect. These prospecting videos are typically sent via email but can also be shared through text or as a private message on LinkedIn or other social platforms. The goal is to replace traditional, boring emails with something that’s more eye-catching and engaging. With video email prospecting, your message remains the same – it’s just being delivered in a different format: Video Format.

Culture Video = 2 – 4 mins

When making your company culture videos, these should not be of just the executive team. Highlight team members, clients, the company dog, etc.! Show how your company lives its values out, every day. What does it mean to be part of your company culture? That’s what you want to illustrate.

Recruiting-Style Culture Video = 1 – 2 mins

Recruiting videos should be shorter. Candidates are looking at a lot of different positions. Capture and use B-roll of the office space and activities the team does together, such as a baseball game or event. The script should be written from the point of view of the team members. You want potential candidates to see themselves in this video.

Interview Style / Q&A = 6 – 10 mins

Any time you’ve got willing participants and a subject worthy of discussion, an interview video makes sense. Many companies will create this type of content while at an event, taking advantage of the numerous high-profile attendees. It’s also a popular format for a recurring series and can position you and the employees in your company as thought leaders.

Interview style is also an out of the box BD tactic. Interview potential clients and warm them up to you. It’s a soft way to introduce yourself by highlighting them. Featuring current clients makes them feel like a star and they are usually very grateful to share their story on your platform. We love interviewing clients! It’s a great way to recognize them.

Thought Leadership Video = 10 – 15 mins

Thought leadership video length depends on the use case, format, and content. If you’ve got a well-rehearsed, relevant message, 10 to 15 minutes should be appropriate. This is also the preferred format for YouTube. You can repurpose a presentation you often do or speech. Just remember the topic should be thought leadership, not sales. Viewers should get real takeaways from your video. The best thought leadership videos inspire people to take some sort of action.

(As a comparison – that’s about the length of a TED Talk.)

Testimonial Video = 1:30 – 1:45 mins (as recommended here)

Testimonial videos should be two minutes or less. Any longer, and you risk viewers clicking away from your videos. Testimonial videos are the best sales tool you can create. Potential customers hearing from real clients of yours can close deals. People want to work with people they can trust and feel confident in. There is no one better to tell them you’re trustworthy than your clients on video. Video testimonials are also more believable than written testimonials, because the client is actually on camera speaking to the audience.

Storytelling Video = Format > Duration (meaning, it varies)

“Use a storytelling video if your message or product needs humanizing.”

These videos can be used to describe:

  • Your customer’s journey
  • Your company’s journey
  • Your origin story
  • Your mission statement

According to Pixar, there are 22 rules of storytelling. Here’s #4: “Every story is unique, but the general structure is similar. It’s described as the classic model of storytelling that we, as humans, have an innate ability to understand.”

  • Once upon a time ______.
  • Every day _______.
  • Then one day _________.
  • Because of this ________.
  • And because of that ________.
  • Until finally ___________.

Remember to always make your customer the hero of your video story!

Have a question? Want to learn more? Reach out today! We’d love to help.

All references:
https://www.testimonialhero.com/blog/3-proven-b2b-testimonial-templates-to-use-with-your-customers
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/144240239372256?id=603833089963720
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/study-38-of-consumers-think-online-ads-should-be-shorter-than-tv/520760/
https://www.voices.com/blog/effective_length_for_tv_commercials/
https://spinsucks.com/social-media/b2b-video-length/
Cincopa: Pitch Deck Videos
LinkedIn Blog: 6 Types of B2B Video and When to Use Them
Vidyard: The 9 Types of Videos to Use for Business Success
Vidyard: How Long a Video Should Be

Are Modern-Day Digital Marketing Requirements Unrealistic?

November 19, 2022 No Comments

What are the biggest challenges of a modern-day digital marketing strategy?

If you’re trying to develop a modern-day digital marketing strategy, you might feel like it seems overly complicated. In reality, current strategies and techniques just require a different approach than they have in years past if you want to make an impact.

In this blog we’re going to discuss the history of modern digital marketing and the latest strategies and tactics we leverage for our agency as well as the marketing professionals and clients we work with.

Stay Current on Marketing Trends to Stay Relevant

We’ve said it before, and we will continue to say it. Marketing has become more complex. What does this mean for the average marketing professional or marketing agency? It means that you are going to have to stay ahead of the latest marketing trends and technology to make the best strategies and tactics attainable.

Digital marketing is any marketing that takes place online – and online is where most people are. Digital marketing can be complicated, and the reason for this is due to the fact that there are so many more options that can be used as part of your strategy these days. This includes a website, social media, email marketing, Pay Per Click advertising, display ads, video, and so much more.

A Brief Digital Marketing History

Let’s start with a little history on Modern/Digital marketing:

  • 1971: Invention of Email – mostly used by DARPA
  • 1982: The First E-commerce Site
  • 1991: World Wide Web
  • 1995: Rise of E-commerce / Amazon.com and eBay (then known as AuctionWeb) both launch. An earlier BBS-based store (Book Stacks Unlimited) relaunches as www.books.com.
  • 1997: The First Pop-Up Ad
  • 1999: Crackberry (The first widely-adopted smartphone, the Blackberry 850 introduced mobile internet to the masses.)
  • 2007: User Behavior Tracking (Facebook launches Beacon)
  • 2017: Online Ad Revenue Surpasses TV

The fun timeline shown here was created by Disco Sloth. There are a lot more interesting moments in marketing history on this timeline, which you can check out here.

Shifts in the Digital Marketing Landscape

According to the Digital Marketing Institute, the creation of the World-Wide Web, Big Data, Smartphones, Access to Information Transparency, Personalization and Agile Marketing were pivotal events that changed the landscape of marketing forever over the course of this timeline.

As a matter of fact, access to Information Transparency has made customers smarter and more likely to research products in seconds, easily comparing competitors, reviews and price shopping for the best deals. For sales professionals, this shift is proving to be a challenge, as 70% of the buyer’s journey is completed before a buyer even reaches out to a salesperson.

As a consumer, transparency and being able to research a product or service before you reach out to the company is a huge advantage. As a business and marketer, you do have the challenge of customers price shopping, but if you understand YOUR buyer’s journey can use this to your benefit. This is where having a strong in-bound marketing content strategy will help.

Along with Information Transparency, SEO improvements have made keyword stuffing and spammy backlinks a thing of the past, paving the way for real value and good content to become a more authentic marketing style.

Other pivotal moments in marketing history include the birth of Google, Facebook, YouTube, AI, Influencers, VR, AR and more. We could spend hours going through the list of pivotal marketing strategies and tactics that have developed over the last 5-10 years. For the sake of time, let’s focus on the high points and resources you can use to help you develop, update and elevate your marketing strategy in the near future.

Start with the Basics of Marketing Strategy

Set Goals

The one thing we’ve always done for our clients and ourselves is to stick to the basics. What does that mean? Start with setting clear and concise SMART goals, which means goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Understand Your Target Audience

The next step is to make sure you really understand who your target audience is, and where they get their information about the products or services you sell.

Establish a Marketing Budget
You also have to make sure you know what your budget is. Unless you have a large budget – don’t try to do everything at once. You may have to be selective about how you spend your budget and try different things over a period of time to see what works best.

Good Marketers Implement, Test, & Adjust

The key to marketing tactics is sometimes you need to just implement, test, and adjust as you go. There is no magic pill. Part of the discipline of marketing is testing various tactics, monitoring the analytics and adjusting or changing tactics as you go.

Marketing Low Hanging Fruit

99 Firms offers these stats to help you understand what your colleagues and competitors are doing and find helpful within their marketing strategy and execution.

Email Marketing: B2B email marketing produces the highest ROI.

Truly, this is no surprise. If you’ve built your email list well, the contacts on the list are warm leads, partners, supporters and clients. They are already warm to your message and want to hear it and share it.

Allocate Funds: Most B2B companies dedicate 5% of their budgets to marketing.

We are often asked “what is a reasonable budget for marketing?” This is a great benchmark to help you set a budget for the year. Another way to determine your budget, from a Forester Study, is to recognize that on average most businesses are spending 2-3% of their annual revenue on marketing. This will help your discussion with a client or your boss when discussing budget planning.

Other key stats include:

  • Refine Your Website: In 2020, the top area of marketing spending was website development (70% of business buyers find content directly on the vendor’s website).
  • Over 70% of business buyers watch videos to complete their product or service research.
  • Content marketing was the most popular B2B marketing strategy in 2020.
  • 62% of B2B marketers say they’ve seen ROI from paid ads on social media.
  • LinkedIn is the most effective platform for B2B lead generation.
  • 96% of marketers using influencers consider it successful.

If you don’t have a big budget and you can’t test a lot of different tactics all at once, utilizing these stats to help you develop a marketing strategy and to weed out tactics that don’t work for your industry, phase of business, or available resources, can be a good place to start.

Top Marketing Channels

Another resourceful survey was the Chief Marketer B2B Outlook Survey.

This annual survey shows how top companies find prospects among all of the B2B marketing challenges. There is a lot of great info here on the top channels that businesses are finding useful, how they are splitting up their marketing budget, and how they are creating content to fuel their campaigns.  Here are a few of our favorite stats from the Survey:

When it comes to channels . . . Channels that produce the most leads:
  1. Email
  2. Search
  3. Live Events
What KPIs should you pay attention to – Metrics that matter the most in marketing attribution:
  1. Cost of Conversion
  2. Amount of time to convert
  3. First click
And what about the types of MARTECH people are using:
  1. Marketing Automation
  2. Video
  3. Email Marketing

Read the full study HERE.

Top 5 Goals

According to the latest HubSpot State of Marketing Report, when it comes to running campaigns, here are the top 5 goals marketers are trying to achieve.

  1. Brand awareness
  2. Increase sales
  3. Increase engagement
  4. Lead generation
  5. Increase revenue

Lead Gen is the top priority and marketers are using brand awareness powered by engaging content to drive their campaigns. Our personal favorite is video.

 

Marketing Automation 

Here’s another interesting stat:  marketing is the largest business area using automation, with marketers using automation 76% more than the sales team and 139% more than the finance department. (Go get ‘em, marketers — work smarter not harder!) 

 

If a company truly wants to grow and enable the marketing and sales team, it needs to implement some type of CRM and marketing automation tool such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Pardot, even more specialized platforms such as Kennected or Octopus for LinkedIn, and Later and Sendible for social media. We’ve been using tools like Later & Sendible for years, which creates efficiencies for our team and the client’s budget. Automation is the best way to not only manage, but analyze data, and test content.  It makes it much easier to monitor campaigns and adjust as needed. 

 

Content Marketing

Marketers are also investing in content marketing more than ever. 82% report actively using content marketing. Following a year of virtual everything, from school to job interviews to shopping, video reigns supreme in the content marketing space once again. Video is the primary form of marketing media being created today, followed by blogs – which are used by more than half of marketing teams – and infographics. 

 

If you are part of the 21% of marketers who are dedicating budget to marketing headcount, consider candidates who are comfortable with multimedia content creation, video editing, and the latest best practices and trends in content marketing strategy.

 

Video Marketing in High Demand

One thing that has remained constant, however, is the demand for video marketing. Video continues to be an essential tool marketers leverage to communicate and connect with their audiences and customers.

 

Your audience is hungry for video content, so give them what they want! If you haven’t started investing more in video content across your marketing funnel, now is the time. Yes, video can be used to entertain and inspire; but it can also be used to educate, empower, and drive real results for your organization.

 

Marketers today are really leaning into video throughout the entire funnel. The number of videos using conversion tactics increased by 30% in 2020 and continues to grow. When it comes to driving engagement, video conversion tactics placed at the beginning of videos had the highest conversion rate at 12.7%. 

 

For example, 

  • Conversion point #1:post a video on LinkedIn, there is a call to action that drives people to 
  • Conversion point #2: a landing page.  on the landing page is a video and 
  • Conversion point #3 the contact form. 

So you can see how video as a tactic is upping the game at each point. 

 

Convert your Audience

Marketers also found that email collection forms were the most successful at converting viewers, with a 15% conversion rate. This finding correlates with the increase in video content consumption overall, suggesting that viewers are more than willing to hand over their email if the content is compelling enough. Integrating video into your overall marketing strategy is so important.  

We hope the information we’ve shared today will help take some of the complexity out of creating a digital marketing strategy for the audiences you are trying to reach. As we come to the middle of the year, use industry research to help guide you as you plan the rest of the year and into next year.

Try new things like Video, adding an AI chatbot to your website, using an influencer, etc.  Be open to testing different tactics so you can learn.

Talk to your customers by sending out more surveys or calling them. Look at your data. Adjust and refine. 

The Pros & Cons of Hiring Professional Talent Or Using Employees For Your Video Content

June 16, 2022 No Comments

If you’ve ever considered developing video content, you’ve probably faced the dilemma of deciding whether or not to use in-house talent – like an employee – or professional talent, like an actor or actress for your video content. When making this decision, there’s a few pros and cons you’ll need to consider. 

Creating professional content requires a detailed understanding of strategy and the steps required to achieve your goal. When developing a corporate video at a high level of quality it might seem like the right decision to go directly to an internal employee to represent the brand, but – while often budget-friendly – this decision should be completely situation-dependent. 

The best thing to do is to start with your objective and work backward toward the decision between internal and professional talent. For instance, when developing a recruitment video, it makes the most sense to utilize real staff to describe the community, culture, benefits and perks of working for the business. The same could be true if you’re highlighting a very technical product or service where you’ll need an internal subject matter expert on camera.

A situation where you are more likely to use outside talent or professional talent could include a commercial with heavy dialogue or a promotional video that requires an animated delivery with a particular look and feel. A lot of employees won’t be great on camera, and can’t be expected to memorize dozens of lines. 

Pros of Using Inside Talent

Using your employees is a great way to highlight your brand, and to show the authenticity of your culture. Also, if you have an employee that are client-facing, they’ll be recognized by your clients when they see the video. Another pro of using an internal team member is the cost upfront. There is generally little to no cost to using staff in your video. 

Cons of Using Inside Talent

Even though you may have somebody that does well speaking in front of people or in public, it doesn’t always mean it’ll translate in front of the camera. Sometimes being in front of that lens simply makes people uncomfortable, and they seem to freeze up and just don’t know what to do with themselves. This camera-shy coincidence leads to flubbing lines, many retakes and a lot of editing on the back end. So, while it may be cost-effective to use an internal employee up front, it can actually cost you a lot of money on the back end with the time invested in editing out mistakes.

Another con of using an employee is employee turnover. You should consider which employees you’re going to choose to have in your video. If you have any concern that they may not be with the company long-term. Take this into consideration when you’re choosing an employee to be in your internal video.

Pros of Using Professional Talent 

The great thing about using professional talent is that you have a pool of people to choose from. As a result, you can get the right look and feel for your video, along with diversity in the video that you may not get with your internal team. You can also audition these people to truly scope them out ahead of time, which is great and can be a time-saver on the back end. You’ll know what you’re getting into, who’s going to be coming in on set and what their capabilities are when you start filming. 

The other nice thing with using professional talent is they are usually camera-ready. They’re going to come on set and be ready to go. They know how to read a script, deliver their lines and deliver the professional product that you need for your final video. When you finish production, your video shouldn’t require as many retakes and editing at the end of the day.

Cons of Using Professional Talent 

The downside of utilizing professional talent is that they’re not as familiar with your business. It can take them a little bit of time to understand your culture and present the content in the way that fits your brand (but they can do it). One way to avoid this learning curve if there is a lot of technical jargon involved is to have an internal subject matter expert on set with the actor. That way they can answer questions, make sure the actor is not mispronouncing any key terms or misstating any statements and ensure that the content being delivered is accurate. 

Another and probably the most obvious con of using professional talent is the cost. Hiring an actor is a much more significant investment than a staff member. However, in our experience here at REBL, we’ve found the balance of up front cost and diminished editing/after-production time investment usually evens out.

In conclusion, there are times using internal talent makes sense for credibility or culture purposes, or if you have a tight budget. However, you always have an option to use professional talent that can up the value and save time on the production of your video in the end. Consider all pros and cons when planning your business’ video production strategy.

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Understanding the Difference Between B2B and B2C  Video Strategy

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When it comes to B2B vs. B2C video strategy, a completely different approach needs to be taken for each. The primary reason these two styles vary so widely is because they’re targeting different audiences who have different sales cycles with different products or services, price points and decision makers. If you’re looking to create a B2B or B2C video strategy, you’ll need to first understand your audience in order to market to them effectively. 

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5 Tips for Creating a Killer Video Content Strategy

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In a world where the digital landscape is littered with visuals vying for user attention, video content is becoming paramount. Whether you’re on your laptop or your phone, you’re probably finding yourself exposed to more video content than ever before. 

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