B2B decision-makers also fall back on YouTube to research new assets for their company. SMEs should also take advantage of this trend for their video marketing. To save the high production costs for a professional videographer, companies can record their own videos at a relatively affordable price. Here are a few tips on how this can be achieved.
The importance of YouTube as an advertising platform
In the B2C business, YouTube plays a leading role as a platform for advertising. But in B2B marketing as well, the video network is gaining importance. The reason: when it comes to purchasing decisions by companies, high sums are usually at stake. Which is why individual responsible persons or buying centres precisely check which offers are attractive for them. Within the course of their research, they often use the Internet and naturally YouTube too. The platform is today the world’s second-largest search engine.
A survey conducted by Statista among several age groups revealed that 100 per cent of those aged 14 to 19, as well as 96 per cent of 20 to 29-year-olds, use YouTube. For B2B companies, these age groups are, generally speaking, too young to be the primary targets, but the survey also shows that:
- 86 per cent of 30 to 39-year-olds,
- 77 per cent of 40 to 49-year-olds,
- 70 per cent of 50 to 59-year-olds and
- 68 per cent of those over 60
use the video platform. This underscores how broad their consumer behaviour generally is. And it makes them automatically interesting for marketing purposes. In which way and with which measures can be discovered in the following paragraphs:
YouTube for B2B companies: which formats make sense
If you would like to publish videos on YouTube, you need an account. Whether this makes sense or not depends on your B2B marketing strategy. If your company is planning to publish just one or a few videos, the efforts needed for this will not really pay off. A manageable number of videos can be more easily placed on your own website or alternative platforms such as Facebook.
If the strategy includes several or frequent clips, then an own company channel for B2B YouTube marketing is recommended. Here, videos of all kind can be released. However, their production is also always a budget question. Concept creation, the shooting, post-production … these can be expensive. Professional videographers deliver high quality, but small and medium-sized enterprises cannot always afford them.
At the same time, you can create your B2B video marketing on your own, to be attractive and targeted. For instance, with the help of employees who are familiar with how to record videos. What’s more, the Internet offers free-of-charge software for editing videos.
Here are a few examples of formats which can be realised at a relatively affordable price:
- Information videos: used to present companies and their offers. Managers can be used as presenters, for instance. These videos focus on certain services or products, blend in scenes from everyday business in the respective departments, and allow employees to say something. Such sequences break up the video, provide authenticity and credibility, and are ready to go with relatively little effort.
- Explanation videos: used to show what the products or services of a company can do. These may include videos that present the functionality of machines. If their operation takes place via displays or if the focus is on software, it’s possible to pick up on the respective monitor content and present it as so-called screencasts in the video. To achieve this, there are free-of-charge programs. If it makes sense, a voice over explains in detail what is shown.
- Interview videos: used to ask satisfied customers about their experiences with the company, its products or services. For the interview itself, you don’t need to invest in any major technical efforts. What’s more, it offers the interviewee the chance to boost their presence so that both sides profit from the format.
SEO for YouTube: how to improve your ranking
Successful YouTube marketing in B2B is hardly possible with videos alone. Supportive measures are needed. After all, as mentioned above: YouTube is the second-largest search engine. So that companies are as far up as possible in the results list, and thus appear above competitors, its recommended that you leverage search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, like on Google. But this is just one option for supporting your own B2B video marketing.
- For a good ranking, the number of views is not the only decisive factor. The viewing time is also important. It is not measured based on individual videos, but on the entire channel. Which is why it’s essential that each video is designed to grab viewers’ attention for as long as possible. And it’s important that the clips offer genuine added value. It may make sense to provide a short preview first which explains what is to come.
- Similar to Google, the right keywords are helpful for B2B YouTube marketing too. The keywords should not only appear in the title, according to the SEO analysis, but also in the file names of the videos in order to be registered by the YouTube algorithm. It also recognises the matching YouTube tags in order to allocate the videos into categories. The optimal result: marketing videos end up in the right margin as context-based recommendations for other, similar videos.
- The preview images should be examples of the content of the video and be designed in line with the target group. A loud and colourful scene or a serious, professional look and feel depends on this.
- At the end, the video should refer to own, similar videos using a call to action. This inspires the user to view additional clips or to subscribe to the channel. Important: an outro should be blended in long enough for the viewer to have time to react, in other words click on the link provided.
