How Paid Video Advertising Works For B2B Businesses

B2B businesses face a lot of unique challenges – we should know. When the company is the customer, it can be easy to lose sight of the individuals behind it. It’s a long and difficult process of client relationship building. Where B2C looks at improving an individual’s life directly, B2B can often be seen as a lot less ‘fun’. It becomes about productivity, ROI, and setting up long-term pipelines for improving work life, and while these are all good things, they’re not always the exciting features that get potential new clients hooked into your services.

The good news is that there’s a whole range of tools to help B2Bs thrive in the age of social media – and paid video advertising is one of them. Check out how video helps businesses build trust with other businesses and their customers by capitalising on the need for efficiency, ease, and online visibility.

1) paid video advertising caters to the busy professional

Ever stop to think about how the word ‘business’ comes from the word ‘busy’? If you’re a provider of B2B services your target audience is, by definition, busy people. It’s therefore pretty damn vital to cater your advertising to the busy professional by streamlining their experience of your brand right from the outset. Video is quite possibly the most efficient medium currently out there, for more than a few reasons.

Video helps viewers retain more information more quickly. According to Forbes, “Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it on video, compared to 10% when reading it in a text.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/yec/2017/07/13/how-to-incorporate-video-into-your-social-media-strategy/?sh=1729fdbe7f2e). This is because a huge 90% of the information that makes it to our brains is visual. In fact, we humans have gotten so good at recognising visuals that we process them 60,000 times faster than text (https://www.popvideo.com/blog/looking-at-the-facts-why-video-content-has-the-highest-retention-rate). In this way, video is able to wrap up your message in one short, easy to consume package. Let’s get real: would you rather watch a 2 minute video about a new product, or read a 1000 word blog post about it? (On a mildly related note, please don’t stop reading this 1000 word blog post).

2) video is statistically awesome for advertising

The audience’s innate understanding of visual content is strongly reflected in the sales statistics of video advertising. Back to Forbes: “The increase in click-through rate with video is as high as 96%, and videos are shared 1200% more times than links and text combined.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/yec/2017/07/13/how-to-incorporate-video-into-your-social-media-strategy/?sh=1729fdbe7f2e). In fact, I could sit here all day posting statistics from all over the web about the wonders of using video to increase your advertising impact, but you’ve probably got better things to read. (Seriously, if you need convincing a quick search on ‘video marketing statistics’ will have you busy for days).

3) paid video advertising a vital move in a long b2b game

B2B client conversion is often a long process. The steps of adapting new services and products, especially in larger businesses, generally involve a gauntlet of meetings, forms, permission from managers, permission from the managers’ managers, more meetings, implementation strategising, staff training, and heck, why not a couple more meetings to top things off. What’s more, a lot of emerging B2B services designed to make our work life easier can at first appear complex, technical, and daunting in their newness, scaring off businesses from adapting at all, despite the long term benefits.

Having a reference point that’s efficient, entertaining, and easy to digest is a godsend in a situation where bureaucracy and technological fear may otherwise stop a new professional service or product in its tracks. That’s where video advertising plays a key role in the B2B purchasing journey. By capturing the audience’s attention with a short and memorable video from the get go, we set a mood of ease and efficiency. The multi-step process of approval feels less daunting for the specific business customer as there is a go-to audiovisual aid to share with their colleagues and higher ups. The path to purchase becomes a quicker, easier process for both your brand and your business clients.

4) paid video advertising catches businesses wherever they are

The best part about paid video advertising is that it helps your brand to actively meet its best target audience where they are. In other words, you can trade a little of your advertising budget for a lot of high-quality eyeballs on your content. It’s no longer just about putting your ad out there for the world to stumble upon – it’s about making yourself as visible as possible to your most valuable audience, and the way to do that is through video marketing.

Video makes you more visible online, it’s a fact. Social media algorithms tend to favour video content because it attracts more engagement than image ads (three times as much engagement on Instagram, and 30% higher audience reach on Facebook: https://www.brid.tv/video-vs-image-ads-why-videos-perform-better-than-images/). With the right call to action, video advertising is also a powerful tool in generating website traffic, in turn improving your website’s Google search results (Google loves video, in case you weren’t aware: https://www.lemonlight.com/blog/how-will-video-help-seo-ranking/).

What’s more, video content tends to perform well across devices, making it easier to catch busy folks on the go. By presenting your content in audio AND visuals (like, you know, videos do), it’s more likely your message will get through even when the viewer is travelling through a loud, busy, crowded, or bright area. And for those viewers who watch your video but still slip through the cracks due to time or distraction, consider a video remarketing campaign to reach them again and increase your chances of potential customer conversion.

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