fbpx

Interactive Video Marketing Tips & Features

5 Actionable Tips to Transform Your B2B Video Content

According to HubSpot’s 2020 State of Video Marketing, 72% of customers reported they would rather learn about a product or service by way of video. Even as far back as 2013, viewers reported that they retained 95% of a message when they watched a video, compared to just 10% when reading the same information in text. 

Given that 70% of a B2B buyer’s research is done online before reaching out to a potential vendor partner, online B2B video needs to be a part of your content marketing strategy in 2021. 

For complex industrial applications, maximizing the impact of video content marketing requires planning beyond the static video asset itself. Competition for eyeballs and attention spans is fierce, with plenty of entertaining and engaging content just a click away. 

Additional Features Help Enhance Existing Videos

The best storyboarding, live action or animated video production, precise editing, and exceptional soundtrack are important, but will only go so far. The complexity of communicating features, value propositions, and solutions for industrial B2B businesses makes it even harder to keep viewers engaged and translate those video views into prospects, leads, and sales.

So how do you make the most of video in your inbound marketing strategy? One of the most impactful approaches to enhancing online video engagement is to transform static, unidirectional videos into engaging, interactive video experiences. 

Interactive video marketing platforms like Wirewax, Hapyak, and Mindstamp allow you to add interactive layers — buttons, hotspots, images, questions, chapters — to existing video assets. They’re all designed to increase viewer engagement, capture insights about the viewer, reduce friction, and trigger the right call-to-action at the best possible time.

Here are 5 ways to enhance current or future videos for inbound marketing campaigns supporting complex industrial businesses.

1. Engage viewers with a decision up front to help segment and better target your audience

Depending on the complexity of your offering, a prospective viewer may play many different roles in the evaluation of your company, product, or service. Your audience may be more or less technical, interested in detailed product specifications or broader case study examples, ready to get into the details of your solution, or more interested in how you engage with clients. 

You can prompt a viewer at the beginning of your video (or before you get into detailed content) with action text, buttons, hotspots, or clickable images that jump them directly to the portion of your video (or another video entirely) that most immediately answers their questions and meets their needs. In addition to being able to direct your viewers effectively, you also gather more insights on your viewer interests based on their clicks.

2. Make video content navigable and searchable, including cross-video searching 

You may have a wealth of information contained within your video library and portfolio. As shown in Weidert’s infographic, your video content might include:

By transcribing the video’s audio track, adding navigable video chapter anchors that designate specific content topics, enhancing specific content by linking and labeling images (graphics, product specs), and using notes, drawings, or other interactions to call out specific content, viewers can search across all of the content elements to find the section of the video that best answers their question. Further, with videos grouped together in a series in tools like Mindstamp, the search can extend across the entire video library, giving your viewers a single interface to discover the video content they most need.

3. Augment video content with “jump out” video and image content to create richer and deeper experiences

We all know from our own behavior that we can grow impatient with longer videos. They may even drive viewers to leave the content earlier than they would have had the video length been a bit shorter. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have plenty of important information to share. You also don’t want to miss out on “going deeper” with the viewer who needs that level of insight to progress down the sales funnel. 

By adding “jump out” video or graphic content to your core video, you can allow a viewer to go deeper into content that other viewers might want to skip over. For instance, you can link images, buttons, hotspots, or questions to videos or images that provide:

4. Personalize video via your CRM data

If you’re leveraging video as part of an email marketing campaign, you can use interactive video to personalize content based on information you already have about the lead, prospect, or existing customer. When your video creation includes personalization, you can expect your click-through rates to increase.

By passing the viewer’s name, company, product information, or anything else you know into the video, you can tailor messages and actions directly to them. For instance, you can link in-video buttons back to a product catalog that is specific to the customer you’re targeting.

5. Ask questions. Gather insight. Show you’re listening.

People love to talk about themselves, and that extends to answering questions in videos. Simple questions can be an ideal way to learn more about key interests, expectations, or needs of your audience, and all of that data can be integrated back into your CRM system like HubSpot to maximize intelligence and improve future campaign targeting. 

Within the interactive video itself, you can even use the answers you gather to customize a subsequent message or call-to-action that shows the viewer you’re actively listening and that they can expect truly tailored solutions from your business.

Whether you start small and add basic interactivity to your existing video content or create custom video solutions that are designed with interactivity in mind, such as choose-your-own-adventure explorations of your product catalog, an interactive video marketing strategy can and should be part of your 2021 plan. 

Translate »