Aligning Video to the Buyer Journey
Article
2 min read
The “play” button has become the most compelling action on the web, with 7 out of 10 B2B buyers watching video throughout their path to purchase. B2B marketers are seeing the benefits, with 74% reporting that video delivers higher conversion rates than other types of content, while organisations that employ video marketing tactics reportedly grow revenue 49% faster than those that don’t.
Does this spell a trip to the knacker’s yard for that old faithful, the white paper? Not quite. But although video has long been associated with the early part of the buyer journey for awareness and education, it can really shine at the latter stages when prospects are looking to differentiate one vendor from another and make an emotional connection.
Aligning video to the buyer journey
Knowing where, when and how to use video at each step of the journey can be a challenge if this is your first foray into the medium. So we break our process into four stages, illustrated by some of our recent work:
1. Awareness (Enquiry step)
Our four-week ‘Better Together’ campaign for TomTom Telematics delivered an entertaining and highly shareable short video, with humour at the heart of its creative treatment. Promoted via email, social media, syndication and targeted display advertising, the video had already achieved 89% of its target reach within its first week.
2. Clicker (Marketing-qualified step)
Our recent campaign for accounting software provider, Sage, aimed to drive free trials that would ultimately convert to sales. We seeded a combination of 60-second videos and five-second soundbites for Instagram and YouTube ads through social media to drive traffic to the campaign site, which featured a deeper-dive into product details and free trial offer.
3. Adviser (Sales-qualified step)
For this truly global project, we shot three adviser videos in London in one day for enterprise software giant, Oracle. These explore how its Java Cloud Service allows software developers to build, test and deploy rich apps in the cloud, and were used for several global events including Oracle Open World.
4. Convincer (Closing the deal)
Oracle was looking to generate demand for its Public Infrastructure Management solution in hard-to-reach territories. We created personalised video packs, each with a bespoke country-centric message from the Senior Vice President of Oracle Primavera, to show how Oracle understood the audience’s local infrastructure programme management challenges.
Not every stage is required for every campaign, but the key is to tailor the length and depth of video content to the appropriate step of the customer journey and the channels used.
Use video to make your mark
Video is ideal for modern marketers with an eye toward data-driven campaigns and solid ROI. The success of video initiatives can be measured in more ways than views and impressions, including watch rate, conversion rate and social shares. It doesn’t have to be a big-budget, high production-value exercise, either, as long as the content is engaging, relevant and appropriate to the audience’s position along the path to purchase.
Our campaign line was “working better together”. It could apply equally to our relationship with MOI. The experience, and resulting campaigns, have been inspiring, fun – and very effective.
Irvin Gray, Marketing Lead for Enterprise Solutions ,
TomTom Telematics
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