Amplifying Your Industrial Content Marketing & Sales Strategy With Video

Video content marketing is a widely unadopted tactic by industrial marketers, yet it’s outperforming typical content marketing strategies! Content marketing is certainly working well for businesses, since 41% of marketers say inbound marketing produced measurable ROI in 2013. However, those that incorporate video strategically, as an additional layer to their inbound marketing, are leaving their competition in the dust.

Vidyard recently published a study stating 71% of marketers said their video content’s conversion performance was either somewhat or much better compared to other types of marketing content.

This kind of performance is noteworthy…so pay attention!

We’ve also seen a shift of industrial marketers that are now valuing video content as being far more important regarding their marketing and sales content.

95% of the participants reported that video is becoming somewhat or far more important as a form of marketing and sales content, according to the same study by Vidyard.

With all of this information and data that’s been collected about video content performance and being more and more important to marketers, how can you leverage video within your company?

1. VIDEO BOOSTS CONTENT MARKETING TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Many manufacturers are not using content marketing to its fullest potential. You’ve probably heard about how blogging at a pretty rapid pace is what’s going to drive traffic to your website. You might even have a blog going now (good for you!).

When your content is providing value, your readers are sharing and commenting and things seem like they’re going great. How can you improve your engagement even more?

Adding video content to your strategy can educate marketing-qualified leads until they eventually turn into sales-qualified leads. So videos can actually increase the likelihood of a prospect purchasing your product or service!

Video content can achieve any one of these four primary goals:

• Brand Awareness
• Traffic Generation
• Gain Links & Shares
• Conversion

Each of these goals demand an optimized video experience. Keep in mind that the type of videos that you create might appear to be directed at multiple goals, and you are likely to get a little “goal overlap”.

Overlap can and does happen– but don’t get confused and purposely start trying to achieve three or four goals from every single video. Specialization is always better than generalization.

2. VIDEOS BUILD BRAND RESPECT & BUYER TRUST

Building brand respect and trust go hand in hand. This is achieved by being authentic. In your videos, be yourself, showcase your company culture, and have fun!

“How could that possibly affect our bottom line?” you might ask. Simple: at the end of the day, sales aren’t made in a vacuum. Everything you do will leave a taste, be it bitter or sweet, in the mouths of your prospects. Hopefully, your impression is a positive one.

Building a relationship with your audience through video content is more engaging than other forms of text content. Your videos provide a face-to-face experience that no other technology can match.

People buy from people. The stronger the relationship that you can build with your audience, the more likely they will be to purchase from you.

You can create desire for your product or service simply by sparking a friendship instead of chasing down a purchase. That doesn’t mean your videos can’t be educational, though. On the contrary, teaching people something new is a great way to strengthen their bond with you.

Odds are, people are watching your brand awareness video content as a way to find a solution. If you’re the one providing that solution, you’re building a relationship with them and increasing the desire they have to purchase from you.

This also means that people are going to feel bad if they end up making a purchase from someone else, because they will feel as though they are violating the trust that you’ve built.

Hopefully, after buying from you once, your customers won’t ever be tempted to go to your competitors after that. But…it’s your job to maintain that relationship. It’s your job to anticipate customer needs before the competition does.

Brand loyalty happens when you do just that.

3. VIDEO INFLUENCES BUYER DECISIONS & CLOSES MORE SALES

Having influence over buyer decisions and the ability to close more sales is strengthened by your video content. Videos are not going to be the single determining factor when a buyer is making a purchasing decision, but they do have a major impact.

There’s a 64% increase in a prospect’s propensity to buy from you after watching a video.

Your videos need to be placed strategically within your sales process, in all stages of the funnel: from awareness, to consideration, to conversion. They should answer the common questions or dilemmas of leads who are in each particular stage.

This means you should have short-form, high-quality videos for brand new prospects; but also longform tutorials or webinars for potential buyers who want to understand a product’s every feature before they sign on the dotted line.

If you can’t meet with someone in person to explain your company or answer their questions, they still deserve the five-star treatment.

If you make the entire education process easy – “Here, just watch this five-minute video,” as opposed to “Here, read this twenty-page manual,” – they won’t forget you easily. They’ll crave more of that easy-to-do, easy-to-understand communication.

Of course, your videos still need to be made with buyer education in mind. All of your industrial video content can achieve your objectives by increasing brand awareness or sales conversions; but that only happens if you plan ahead of time.

How can you get started?

The first thing that you’ll want to do is choose your goals. Phil Nottingham says: “Before creating a video, fill in the blanks: ‘The purpose of this video is to ____ the audience to ____.’ “

Once you have decided what kind of goal you have, you’re able to take the next step of determining how the video is going to fit into your inbound marketing strategy.

One of the best ways that you can get started with industrial video content marketing is creating videos based off of your best blog content, or most commonly-asked questions by prospects.

You’ve already measured the success of your articles based upon views, links, and shares. Your sales team probably already knows some answers by heart because they have to repeat them on such a regular basis.

Now you can simply turn everything up a notch by making a video out of it.

 

 

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!

 

Sponsored by Optimum Productions