As with any marketing effort, producing an online video should be aligned with a well thought-through marketing strategy. Let’s start with the core question. Why are you considering video? If your only reason is because your competitors released one, you may want to reconsider. Online video can be a powerful marketing tool for B2B companies with complex products or services. If you’re having trouble getting prospects to read your 20 page whitepaper, or sit through your hour long PowerPoint presentation, video can help you explain your complex features and benefits quickly… and in a way that prospects are willing to consume.

What Are You Trying to Accomplish?

The number one objective of B2B marketing is to generate qualified, sales-ready leads. Unless you have unlimited budget to spend on branding efforts, I strongly recommend you focus on the use of video to generate sales-ready, qualified leads. You’re not going to close a $100,000 sale with a video, but you can move a targeted prospect significantly along their buy cycle to the point where a follow up from Sales is welcome.

Who Are You Talking To?

People don’t listen (especially online) to anything that isn’t relevant and useful to them. You need to know exactly who your video is aimed at because what’s useful and relevant to one person is useless and irrelevant to the next. This is a critical step in honing your product positioning and specific messaging. Delivering a highly targeted video message to a clearly defined audience will yield a superior marketing result.

What Are You Going to Tell Them?

Develop a condensed version of the campaign’s core messaging including product positioning, value proposition, features and benefits… in a story format. Be concise! Don’t squander this opportunity by straying off track or being long-winded.

How Are You Going to Get It in Front of Your Prospects?

Think through what you’re going to need to do to pull targeted traffic to your video, or to push it to them. Multiple push and pull tactics rolled out over time have the best chance at success.

What’s Your Call to Action?

What do you want your prospects to do after they’ve viewed your video? Don’t make the all too common mistake of building the video and having no call to action… or a weak one. “Visit our website to learn more.” is too vague. Tell them exactly what you want them to do. Determine what type of high value ‘offer’ you’re going to make in exchange for them completing your requested action. For example, an interested prospect gets access to a relevant and useful research study from a respected industry analyst in exchange for providing their contact information.

What Are You Going to Do with the Leads You Capture?

The goal of most B2B marketing campaigns is to generate qualified leads. Your video campaign landing page should include a lead capture form that can pass the contact information collected directly to your company’s CRM system and automatically route it to the appropriate people in the Sales organization.

Have You Collaborated with Sales Throughout?

Include your Sales organization in the campaign planning process. All the above is for nothing if Sales doesn’t follow up with the leads you’ve generated. Work with them to define a “qualified lead” up front, so you capture leads they feel are worth spending time and effort on. Keep the lines of communications open after the fact, thereby creating a closed loop process that gets more and more effective over time.

Next up in our series – Why Story is So Important.

I saw the “business casual videos” term on David Merman Scott’s blog. It aptly describes the videos that mid-sized B2B companies should be producing. You want to position well above the T-shirt and sneakers crowd, but below the Brooks Brothers (think IBM) crowd. You want to select a video marketing producer well above the legions of wedding videographers now pursuing online marketing careers, but below the major city agencies who have massive overheads to carry.

My partner in acSellerant Video Strategies is Teri Addabbo. Teri has produced thousands of hours of broadcast television. She has definite opinions on what it takes to produce effective videos – videos that people watch to completion because they want to.

Teri: “It’s not a part-time gig. It’s a complex art and science to script, shoot and edit seamless, watchable videos. Anybody can shoot video, but to get attention and communicate with an audience, you have to create a connection.”

Bob: “Which is much more difficult than it looks. Let’s address it one component at a time. For video case studies, we’re doing a lot of interviews. Give us an example regarding the interview process. What sorts of mistakes might a novice make?”

The Interview Process

Teri: “It’s important to understand the interview process. It’s not just asking questions. You have to do your homework so that when a question is answered you can follow up and create a conversation. How many hours do you spend preparing, Bob? You learn all about our client’s business, about how their customer is using their product, the benefits, the ROI, the person being interviewed – their role and responsibilities. When they trust you, the interviewee relaxes and engages in the conversation. That’s when it flows and becomes fun and interesting to watch.”

Shooting Seminars

Bob: “I know this is a pet peeve of yours and something many mid-sized companies attempt to do – record a video of a PowerPoint presentation given at a conference or seminar.”

Teri: “Absolutely. People don’t realize the number of facets that must be managed in order to produce something that’s usable. They’ll rely on the lights and sound equipment in the room. Big mistake. Either there’s not enough light so you can’t see the speaker’s facial expressions or hand gestures… which are what add emotion and interest; or there’s too much light and the screen is washed out. If the speaker isn’t mic’d for the video, you’re recording second hand from the room, often picking up ambient sounds that drown out the words.”

“The result is a video that’s unusable. Even if they get everything right, the video is boring. Being in the room is one thing. Watching an hour long presentation on video is deadly.”

Inexperience = Costly Mistakes

Bob: “Let’s explore the number of things that can go wrong. Your wealth of experience saves us almost daily from making costly mistakes.”

Teri: “OK. Let’s start with the script. Writing for a visual medium is much different than writing for print.”

Bob: “Yes, so I’ve learned. I actually covered that elsewhere (Optimize This!) though, so let’s skip that for now. We’ve touched on the camera, lighting and sound. What else?”

Editing

Teri: “Alright, let’s talk about editing. People think that you just punch a few buttons and you stitch snippets of digitized video together. That’s part of it, but how do you tell a story while doing that? How do you transition from scene to scene? How about pacing? If it’s too fast or too slow, you lose viewers. You have to vary the pace.”

Post Production

“How about post production and motion graphics? These can be very powerful, especially for marketing applications… but they must be used judiciously. Too much and they appear hokey or overwhelm the viewer. They should augment the action, adding related but not redundant information.”

Voice-Over Narration

“What about voice-over narration and sound effects and music? All of these must be synchronized and layered over the visuals so they add to the experience. If not done correctly, they can distract and confuse the viewer.”

The Story and the Marketing Messages

“If all the above is accomplished in a professional way, the end result is seamless. It’s a joy to watch. Viewers are unaware of the production… they’re absorbing the story and the marketing messages. And that’s what marketers should be aiming for. Otherwise, they’re spending time and money to produce a video that won’t be watched, or one that’s not going to have the desired effect. It can even have the opposite effect – leaving the viewer with a negative impression of the company.”

Bob: “And that happens. A company pays for a video, it’s produced, but it’s shoddy. So they bury it because they realize it’s an embarrassment. In that instance, beyond the wasted money, at least no harm was done. Sometimes though, they go ahead and display it where clients and prospects can see it. Now they’ve paid for something that harms their reputation and their sales.”

Business Casual Video

How much is too much when it comes to production values? It depends on your situation, your product or service, your target market, your competition, etc. In B2B marketing, you definitely don’t want to show up dressed sloppily, but you don’t want to be over-dressed either. Shoot for business casual video to make it affordable and watchable.

It’s one thing, though, to come up with a great idea, and something quite different to execute it successfully. So, even as we produce a proof of concept video, deploying all of the ingredients in my recipe, I looked for someone who could give me advice concerning my business model and implementation process. Fortune 100 corporations and top-tier agencies can do what I’m doing, because they have massive budgets and deep pools of talented staff. How do I produce effective videos while keeping costs down, so my mid-sized clients can afford my video marketing vehicles?

Laurence Moskowitz is managing partner and CEO of Lumentus, a new breed of communications agency that combines public relations, social media and advertising. His Madison Ave. firm has developed proprietary technology to “force magnify” its efforts on behalf of a wide range of clients. I asked Larry for his advice. This is an excerpt from a highly valuable conversation I had with him:

“The current business environment is more dynamic, more fluid and more challenging than ever. Today’s demands simply can’t be met with yesterday’s solutions. Marketers share a common problem: attention. Prospects are busy, and they’re overloaded with information. They don’t have the time to sift through it and make sense of it all.”

“That means that marketers must reach buyers with impact, conciseness and a lasting impression. As communicators we need to employ the right tools at the right time in the right way. Our eyes are our windows onto the world… and the sense that affects us most. Movies and television are integral parts of our culture. The outstanding success of YouTube proves the power of video on a smaller screen. Mobile media are now being dominated by video.”

“Online videos can be the most effective B2B marketing tools. Video – if produced and edited professionally – can announce, demonstrate and explain products and services with a power unmatched by any other medium. The difference between amateur and professional video is the difference between (at best) an entertaining diversion, and a sophisticated tool for advancing prospects through the sales cycle.”

“For you to execute successfully, you need to function in a nimble universe of skills. That translates into using the best resources to tackle a challenge, but you can’t afford to maintain all that talent in-house. The solution is clear: outsource the video aspects to experts who know how to produce powerful imagery that incites audiences to respond.”

“Bob – you made a brilliant choice in partnering with Teri Addabbo. Teri is a highly talented video producer who has extensive experience in broadcast television. She knows how to tell stories visually… to capture and hold attention. She has assembled a large network of all kinds of video professionals you can tap into as needed. And you, of course, have a similar network in the B2B marketing field.”

“I think between you, you’re developing a flexible and nimble organization designed to understand client needs, overcome marketplace challenges, and create highly effective sales tools.”

So why aren’t we seeing effective online B2B marketing videos? The laggards are the agencies.

Mac McIntosh is a friend and colleague. He’s also a B2B demand generation expert. Here’s what he said when I asked him about this phenomenon: “Online video producers who come from a marketing background know how to drive traffic, align with a marketing strategy, and include a compelling call to action. Producers from the video world know how to tell a story visually and hold the viewers’ attention with sight, sound and motion. What I haven’t seen much of (other than from a few big, expensive agencies) are video producers who deliver both: left and right brain, message and visual, strategy plus story. That’s what’s really needed.”

Let’s take a look at what’s out there. There are literally thousands of examples of what Mac is referring to. Here are just a couple:

IT Networking Equipment Case Study This is clearly a case where a video production crew did a credible job of documenting a case study in a story format, but little thought was given to the marketing aspect. The target prospect was not clearly defined, so they were unable to focus on the handful of benefits that would be most important to that prospect. The result is a lot of superfluous talking heads and a run time of six minutes – far too long. The context for the story is never articulated. It should state up front what this is about and why (the targeted prospect) should view it. They chose to post this on YouTube, instead of on one of the streaming platforms designed for marketing. The result is a weak call to action that appears below the viewing panel. It gives the prospect no reason to click through, and there’s no way to capture contact information from those that do.

Medical Billing Software Here’s one that’s built on a sales strategy, but the video production is nothing more than a PowerPoint with voice over. The images and graphics were given little thought. There’s no evidence of any skill or knowledge regarding visual storytelling, or an ability to grab and hold a viewer’s attention. At two minutes forty seconds, the length is suitable, but try to sit through the whole thing. Those two minutes may as well be two hours.

So Mac is right. Effective B2B marketing videos require both sides of the brain, art and science, visual storytelling and online marketing expertise. We’ll discuss how to go about achieving that in our next blog post.

• Place your messages in front of highly targeted prospects.
• Grab those prospects’ attention and hold it.
• Communicate a significant amount of information in a short amount of time.
• Gently persuade prospects in a way that’s entertaining and memorable.
• Incent them to take an action that demonstrates a significant level of interest.

A study conducted by Rich Media calculates a 600% increase in viewer engagement and response rates using online video compared to static content such as text and graphics. It makes sense then to couple online video with marketing strategy and tactics like a story format. People are hard-wired to be fascinated by stories. They remember and retell stories.

I am fortunate to be acquainted with Joe Pulizzi, the Godfather of Content Marketing. I reached out to Joe to ask his advice. Here’s what he said when I explained my idea for an online B2B video marketing service: “I think it’s a viable idea… particularly the combination of building the videos on well-conceived marketing strategies, and telling stories via the videos. Those are differentiators that not only set you apart, but they’re what the market needs.”

Of course, this is all for naught if we don’t capture qualified leads from the process. Each video must include a call to action – a specific assignment given to the viewer that, if completed, converts them from a prospect to a qualified lead. That means there must be an offer of some type and a follow through. An appropriate offer (e.g. an ROI study) prompts the prospect to fill out a form to learn more about the product or service, thus self-identifying as a qualified lead.

Finally, the qualified leads must be taken care of. They may be ‘sales-ready’. In that case a salesperson is assigned to the opportunity. If the lead is qualified, but not ‘sales-ready’, they’re placed in a lead nurturing bucket. They will then be contacted periodically with relevant and useful information to keep them warm and engaged until they’re ready to buy.