B2b Marketing on Social Media, it has a reputation as an intensely superficial practice by companies filling up our feeds with marketing pitches meant for board rooms and conference calls.

Anyone with a few minutes to spare and the willingness to search can find dozens of examples of place holder social Media accounts and lacklustre posts promoting businesses with genuinely useful products and services.

For the most part the most utilized social media channels for B2B have proven to be the four major players; Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. LinkedIn leading the back in the use from B2B marketing with 92% of B2B companies having it as part of their Marketing Mix and this translates into around 44% of all success of all B2B social media activity being attributed back to LinkedIn.  

The main issue that B2B companies find is that they are perceived to be a stale source of inspiration compared to others on social media. The fact is, most users on social media are not actively looking to be advertised an IT solution for connecting multinetworked offices across several companies. BUT this does not mean that their presence on social media is not wanted or useful, it just means that the approach needs to be different.  

“Online video over the last few years has blown up as a platform to share, connect and spread the word among a variety of topics, and for B2B companies in particular its helps to set them apart in a sea of half hearted attempts at social media engagement” 

Apart from simply being a platform for a unique approach to social media engagement, B2B video marketing is positions itself in such a way that it is suited to sharing content in a memorable and digestible way. All day we are oversaturated by online content, especially when it comes in the same old “social media appropriate” forms, but videos are time and time again seen to be much more of an engaging form of content. Not only that, but online video has comparatively been seen to increase a return on marketing investment with nearly double the effectiveness of online marketing when video is involved.  

However not all forms of online video are inherently effective to B2B marketing. If not done effectively some forms of online video can be seen to hurt a company’s marketing activities rather than help it.Here are a few things to help make sure the online video content adds even more value into your social media activity.   

 High quality content 

Making sure your video content is of a certain standard of quality goes a long way to helping the content spread more and get the message across social media. From any point of view, badly made hard to understand content is hardly what is in high demand and definitely is not what B2B customers are looking for in terms of digital content. Low quality content with a badly thought out premise is more likely than not going to lose interest in a company at the same time being just plain hard to understand for the company’s customers. Whatever the product or strategy, having hard to understand content to market and showcase it will help no one. 

Useful content  

Having appropriate content for the customer is also a major way in which online video can be a more effective form of marketing for B2B businesses. Tailor making the content to be suitable for more businesses will help for those businesses to be able to see themselves taking advantage of the company’s services. Not only will the company not gain business from potential B2B customers if their content does not prove to be useful in leading the customers to decide on purchasing the product, it also negatively impacts the company’s image. First impressions are so valuable and if the content that your company provides does not prove to be an asset to the company its being provided to, that company will more likely than not simply ignore you in the future, despite your actual ability to provide the services they need.  

Interesting content  

Finally providing interesting content is the most important factor in using the content as a method to turn your marketing efforts into a tool for developing your business with potential customers. If the online video that is meant to be the first step in representing your business fails to stick in potential customers heads it has failed to serve its purpose. B2B marketing has the added factor of needing to serve a customer base made up of other businesses and so the content must also reflect a certain amount of professionalism in this case. However boring content is the very last thing that should be shown to the businesses being marketed to and so the more effective and innovative the content the better chance there will be at providing a stepping off point from online video, to connection, to sale.  

All in all, the use of video for B2B marketing has not only the potential to provide more useful effective content to those looking for your company but the use of video content in most social media setting will catapult the marketing of a company way past most other forms of social media content. The unique points that an online presence through video can be so much more effective at helping to present your content, in particular those of B2B companies, in a high quality, interesting and useful way. 

Author: Kaihua Johannes

The post Online video marketing: Give your B2B marketing an edge on Social media appeared first on Craftoon Video Marketing Blog.