As a digital strategy firm, we often focus on the big picture for clients that need to shape their digital presence, priorities, and marketing. So why am I talking about video?
Video is digital- and only getting more important in communication and marketing. In the B2B space, video can be a crucial tool. Current data shows that B2B prospects research more than ever, and millennials like to self-educate before reaching out to potential vendors. This is no different from how consumers now walk into a car dealership- often knowing more than the salespeople. Prospects often first come across your services from a web search. Your website establishes your credibility- but how do you explain your product or service? Sure- web pages with product info are great- and necessary, but prospects often want more. They want explanation and demonstration. According to research from IBM, millennials like video for research in B2B- and prefer it to traditional formats including whitepapers and written case studies- and websites. They also say that demonstration and training is the most important value add a vendor can provide. Case Snippets A client of mine had a new to world type service that uses machine learning to bring magnitudes of efficiency improvement to an existing process in a regulated space. The buyers of this service are smart, savvy, and conservative- but they are not data scientists. A black box doesn’t cut it for these folks. My client needed to establish authority in the space, explain what the machine learning does, and how it can provide more accurate results- even while cutting expenses. By combining thoughtful narration with illustrative animation and on-screen text, we brought this abstract concept of machine learning out of the black box, explained it in terms the prospects could relate to and demonstrated visually it could help solve their issue. Another client sells component products. A large part of their added value is to be there at the beginning of the product development cycle for their customers as they begin concepting new consumer products. For them, video helps explain how their components can shape a client’s new product early in the development cycle- but even more important, they provide a different type of content to support production engineers as they move from a lab / prototype setting to production. Here the video is used as a value-added relationship tool as aiding the production end of the development cycle makes it easier for the product development people to choose my client’s products. In B2B, the consultative sales process is still critical for many companies, but also using the tools of today to explain and demonstrate what you offer just makes sense. Customers like researching on their own, understanding your products and services before they reach out, and especially before they pitch them up the chain in their organizations. This new wave of video is not flashy brochure-ware, but in-depth explanation and demonstration of the solutions you can provide- and it is surely digital. Comments are closed.
|
PerspectivesOur angle on digital Archives
April 2017
Categories |
(c) 2017, Jay Robin, Inc. All Rights Reserved