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6 Types of B2B Marketing Videos Your Business Needs in 2021

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, 6 Types of B2B Marketing Videos Your Business Needs in 2021Are you wondering how to most effectively use a B2B video marketing strategy to attract leads and sales for your company?

You’re not alone. Many companies today struggle to mix B2B video best practices into their B2B marketing strategy. In this article, we’ve listed the most important types of B2B marketing videos your company should consider adding to its video marketing plan.

How-To/Explainer Video

How-to videos help your prospects or customers learn something new. For example, you might teach your target market how using your product improves their company’s bottom line or improves their HR processes.

Brainstorm all steps involved with using your product and put together short explainer videos around that material. Focus on one specific piece of education that can help customers use your product more effectively or help a prospect move one step closer to understanding why using your product or service makes sense for them.

For example, in this video, Mailchimp teaches how its customers can set up email campaigns.

Tutorial Video

Your video marketing campaign should use tutorials to expand upon the strategy of using how-to videos. Tutorials go into more detail and take viewers on a more extended step-by-step experience.

These videos don’t always need to involve your product directly. Instead, you can create tutorials that walk through any related topic you deem helpful to your audience. If you teach your leads about your product via tutorial video, they’ll trust you more and become open to reading or watching sales material next.

The Whiteboard Friday series from Moz is an excellent example of using tutorial video content.

Product Demo

This video type is an opportunity to walk viewers through the process of how your product works. The key aspect to using product demo videos is to focus on the problem your product solves.

Make sure it’s clear to your leads how every feature provides a tangible benefit to their lives. For example, show them how using your scheduling software gives them more time to spend with their family or invest more time in completing revenue-generating sales calls.

Look at this example product demo from Airtable for some ideas.

Brand Awareness Video

Here’s where you get the chance to give viewers a high-level view of your brand. Instead of teaching specific tips or focusing on using your product, insert brand videos into your video marketing funnel and reveal what makes you unique.

Show your company’s culture, whether it’s humorous, quirky, off-beat, or serious. Hootsuite did a brand awareness video of this type on their 10th anniversary.

Customer Testimonial Video

Your B2B marketing strategy must include customer testimonial videos. Nothing speaks louder than hearing happy customers tell others how great you are.

You’ve likely heard about the importance of inserting social proof into your video marketing funnel. This video type is where you get to share social proof, as someone else steps in and tells new leads why they should make the important decision to become your next customer.

Take the time to craft intelligent questions, so the interviewed customers can tell their stories comfortably. Let them elaborate when they get excited, reliving the ways your product or service improved their own companies. Watch this video to see how Zendesk’s customers sell for the company.

Case Study Video

Case studies allow you to expand beyond simple customer testimonial statements and go into great detail about how your product or service solved a significant problem.

Here’s where you show the complete story, revealing the problem your customer felt before finding out about your company’s solution. The customer used your product and transformed their situation into an improved experience.

Make it a goal to add several case study videos to your video marketing strategy. Showing tangible and measurable outcomes achieved by others goes a long way in helping prospects convert to customers. This video is an example of Growth Tools talking through a customer case study.

Conclusion

You now know six types of videos to start using in your B2B video marketing campaigns. Take these B2B video ideas and use them to attract more leads and sales!

At Vidico, we believe that creating quality video content gives you the key to future success. Need more examples to help you round out your B2B marketing strategy? Check out these 15 additional startup videos and learn how to start creating your own.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor, Michael PironeMichael Pirone is the Co-Founder and Creative Director at Vidico, a video production agency that produces high-performing video content for startups and tech companies like Square, Uber, and Spotify. Michael and his team like to explain “the hard stuff” with the aim of bringing more clarity to the messaging of new and innovative tech products around the world.

Interested in learning more about how video can help your brand engage with customers? Reach out to Vidico today to see what video can do for your marketing strategy. They’ll work with you to create a unique project that accomplishes everything on your video to-do list.

Strategies To Grow Your Website Traffic

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website Traffice|Strategies To Grow Your Website TrafficAll business owners want the same thing, ‘more customers’. Their second answer being more traffic to their website, which will bring in more customers.

So how can you attract more customers to your website? There are many different strategies to consider.

Advertise

This may seem obvious, but advertising is key. Consider your target market and advertise in ways that will reach them. You could consider paid ads, social media, magazine or newspaper adverts, TV, radio or display boards as excellent ways to attract people, building your brand’s awareness, and getting your site out there in front of people.

With any advert, consider the wording and language used and the outcome you want for more people to see your site. For example, if you are looking to convert a visit to a sale, you could include a ‘call to action’ within your advert.

Make Sure Your Content Is Valuable

What is it that you offer, that makes you, your site, brand and product stand out? Think about what your customers (now and future) will gain by visiting your site. You might be able to help them solve a problem, sell a product that will help them overcome a hurdle, teach or educate.
If you’re unsure of where to start, have a look at keyword research tools and google trends to see what is popular.

Social Media

It is never enough to have a great product or service in the hope that everyone will just stumble across your site. You need to proactively promote your brand, product, and service. There are many different channels of social media and the luxury of this and you can utilize them in different ways to get the word out.

For example, Twitter is great for immediate short-term influence, whilst Pinterest can offer a longer-term visual solution for continual advertising and Instagram can allow a more interactive way for customers to engage and ‘tag’ you and your business.

SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is most likely a strategy you’ll of heard of already. In short, it refers to boosting where a website ranks in search results. The higher you rank, the more your website will be seen.

An SEO company can assist with this and work with you to build a plan of action for your business to list higher when customers search for certain words or phrases.

Create Catchy Headlines

Like your products and services, you need to stand out from your competitors. Your services and products could be the best, but unless you have a compelling heading or caption to draw customers in, they could scroll on by.

Consider your customer, use their language and phrasing to engage them. You may want to write out more than one heading out to consider which is most appealing and eye-catching before pressing the publish button.

Offer Variety Of Content

Not only will variety in social media channels boost your exposure but it is also worth considering once you’ve got your customers to your site, how to maximize their visit. Think about your content and your clients. In today’s world, a lot more customers buy and appoint services through their mobile devices whilst out on the move. With this in mind, it is important to ensure you have a mixture of content to cover all bases. Include short and snappy articles, blog posts, videos, photos as well as longer content articles.

Link Internally

Using internal links on your site. That way you can guide customers to other services or products they may be interested in, which they were unaware of, or link to reviews and feedback confirming how wonderful your product or services is.

Have Evergreen Content

There possibly will be times when you focus on an upcoming holiday or occasion as a driving force to get traffic to your website however it is vital that you can maintain a steady stream of traffic for the rest of the year.

It is recommended to use ‘evergreen’ content available that will always be relevant and will continue to attract that footfall.

Examples of evergreen content would be how-to guides, product reviews and answers to frequently asked questions.

Include List Posts

Articles with numbers in the title such as ‘10 ….’ act as a good way to draw attention. By having a number in amongst words it makes it stand out and eye-catching, which will draw in more click-throughs to your website.

These aren’t always the best types of content to build regular viewers/customers – so this is where those internal links to other articles can help – but they offer a great alternative way to drive the traffic to your cyber front door.

Have A Plan In Place

Like all things business we have to work hard to get the results. Driving traffic to your website is no different. It takes hard work and dedication, along with the ability to multitask planing your content, advertising, social media presence along as with the day to day tasks needed within your business or brand. So, it is always a good idea to generate a plan. Plan out your what you are going to post on social media and site or sites you will be using. Plan any new content you’ll be releasing and how you plan to advertise it.

You can get specialize content calenders to help you with this so you’re releasing all your content in a logical order.

Repurpose Your Content

You might be debating how much more work you’ll be taking it but it will pay out in the end and like anything new you’ll find you get quicker at this the more it is implemented. One way to help keep times down is to revamp and repurpose older content in different formats. You might have some amazing older content in your locker, so dig it out and reuse this content in a YouTube video, for example, a Video Pin on Pinterest.

By doing this you are maximizing the amount of value you are getting out of one piece of content.

Email Marketing

With the majority of the population having email, email marketing is a great way to drive traffic and to keep you and brand in your customers’ minds. All you need to do to benefit from this to get customers to sign up. There are many ways to do this, some sites use pop up boxes for this, others have a ‘subscribe here’ open on their side bar. All you have to do, is come up with a compelling reason that they need to sign up and subscribe now.

Once subscribed you’ll be able to communicate directly with your customers. For new subscribers, you can send a welcome email series out to them. This will allow you to make a good impression and allow your customers a ‘get to know you and what your brand or business is all about’. So remember, this is your opportunity to make a good impression. Keep them notified of all new services, product and valuable content you’ve created.

Within the body of these emails you can also include your social media links and start the process of building yourself ‘super fans’ that follow you across of media channels.

With all of these suggestions, it is worth completing research in advance as there are numerous sites and technologies available to assist and make these steps easier to achieve. If that fails there are also companies out there that strategies and support in different fields that you could outsource too.

Determining Your Objectives In Digital Marketing

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Determining Your Objectives In Digital MarketingThe world of digital marketing is full of terms, some that may sound completely alien to those who are not used to the jargon of this world (such as, for example, KPI). Others may come from everyday language. If you personally saw a phrase like “SEO Austin,” you would know right away that it has something to do with digital marketing. However, you may think everyone knows what they mean, but many people don’t really understand it completely. This can lead not only to misunderstandings in conversation, but also totally wrong communication policies. That is why today, we want to talk about the differences between the concepts of objectives, strategy and tactics.

Quantitative Objectives

The first thing to be clear about is the objectives. There are two main types of objectives; the first is ‘quantitative objectives.’ Quantitative objectives are always measurable since, as their name indicates, they are set in quantities.

  • Increase our blog traffic by 20%
  • Increase web traffic by 100,000 visits per month
  • Get 1000 followers per month on Twitter
  • Make 200 monthly conversions
  • Increase 25% in annual sales

Qualitative Objectives

Qualitative objectives are more subjective and therefore more complicated to measure. Whenever possible, set quantitative objectives (since they are easier to measure) and use qualitative ones in a complementary way.

For example:

  • Improve public perception of our brand
  • Increase brand awareness on social media
  • Improve the image of our product or service

Establishing Objectives

It is essential, to establish our objectives, to have a great knowledge of your business and its environment (the market, the potential client, and the competition). For this, it is essential to carry out an internal and external analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis).

Smart Goals

These objectives should be divided into small intermediate goals, which are known as SMART goals.

Specific: clear and concrete, all members of the team must understand and be on the same page.

Measurable: it has to be measurable, even qualitative ones. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be reached.

Achievable: if we set ourselves an unreachable goal, the team may fall into frustration.

Realistic: in addition to being achievable, it must be realistic with the means at your disposal and considering the current situation of your company.

Timely (limited in time): you have to set a deadline to reach them.

For example, if you want to reach 30,000 visits to your store per year, they could be divided into 10,000 each quarter. This makes it easier to evaluate the results and maintain or correct the course if necessary.

Conclusion

When you work with SEO and marketing professionals like MOTOZA Digital Marketing, objectives are essential to control and measure both strategy and tactical actions and allow you to achieve larger goals. For this reason, it is vital to define short, medium, and long-term objectives.

Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Use Video

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Use Video

Do you know that over 500 million videos are watched every day on YouTube?

Currently, one of the most effective tools to push your brand, generate a skyrocketing ROI, and increase sales is video.

Clearly, you could be missing out on a huge number of customers if you are not using video in your business.  Without high-quality videos, your sales, brand, and leads will keep frustrating you. This is why every business, regardless of size, needs to have video content.

Keep reading to find out why you should use video in your business.

Videos rank well in search engines

Videos appear in 70% of the top search results. Hence, using video comes with huge SEO benefits.

There would be no point in publishing anything online if no one sees it, right? Search engines prioritize high-quality and relevant videos and rank them higher than plain articles. With an optimized video, you can be sure that a lot of online users will see you.

Video is more memorable than written content

The online world is full of marketing messages that get stuffed in there every day. Chances are, you can’t remember most of them.

How about a commercial video?

You likely remember quite a few of them. This is what video does. While you can ignore or forget the written text, you are less likely to forget a good video.

Videos are more personal

Your brand is not a static strategy on paper; it must be brought to life. It must ooze personality too.

While you can inject some personality into your written brand copies, a video does more than that.

It builds an instant authentic connection with your audience.  Videos allow your audience to know you more, connect and relate with you on a more emotional level. As you can guess, you are likely to gain more customers when they like your personality and trust your brand.

Boosts brand credibility

Users trust customer testimonials more than statements from the brand. This is why customer testimonials are a great marketing strategy. They boost your credibility and lead to higher conversions.

Well-thought-of, strategic customer testimonials win visitors over and turn them into customers.

While written testimonials are better than no testimonials at all, video testimonials do the job sufficiently.

Video is popular

Regardless of the social site you use, videos will be the dominating content. Considering the insanely high number of social media users, imagine how many people would see your video.

By posting a video online, you are exposing your brand to millions of users. Better yet, videos are sharable. According to HubSpot, 92% of mobile video audience shares videos. This means that it would be shared to millions of internet users if your video was to go viral.

Clearly, your business would greatly benefit if your videos were to be shared. You can get video experts such as video production company in Toronto to do the magic for you.

Videos are mobile-friendly

Almost everyone owns a phone now. As you can guess, people watch a lot of videos on their devices.  Research shows that more customers are using their mobile phones to search and make purchases. Hence, videos are the best strategy to reach this audience.

SMS Marketing Trends 2021

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, SMS Marketing Trends 2021

Since the world has been gripped in the hands of COVID -19, it brings significant changes in the life of businessmen. SMS is now regarded as the marketing tool and perfect way to bridge the gap between the business and its consumers. According to a study, the texting was increased by 53% and recorded to be higher than average in both January and February. Let’s look at some of the trends in SMS marketing and the probable changes they must bring to the lives of many.

1. More than SMS, Omni channel is better preferred: In case you want to establish a better relationship between with the customers, prefer Omni channel more than only SMS. Earlier SMS was regarded as the only channel of communication with the customers; the contact number and email ids of customers were collected by the senders. But now, SMS has an incredible open rate (say 98%) acceptance and it can be integrated with other channels as well. 2021 will notice certain trends in SMS marketing and they would be like the following.

  • Blog posts and other company news can be shared through messages.
  • E- Mail and SMS promotion can be combined.
  • SMS can be well combined with social media marketing.

With the help of marketing automation software it is possible to integrate other channels with SMS.

2. SMS as a customer care channel: Some ways are prominent where SMS can facilitate the customer service functions.

  • They can be used for sending confirmations.
  • They could be used for providing delivery tracking information.
  • They can be used for confirmation and also rescheduling appointments.
  • They are generally used for responding to questions that are frequently asked.
  • While you text with customer support that allows a shorter time of resolution.

In the present year 2021, you may expect to see a betterment in customer service. Since the SMS platforms come handy, there is much improvement in the transactional SMS, and the two way SMS that helps in customer and business services.

3. B2B SMS marketing is on the rise: B2B marketing uses SMS for interacting with the customers and it’s in rise in 2021. Well, the amount of SMS used by B2B is always lesser than B2C. SMS is used to send text to customers as well as valuable information. Well, there are many ways that can help in this regard:

  • By sending personalized messages that customers can know the expected time of delivery as well as the order number of the materials.
  • The customers might know about the product updates and also improved services thereby keeping them in the loop.
  • While you exchange messages with potential customers, it can keep themselves motivated.
  • There can be timely updates about the company’s products and offerings.
  • You may schedule product demos and webinars, as well as answer FAQ’s that provides limited time offers.

4. User reviews is the trend:The use of SMS is on the rise. According to a study about 82% of the consumers read the online reviews especially for the local business. Reviews play a critical role in sales and marketing. In fact, there are several polls and surveys conducted that would give an idea of people the product. In fact threads are provided via SMS and users are expected to complete the poll. Give customers a chance voicing their opinion on the various products and services; you may see the use in social media. The surveys conveyed can help to build the necessary insight.


5. Transactional SMS updates for cross selling: The transactional SMS would keep the customers updated about their purchase and any interactions with the Finance business. By sending SMS to the customer would create a positive image, and there are chances they would convert to potential customers. The companies will be provided with a chance to promote cross selling and providing discounts, all to attract a buyer.

6. Elevate your business with SMS marketing message: In the future, maybe SMS marketing will be combined with marketing strategies as a mix. The success of a marketing strategy depends how effectively it’s used to send text and manage the potential clients. With advent of age, SMS marketing will be the most effective tool to communicate and give a boost to sales.

The marketers hope that business will see a havoc change in 2021 and that will be reflected in the marketing trends. Business trend will be more empathetic this year and that will lead to a stronger customer relationship. E-mails and SMS are regarded as a perfect tool that can help push notification and can elevate sales along with revenue. After all, there is a saying that ‘Content is the king’, and it would appear like that text only emails and SMS are the main tool that can lead to a successful marketing strategy and future development.

About the Author

Susan Raj is Marketing Head of TXTImpact.  TXTImpact provides Business Text Message products for marketing to and support of customers to increase their client base. Our Enterprise Text Message Marketing Platform designed for your business, allows marketers to communicate and engage customers on the go instantly.