We recently attended a seminar given by a marketing executive of one of the prominent video hosting and support services - and he made a remark that their customers looked at BtoB video as:

• Difficult
• Expensive
• Had no talent in-house to deal with it

I found this remark curious, because at this point video is no more or less difficult or expensive than a website (unless you go overboard with production expenses.) The “lack of talent” remark was equally curious - what type of talent was of concern, marketing or video production?

Just as you don’t need to be a web designer to know how to utilize a web site and SEO in your marketing efforts - the same applies to video (but it is necessary to understand how it works as a marketing tool.)

Video production talent is more or less a commodity these days, but if the clients were referring to marketing staff that understood the role of video in sales and marketing - that’s a different story.

It has been our experience that the role of BtoB video in their buyer’s journey is not clearly understood by marketers - and hence we see a lot of misapplication of BtoC and consumer marketing taking place. For example - a focus on “awareness” and “branding”.

Sales and marketing video is most effective when it plays to the inherent strength of video - which is that it conveys emotion. Since the sales process is emotion-based (but justified by analytics), using video in the buyer’s journey - especially when it has progressed to the critical decision making stage - makes a lot of sense.

Yet you will often find video deployed in the less-effective, front-end role of “awareness”, “branding” and other consumer-marketing type of techniques.

BtoB marketing is not BtoC or consumer marketing. Write it on the blackboard 100 times.

BtoB marketing needs to support the BtoB sale, or more accurately, the solution selling sales process (as typified by Solution Selling® - the industry standard sales process.) Since the sales process is (or should be) a mirror-image of the buyer’s journey - the need is to determine where video is best deployed to support your buyer’s journey.

How do you do that? Simple - ask your best customers how they use video to help them select vendors! Since your solutions have met their criteria as a best customer - their information is a gold mine of how to find more customers just like them (remember - these are your best customers - not just any customer).

We refer to this as marketing diagnostics (focusing on future decisions - as opposed to analytics - which is the evaluation of current or past actions).

Years ago, we developed the Sales Autopsy℠ (long before the term “buyer’s journey” was used) as a technique to quickly determine buyer intent and future actions - and have utilized it across many industries. It works every time - because it has a basis in the same structure as the Solution Selling type of sales process. (Click on the hyperlink to take you to our article on The Sales Autopsy)

So if you struggle with the same issues that the video marketing executive referred to - in that you find the development of marketing video to be difficult, expensive and you have no talent in-house - take a look at our Sales Autopsy technique. It cuts trough the clutter and lets you tap into the buyer’s journey goldmine of marketing information.

Isn’t that what you would really want to do?

Caveat:

In your search for video resources, you may come across one of these "we do it all" types of production firms. They might, but rest assured - outside of perhaps a few core areas of competence, that's really not possible to do. Marketing messaging and competitive diagnostics are unique to each market and set of buyers, and concepts that fit BtoC (consumer) really don't work that well with BtoB (reason being that BtoB is looking for solutions, BtoC is looking for entertainment.)

So bear this in mind when you review marketing videos. Take a tip from Don Hewitt, the Creator of 60 Minutes when he reviewed a story in the screening room: If he wasn't sure it worked, he would spin around in his chair and look out the window, and listen to see if the script (audio) carried the story. If it didn't - he would send the producers back to work on it some more.

Put yourself in the mind of the buyer for the products or services that the video is trying to support - and see if it creates a vision for you. The technique works rather well - it certainly did for Don Hewitt.

©2018 Jeffrey Geibel / Geibel Marketing All Rights Reserved

In addition to being the principal of Geibel Marketing the author has been a video producer-director since 2002, and has either directed, crewed or personally produced well over 100 productions, including 60-second PSAs (Public Service Announcements), sports events, topical packages for video magazines, multi-camera theatrical and studio productions and election coverage. He was co-producer and director for a multiple award-winning video series ( eight years and 50 episodes), and previously named Producer of the Year

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