B2B Video Marketing: Connecting with Consumers

ANGELA: Hi, yeah, it’s great to be here and yes that is definitely our mission, my background was in B2B marketing for energy technology and energy tech startup, and we see so much cool stuff in B2B treating humans like humans and all the marketing content and then the playbook for B2B tends to be pretty stale, right? Lots of long white papers, lots of very generic press releases and just felt like there’s a better way to do that, yes B2B is different than B2C but we’re still ultimately selling to humans, so the way that we approach that is by making it easier to get humans on video and tell real human stories sort of unearth the authenticity with the voices from your customers, partners, employee and the like.

CAROLINE: I love it, I love it. You know, my background is in B2B as well and I can really relate to what you’re talking about and so today we’re gonna talk a little bit more about videos and how really B2B marketers should think about leveraging videos in their content strategy right now and how it’s been changing, we’ve seen the past few years but more so, in the past 12 months.

ANGELA: Yeah, it’s certainly been changing, right? I remember talking to a few companies when I was starting Laudable about a year and a half ago and most of the marketers and CEOs that I was talking to said, hands down video is the biggest gap in our marketing strategy, we need to do video, we need to figure it out and I think there’s sort of this mental burden or mental barrier when it comes to planning video ’cause it seems like such a behemoth undertaking and it traditionally it has been my experience at Spark Fund, the company I was at prior to starting Laudable was spending four months, $25,000 and a whole lot of my entire team’s time to get one single video produced and that just doesn’t jive with the need of marketers today to be producing a whole lot of content. So, I think a lot of people are sort of intimidated on where to start when it comes to video or they’re doing video and can’t kind of produce enough or make it authentic and sort of engaging enough, so I definitely think there’s a gap and I think COVID has only accelerated the need to figure out how to step up the video game.

CAROLINE: And so, have you noticed a change in the way people are thinking about producing videos, moving away from this like huge production effort into something more authentic and more scalable?

ANGELA: Absolutely, I mean I don’t know if you use Hulu or Netflix as an example, but the ones that have advertisements like Hulu either on demand streaming services and half the commercials I see aren’t there and these are TV made commercials, are featuring basically user generated content or some version of a lower production value, a kind of authentic user centric piece and that is indicative to me of what’s going on in the broader landscape right now, right? I log into LinkedIn and half of my feed is conversations between people that feel more authentic than you know there’s no film crew there, even big CEOs at Goldman Sachs and these very large traditionally stuffier industry type companies and they’re doing lower production quality video, partly because they have to, right? You’re not gonna send a film crew right now most likely in the middle of COVID, but also because it’s what we’re getting more used to seeing and getting more used to digesting and what feels authentic, so I think that’s a huge change, people are adjusting sort of their expectations of what they’re gonna see in their feeds, on TV and then the producers are sort of adjusting their expectations around what kind of content they’re gonna put out.

CAROLINE: Right, right. And I think what’s interesting too is that for years we’ve been trying to… Marketers have been kind of faking this content, right? Hiring people, especially in B2C, like hiring people pretending to use their product.

ANGELA: Yeah.

CAROLINE: And now we’re finally seeing, we’re saying no, like actually show me the people, right? In their environment, how they’re using the product, how they want to talk about it.

ANGELA: Yeah. Yeah, and it’s tricky I think one thing, when you think about that form of video of almost, I don’t love the word testimonial because when you think test… What do you think when you think of a testimonial?

CAROLINE: You know something like a little bit stuffy, like high production value—

ANGELA: Yeah.

CAROLINE: Is like very set questions—

ANGELA: Exactly. Yeah. I mean same, right? I think testimonial I think someone sitting there “oh I love working with Caroline, she’s wonderful, “this was a great experience, I tripled my ROI.” Cut, right? And what really is working in my opinion and what we’re seeing is engaging human emotion centric type of videos, so making it really feel natural, having the subject on camera, tell a story having the subject seem comfortable in their environment and really opening up versus just reading a script, we don’t use scripts for anything and I would encourage anybody in customer stories or customer testimonial videos do not use a script, it’s not gonna give you an authentic feeling video, but that’s definitely like the type of content that is working more is get down and strip away the script and make it feel like it’s an actual authentic conversation with your customer, show them in their environment and that is not always easy to do, if you send them a request to, hey, send us a testimonial, most people are gonna send back that sort of asynchronous, most people are gonna send back, “it was really great to work with Caroline “and it really did a lot for our business “and hopefully this testimonial is helpful, okay, thanks, bye.” Right, so it requires some staging to get to that authenticity, but I think it’s really worth it and makes a huge difference.

CAROLINE: So, what would be your advice for companies that are trying to start this authentic testimonial process, like how do they start? How do they get there?

ANGELA:  Yeah, so I think first step would be figuring out what value proposition? What themes? What messaging you wanna come across? And that starts with who’s your audience, right? Is this for prospective customers? What are you trying to do? Is this about lead generation, top of funnel? And so, what are the main things you wanna hook in somebody’s messaging wise with that? Or is it about converting existing prospects? So, it’s a little more mid or bottom of funnel so sort of defining who your audience is and what your core objective is, is step one and then that lets you turn that into what are the stories and messages you really wanna tell here? And at that stage, I would encourage thinking outside of the box, right? Again, scrap the idea of a traditional testimonial and instead do, we actually have a page that gives I think about 15 examples of ideas or themes for non-traditional customer spotlights or customer features, so I encourage you to think about it as a customer spotlight and then what can you do to make that a little bit more interesting and different? So, starting with the themes and then messaging the questions that you’re gonna ask the customer, I think is really, really important to start to shake things up a little bit, so that’s kind of step one and two.

CAROLINE: Great, awesome.

ANGELA: And we’ll put the link in the comment for everybody who’s interested here. There’re some really fun examples in there and we link to some examples of companies that are doing these I think there’s one from Sendoso, from Gong, they’re all doing kind of fun different stuff when it comes to featuring customers and so we share some of those examples.

CAROLINE: That’s great. Super useful. Okay, well I think we covered a lot in this video. Thank you again for being with us and giving us so many insights and I think that now everybody’s ready to start their own videos.

ANGELA: Yeah, thank you. Really nice to chat.