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5 min read

Easy types of B2B video content for you to use

B2B video marketing

Video is a pretty big deal in B2B marketing: 86% of businesses use it, and 93% of video marketers who use it cite it as an important part of their overall marketing strategy.

There are many reasons for this and to name just a few:

But what types of video content are effective for B2B marketing? It takes more time and resources to produce a video than other types of content, so you’d best make sure you’re prioritizing the right ones.

In this article, we’re going to discuss five of the most popular and effective types of B2B video content, why they work, and how you can leverage them for your brand.

What is B2B video marketing? - Your complete guide
Video marketing is a powerful tool in B2B. In this guide, we take you through the importance of video marketing and tips for producing video.

Explainer videos

Explainer videos are one of the most popular types of B2B video content. The title is fairly self-explanatory (🥁): they’re videos that explain how your company, products, or services work. They tend to be between 90 seconds to 3 minutes in length, giving an overview of particular aspects of your business and how it helps your customers.

A punchy, entertaining explainer video acts as a great introductory piece of content for your brand and its products. You can show the value of your products and services, show off your brand personality, and include a nice CTA funneling people into your marketing/sales funnel, all in a nice little package.

Explainer videos can be distributed in a number of different ways. It works well on your social media channels (making it easy for people to share), and as part of landing pages (in fact, video can increase the conversion rates of your landing pages by 80%).

Testimonial videos

Case studies and testimonials have been cited as the most valuable source of content to B2B buyers. As such, you should be devoting a good amount of resources to developing them already, which means creating an associated video along with any written case study or testimonial makes sense. It means you’ll be able to leverage the case study or testimonial in different ways and across different channels.

The video doesn’t need to be a lengthy, in-depth video into every minute detail of your case study, it works better as an overview of what problem your customer was facing, how you resolved it, and how effective your solution has been.

You should already be including quotes from your satisfied customers in the case study anyway, but having someone speaking about how awesome you are on camera in their own words will make it more believable and really sell just how happy you’ve made your customer.

Tutorial/how-to videos

From the name, you might think these are the same as explainer videos, but there are enough differences to make this a distinct difference. Explainer videos are more about giving an overview of your company and its products, but a how-to video goes more in-depth into individual components of your products and services, and how your customers can make the most out of them.

They can range from basic guides to in-depth looks at some of the extra-technical aspects of your products and services. A particularly useful form of how-to videos (particularly when it comes to SaaS products) is explaining how to integrate your product with other popular products. For example, if your product is email automation software, you might show how to integrate it into an existing CRM.

By providing this kind of information, you’re helping your customers use your products as they’re intended, increasing customer satisfaction, which should increase the likelihood of retaining them, and even become advocates for your brand.

But why bother with how-to videos when a written guide is potentially quicker and cheaper to produce? Well first off, you shouldn’t just have video guides, they work better as accompaniments to written guides. Some people just prefer to read this kind of information, so you should make sure they’re still catered to. But studies have shown that your average person retains 95% of a video message, as opposed to just 10% from text, making it an effective way to deliver this kind of information.

A video is also easier to share and use as a sales tool than a written guide. A high-quality tutorial video that shows how quickly and easily you can achieve something with your product can be an effective means of generating high-intent, sales-qualified leads who are looking specifically for a solution to that issue.

Development/production videos

What goes into the products you sell? What obstacles did you have to overcome to provide great customer support? What inspired the new service you’re providing to your customers? Answering these kinds of questions can make a great piece of video content. Showing these aspects of your company provides great insights to your audience.

It’s a chance to show off any innovations that go into your development process, provide evidence for the high quality of your products and services, and allows your customers to feel more connected to the products and services they purchase from you, as they’ll see how much work goes into them.

As well as an opportunity to learn more about you, these videos can act as a subtle cost-justification exercise: you don’t have to say outright “this is why we charge what we do”, but that should be an underlying message.

Behind the scenes videos

Behind the scenes differ from development/production videos by being more about the general goings-on at your company rather than looking at how you deliver specific products and services.

They tend to be fairly light-hearted, informal videos about your company and its staff’s day-to-day work, or possibly a fun event that might not necessarily be directly related to the work you do (e.g. a video about a bring your pets to work day). Their informal nature makes them ideal for social media.

But if you’re not talking about your products, why are they important? Well, they’re an excellent way to show your corporate culture, values, and personality. Showing your corporate culture and values can be very important, as they can play an important role in developing and maintaining long-term relationships with companies that share your culture and values.

Showing your personality is a way to make you stand out from your competitors. You get to show off the interesting people you work with, allowing your audience to put names to faces and build a more emotional (and stronger) connection with your brand. It can be easy to forget that B2B is still about marketing to people, so forming these emotional connections can result in longer-term and more fruitful business relationships.

Lastly, they’re fun! People are more likely to retain information that has an emotional response attached to it, so if you can foster an enjoyable emotion in relation to your brand, you’re more likely to stay top of mind.

Final thoughts

These five types of video content are just scratching the surface when it comes to B2B video content. Once you’ve got your video production and distribution process locked down, you can start looking into more complex, longer-form video types, like webinars, live streams, and more.

Got some great tips for B2B video content? Need advice? Head to the Revenue Marketing Alliance community.

Written by:

Will Whitham

Will Whitham

Will has written copy and content both in-house and agency-side for a broad variety of brands, industries, and international audiences. He's the host of the CMO Alliance podcast, CMO Convo.

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Easy types of B2B video content for you to use