Your new weapon for engaging prospects
Prospects are bombarded with hundreds of emails on a daily basis.
It’s challenging to compete with such volume, and standing out is harder than ever. That's where video comes in.
According to CMI, 71% of B2B marketers are now using video marketing, which is higher than the 66% used in the B2C market.
When you want your company to stand out, then emails with the word video in the subject line will boost your open rates by as much as 20%, tripling lead generation.
Starting conversations with leads and decision-makers is much easier and more impactful with video, and IDG research suggests that tech decision-makers are 85% more likely to use tech vendors who use video for education.
Here's what you need to know to get started with B2B video selling.
How to incorporate video into your strategy
Once you realise the power of video for B2B selling, the next step is to work out how to incorporate those videos into your overall sales and marketing strategy. The goal is to accelerate the sales cycle.
Video prospecting is ideally suited for cutting through the noise of your competitors and improving your engagement with leads. Partly, that's because video improves information retention. Your prospects will retain up to 95% of your video content, compared to just 10% of written text. Even your SEO will get a boost because websites that have embedded video content are up to 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of a SERP. There are three main ways to incorporate video into your existing sales strategy:
Cold Emails
One of the hardest sales techniques to get right, cold emails can be transformed with video content. Using video recording tools like Vidyard, you can easily insert your video into an email with tailored messages that contain your validation and how you alleviate your lead's pain points. Your sales team will be able to improve their figures with unique personalisation options that transform cold emails into tailored, targeted sales tools.
Call Follow-Up
Follow-ups are all about engagement and reinforcing your brand in the minds of your prospects. Even a simple thank you video is more effective than written follow-ups, especially if those videos have been tailored to the previous comms. Personally tailored videos can improve retention rates by more than 35%, meaning that your follow-up call will be remembered, a vital statistic when you add extra content to your communications such as client testimonials, e-books, and demos of your product. This can allow for much easier upselling via effective video marketing.
Account-Based Sales Approach
Your sales team members can create a tailored account-based video that can be more easily shared across a range of contacts and personas. Relevance is the key to making that content appeal to the targeted organisation, as well as highlighting solutions to the unique roadblocks being encountered by that organisation.
Video as Relationship Builder
When so much of a rep's success depends on their ability to build and maintain lead relationships, video communications can be part of the cadence of touchpoints. Again, the key is personalisation, with simple methods such as walking your prospects through new product delivery or marketing content delivered with personalised messages tailored to those relationships. Video can quickly become the quickest and most effective means of maintaining consistent touchpoints, even if the messaging is a simple hello. Take our 60-second series for example!
Here's one of our videos on looking up website visitors inside your CRM:
Video Selling
The goal is to always be selling and for your reps to get the highest close rates. Video is enormously valuable when it comes to selling techniques because it allows your leads to see products and listen to your sales team. The top four methods for using video to improve sales figures are:
● Sharing micro demos
● Recapping your follow-up calls
● Reviving cold leads
● Upselling in all video communications
Best practice: How to create a video fit for conversion
One of the reasons you may not have given much thought to the high ROI of video selling is that you have seen so many bad examples. However, some very basic production techniques can dramatically improve the professional look of your video content. In terms of time investment and costs, your videos do not have to go overboard. You simply have to consider:
● Lighting: Being more aware of light and how it affects the image from the viewer's perspective can help you add a much more professional look to your videos.
● Audio: Microphones are more affordable than ever. However, even a pair of headphones with an inbuilt mic can help to improve the way that your videos (and your reps) sound.
● Content and Delivery: Possibly the hardest part of video creation, the best tactic here is to plan what you're going to say, but don't script it too tightly. Unless you're a professional actor, scripted video simply sounds unnatural.
Adding videos to your cadence is easier than ever, and you can also take advantage of the many types of video that are ideally suited to B2B selling. Consider using one of the following:
● Webcam Video: This is the easiest (and fastest) type of video to create. Simply use your webcam or your phone to share your personal message with your prospect.
● Screenshare Video: There are a lot of times when a screen share video can improve your chances of closing a lead. If you have something to share with your prospect, then screen sharing is quick, easy, and effective.
● Chaptered Content: Your existing sales and marketing funnel will have very clearly designed chapters, and there's no need to change those with video content. Simply create videos that touch on the same points as your existing sales funnel. This is ideal for both follow-up calls and for your regular communications cadence.
Measuring the ROI of your video strategy
It's all well and good looking at stats, but you'll want to be able to know how to measure the ROI and effectiveness of your videos. Seven key measurement parameters will identify the value of your video content. Those are:
● Email opening rates
● Email clicks and click-to-open ratios
● The reply rate
● Number of video views
● How long viewers watch your videos for (attention span)
● Influenced sales and business
● Time to close
It's worth remembering too that although video marketing and sales can be more expensive than the alternatives, it does pay back what you invest. Often the same video content can have high value and effectiveness even years after your campaign has finished. HubSpot research revealed that 51.9% of marketing professionals see video as their most ROI-effective marketing content. While there are many reasons for this, the one that stands out as most important is data.
All business leaders understand the value of data, especially when it comes to sales, but today, it’s never been more important. Your videos can be an extremely valuable data source and provide you with incredible insights that will not only improve and enhance future video-based campaigns, but also your overall marketing strategies. Advanced online video platforms like Vidyard, combined with ProsperoHub, have features that allow for A/B testing, improved distribution methods, customisation options, and in-built CTAs. You can even export your actionable data from your video analytics into automation tools or the CRM software that you use, where it can be delivered to you as reports.
ROI and Team Effectiveness
Another effective way to measure your video ROI is to use it to evaluate the effectiveness and engagement of your sales reps. You can easily track how many videos each member of the sales team is making, and how much those videos are being engaged with. This is a great way to identify the top performers in your sales team, and you can use the most successful videos to highlight where other members of the team may be going wrong.
Add video marketing into your cadence with ProsperoHub
If you're already using HubSpot, you will have an idea about its high value for sales and marketing. At ProsperoHub, we sell HubSpot-driven strategies so that when you come on board, we can immediately create and then execute the video marketing strategies that work. The pairing of HubSpot with Vidyard creates an ease of use, which means you get all of the advantages of video selling without the hard work.
Utilising your CRM with video content
HubSpot has a variety of valuable tools that you can use to incorporate your videos where you need them most. Since video is such an effective sales tool itself, HubSpot is designed to easily integrate with it, meaning that your video incorporation is seamless. The result is that you can then use your videos how you prefer, including:
● One-to-one emails
● Blog posts
● Solutions pages and landing pages
● Email marketing (including cold emailing)
There are variations on the types of licenses that you may have with HubSpot, but Vidyard will integrate fluidly with both Sales Hub Professional Enterprise licenses and Service Hub Professional Enterprise licenses. When it comes to managing your relationships with your customers and leads, the powerful combination of your sales team, Vidyard, and HubSpot could be your most valuable transition to date.
The question is, can you afford to not be using video to accelerate lead generation?
If you'd like to find out more about how we can help you create and integrate video sales into your existing sales process, watch our Masterclass on The Power of Video in your Sales Process:
