I’m sure it’s not a surprise, but video is no longer just a small piece in a marketers overall strategy, it helps to tell the brand story, explain the product and increase awareness. And driving more viewers and keeping them engaged is the key to a successful video marketing campaign.

Now, with video becoming the most preferred medium among consumers and the fact that by 2021, video will represent 80% of all online traffic, businesses are quickly  becoming interested in video marketing; yet many still struggle to create and use video content in a way that it would help increase engagement and generate more prospects.

Thus, in collaboration with Bureaubiz, we invited experts to our TwentyThree Breakfast Seminar, “How Top Brands Increase Engagement with Video,” where they shared best practices, insights and cases on how to best integrate video into a marketing strategy to boost engagement and generate leads.

The Breakfast Seminar featured 3 speakers that you’ll find insight from below:

- Nikolaj Kirkeby, Brand, Marketing & Communications at Ernst & Young P/S: How to Use Video to Boost Engagement in B2B Marketing

- Casper Emil Rouchmann, Traffic Manager at Templafy: How to Market a Product Everyone Wants, but No One Understands

- Todd Patton, Head of Comms and Story at TwentyThree: How Top Brands Increase Engagement with Video

You can either watch a full seminar embedded below the post or read through the 5 key takeaways from the event and start integrating these into your video marketing activities!

Create Relevant Video Content for Your Audience

Focus on creating a video content that really speaks to your target customers and their needs. As Nikolaj Kirkeby stressed, “your customers aren’t interested in how high is the quality of your tools or the expertise of your employees.” Consumers are overwhelmed by the information and lack of time, thus, if you want to get their attention and get them interested in your products/services, first, you need to find out who they are, how they behave online, how they engage with different platforms and topics that they care about. And afterwards, you need to “go from telling to showing” your business in a way that would relate to the problems they are facing. All speakers agree that video is the best medium to transmit the message and tackle consumers interest.

For example, this video ad from Templafy introduces the product by addressing customer pains:

Here is another example, introduced at the Breakfast Seminar, of a kickstarter that Bear Butt used to transmit the story of their brand and products, that would be challenging by using other forms of content:

Pick an Ideal Length for Your Next Video

There are various opinions about the length of the video that would result in the most engagement. Casper Emil Rouchmann stated that “after 2 minutes of watching, engagement level on social media drops dramatically.” Thus, according to his practise, marketers should make the first 2 minutes of their video content - a “thumbstopper” that stops the viewer from scrolling further.

Todd Patton shared different findings of the length that adds to the first point of the blog post: “Being targeted and relevant for your customers is the key to hooking the right people into watching long-form content. People do watch really long content if it’s made for them.” Additionally, in the research conducted by TwentyThree, it was found that half of the engagement comes from videos that are 15 minutes and longer, but videos have to be right for the audience. And even though only 8% of the videos are of >15 minutes, it accounts for 50% of engagement!

Fit Video Content Across the Entire Customer Journey

Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, video can help in each stage of the customer journey. But first, as Casper Emil Rouchmann states, “it is really important that you would think about where your audience is, why they are there and what they are looking to do” so that you could map out your customer journey and then adjust and place the different video content strategically.

For example, if a person is at the Awareness stage, as Casper says, “you need to provide people with more information because they haven’t been nurtured enough at this point”, thus they don’t yet fully understand your company and product to convert to a buyer. Additionally, Todd Patton shares that “video is processed 60,000x faster than text” making video a perfect content form for marketers to educate their prospects.

In the Interest stage, a person already knows what they’re looking for, and that is a solution to their problem. Thus, the important thing here is to make sure that your video content hits them at the right point of where they are. Meaning, that here you should already know in what specific product or service your customer is interested in and then use targeted video content that would create more awareness around your solution and increase chances to convert him to a buyer. For example, if a prospect is visiting a certain product page on your website, you could set up automated video emails with more information. That’s why fitting your video content into the customer journey is so essential.

Here are some video snippets of an exact product a person is looking for, that Templafy showcases to prospects (on Mobile, Facebook and YouTube) that engage with either Brand Management or Document Creation content:

Repurpose Your Video Content into Many Forms

“People consume media in different ways” stated Todd. Companies should provide various options and choices for their prospects to use the content. For example, Rand Fishkin creates and embeds Whiteboard Friday video to the website, but then also, to create more awareness, increase engagement and attract more people organically, he includes an entire transcript in to the blog post mixed with video and does the podcast.

Actually what Rand Fishkin shared is that “only half of the people watch the whole video, the other half - reads the transcript”, showing that  providing options to consume the media works very well for them. Additionally, after 90 days, they are uploading the Whiteboard Friday video to YouTube (the second largest search engine) to create even more awareness.

Start Tracking Video Data Properly to Generate More Leads

“Likes, comments, views - they are fine but on brand scheme, they don’t matter, since they are not going to drive your business and get you leads, thus, you should focus on play time and engagement,” highlights Casper. For example, let’s say that 100,000 people watched your video, liked and commented on it. But then looking at the play time, you see that they only watch 5-10 seconds of it, meaning that they don’t really understand the solution.

Todd Patton shares the most common video metrics that marketers use, according to the survey conducted by TwentyThree, where vanity metrics are still used the most:

Casper also shared how  Templafy sets up their lead scoring based on how much of video a person has watched. If a person watches the whole video, they can be classified as qualified to receive more information and be further nurtured. At EY, they are retargeting individuals if they have watched >50% of the video. Both companies are capable of tracking their video performance through the placement of collectors in the videos.

Todd added that “only 38% of marketers use video to collect leads, despite videos being a very engaging medium and by putting a collector form on a video, marketers can engage their audience more down the funnel.” But despite great advantages of having a collector to help marketers track video data and generate leads, they shouldn’t be put on every single video a company produces.

There is no doubt that the key to increase engagement with video and generate more leads is in creating relevant video content that is strategically distributed and tracking accurate video metrics.  

Want to listen to the whole seminar? Watch it here: