Hasta La Creative!

Your customers don’t have time to read through pages of product research and promotional materials. They have businesses to run! That’s why video is such an important tool for B2B marketers.

Video engages your potential clients much better than standard text. For example, using video in your email marketing can result in a 300% boost in click-through rates. And, landing page videos can increase conversions by 130%.

Video content is more trustworthy and easier to access than text. And it’s not just for social media pages and YouTube ads. A great B2B video hooks the viewer and leaves a lasting impression. Text-based content can’t do that.

That may be why 70% of B2B marketers report that video is more effective than any other form of content for converting leads.

How can you use videos to increase conversions and get more leads in your next B2B marketing campaign? Use the tips below to get results.

Use Video in Email Marketing

Email marketing is the second-most popular tool among B2B marketers. But for some reason, not many have upgraded to using video in their email funnels. This may be because the older generation of B2B buyers was not as tech-savvy.

But now, millennials comprise most of a B2B marketer’s audience. They expect modern sales tactics and communication techniques like video and live chat. And like all targets, they won’t spend time researching the benefits of your service if you don’t hook them first.

A powerful onboarding email funnel featuring a series of videos can go a long way toward generating leads. Email videos result in skyrocketing CTRs, and B2B marketers have a high potential for maximizing ROI with high-quality production. Even better, your email videos can be repurposed for social media, YouTube, and more to get more bang for your buck.

Incorporate More Video into Your Website

Businesses are converting more of their traditionally text-based web pages into video content. From landing pages to “about us” pages and even customer reviews, everything is turning to video.

B2B audiences tend to prefer video, with well over half of senior executives stating that they prefer watching video on a website to reading text.

Landing page videos play a huge role in boosting conversions and engagement. A simple background video can showcase the value of your product or service even while muted. Check out this example from the commercial webpage for Chipman Relocation. Of course, text-based content is still important. But a great video can replace a lot of your pitch, leading straight into your service offerings.

Once traffic clicks through to your product pages, there should be videos awaiting them there too. High-quality product videos and explainers will move traffic seamlessly through your funnel until they’re confident enough to buy–or at least become a lead. Check out this cool B2B product video by Ruby.

Make Testimonials with Real B2B Customers

One of the best ways to build confidence in potential customers is to showcase the satisfaction of your current customers. Normally, this is done via text-based reviews.

Don’t get us wrong–all reviews are critically important. Even written reviews can boost B2B conversions by up to 270%.

But video testimonials are much, much more effective. Viewers retain about 95% of the information in a video testimonial compared to 10% of a written review. And video testimonials are far better at building trust. They allow viewers to see real customers expressing their satisfaction and describing the impact of your product or service.

This engages a viewer’s sense of empathy, which a few lines of faceless text can’t do.

Here’s an example of a testimonial for the workplace management services provider Robin. It shows how a testimonial can demonstrate the value your service provides and build trust–all in under two minutes.

To maximize the impact of your testimonials and stay within budget, plan multiple videos beforehand and shoot them all in one period. Then, release them throughout your campaign.

Modernize your Social Media Presence with Video

Now that Gen Z is entering the workforce and millennials are entering higher management positions, social media is becoming a place where businesses interact with one another. B2B companies must be just as active on social media as B2C brands.

Traditional business-focused social media platforms like LinkedIn are still important places to interact, and video consumption there is growing rapidly. Modern social media users on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are now engaging primarily in video formats. About 61% of B2B marketers are boosting spending on IG, while 45% are increasing their investment in YouTube marketing. TikTok is not popular with B2B marketers yet, but this could present valuable opportunities for creative brands in the future.

Social media is the perfect place to create buzz for your brand with ads, behind-the-scenes videos, interviews, and testimonials. You can also use your social media for goodwill posts, thank you videos, and product launch videos. The idea is to post bite-sized content that offers value without miring viewers in details. More complex videos like how-to guides, explainers, and product demos are best left on your website.

Create Detailed Tutorials

If a customer is interested in your product, they want to get down to the details to understand how your offering differs from their current solution. However, they’re reluctant to leaf through pages of manuals to find what they’re looking for.

A detailed tutorial video can walk viewers through the function and benefits of your service to show them exactly how it provides value. Tutorials should be direct and dry–the goal is not to entertain, as your audience is here for a specific reason.

However, you should make your tutorials with an agenda: you need to position your product/service against the competition with every step. By the end of the video, viewers should not only understand how your product works, but they should also have a clear idea of what makes it stand out.

Modernize your B2B Marketing Campaign with Video

Now is the time to jump head-first into video in your B2B marketing campaign. The internet is being taken over by video content on websites, social media, and eCommerce stores–and the demand for video continues to grow.

If you don’t know how to produce videos or are worried about your budget, there are plenty of options to consider. For example, you can convert your blogs into videos using AI video tools at very low cost. Stock video is also a great option for splicing together videos without the need for a production crew.

Start sharing your B2B video content now to modernize your marketing efforts and increase engagement.

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The Anthropocene Cookbook. Recipes and Opportunities for Future Catastrophes, by curator and writer Zane Cerpina and curator and researcher Stahl Stenslie. Published by MIT Press.

The Anthropocene Cookbook interrogates the food we will engineer, grow, cook and consume tomorrow when population reaches 10 billion, biodiversity drops even more drastically, weather patterns are out of control, topsoil is gone and resources are depleted. The book conjures art and unbridled creativity to play out radical scenarios that will inevitably challenge food taboos and question our cultural prejudices, little hypocrisies and vision of tomorrow’s life/survival on planet Earth.

Wataru Kobayashi, BUGBUG, 2016

Kuang-Yi Ku, Tiger Penis Project, 2018

Some of the food experiments and speculative ideas described in the book might not sound that outlandish today. Many of us don’t find feasting occasionally on invasive exotic species disturbing anymore. Perhaps we wouldn’t mind tasting a long-disappeared bird. The Center for Genomic Gastronomy’s Cobalt 60 Sauce demonstrated that, for decades, we have been buying foods that came out of radiation experiments. And even though their success is not stratospheric, energy bars, pet food and hamburgers containing insects started to appear in our shops years ago. As for plastic, which we already ingest (albeit unwillingly) in breast milk, beer, sea salt and other foods, we could use it to feed organisms like meal moths, fungi and bacteria which can then be turned into nutritious edibles for livestock. And if you’re vegan or vegetarian, you’ve spent the past decade or more discussing the ethics of fake meat -a type of “imposter food” as the authors call it- whether lab-grown, plant-based or made of insects. But what if this becomes the new normal?

Nordic Food Lab and the Cambridge Distillery, Anty Gin, 2013

Marco Evaristti, Polpette al grasso di Marco (Meatballs made of Marco’s body fat), 2006

And what if other, decidedly less palatable, recipes are part of your menu in the near future? One day, we might gleefully buy products made of untapped edible resources such as sea plankton or tree bark (as in Nordic Food Lab’s birch bark bread ). Or we could explore the culinary possibilities offered by the human body: breast milk, saliva, various body bacteria, seminal fluids, our own flesh, urines, faeces and even human material removed from plastic surgeries might be included in dishes and give a new, visceral twist on the concept of locally sourced organic food.

Some artists and designers even suggest that we might one day transform our bodies to enjoy rotten food, thrive on otherwise not very energetic food sources such as cellulose, process raw materials that we cannot digest or even become more like the Elysia chlorotica, a sea slug capable of photosynthesis.

It would all be for a good cause though: the survival of the human species. Or would it? Cerpina and Stenslie underline the ambiguity of the projects they analyse in the book. These recipes might help mitigate the crisis as much as they might contribute to resource depletion and accelerate the coming collapse.

Hanan Alkouh, Sea-Meat Seaweed, 2016. Photography by Hung-chun Wang

Hanan Alkouh, Sea-Meat Seaweed, 2016. Photography by Hung-chun Wang

The Anthropocene Cookbook will test everyone’s boundaries and cognitive dissonances. I greedily grabbed a bar of Búi Adalsteinsson‘s insect snacks at an art biennial 5 years ago but I weep at some of the projects I discovered in the book, such as Paul Gong’s The Cow of Tomorrow. The future of food of humanity should be about making respectful, responsible and empathic choices. Still, our techno-fetishism means that the future will probably be filled with cruel gastronomic aberrations such as animals modified to their most absurd and cruel limits. But while insects -like the one in the chocolate bar I ate- can have higher energetic values than other animal meats, what would be the environmental impacts of large-scale industrial farming, the authors ask? And shouldn’t we take into consideration that insects might experience pain too?

The book does a brilliant job of asking these kinds of uncomfortable questions, testing our willingness to make radical changes and our tendency to fall for progress traps. It doesn’t contain any step-by-step recipes to overcome the massive threats to food security but it does use visual art – with the odd foray into science fiction movies and literature- to illustrate and build upon a vast amount of recent research studies that ponder upon the massive issue of producing nutritious food for the coming 10 billion people.

The Anthropocene Cookbook. Recipes and Opportunities for Future Catastrophes is a witty, incisive and inquisitive look at the survival of humanity, the future of pleasure and that irresistible urge we have to change everything around us in order to prosper.

Helmut Smits, The Real Thing, 2010-2017

Unsworn, Eating E.T. — Mock Alien BBQ. Photo: Antti Ahonen

Fun fact I discovered in the book: according to a 2018 research paper, the superfood of the future might be the milk of the Diploptera functata cockroach.

The Tissue Culture and Art Project, Stir Fry Nutrient Bug 1.0, 2016

Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Smog Tasting, 2011

Katharina Under, The Farm 432, 2013

Tattfoo Tan, New Earth Meals Ready to Eat (NEMRE), 2012

Related stories: Making cheese from the black mould on your wall; Future farming. How migrants can help Italian cuisine adjust to climate disruptions; Future evolutions of our food systems – Interview with After Agri; To Flavour Our Tears – A restaurant where insects can feast on us; From knitted meat to obsolete supermarket. Rethinking our food system; Age of Wonderland – Balancing Green and Fair Food; mEat me! Food for a post-anthropocentric society; Foto/Industria. The political, technological and cultural dimensions of food; Gilpin Family Whisky; Vapour Meat: a helmet to vape the essence of ‘clean meat’; Farming the Unconscious; Tomorrow’s tailor-made cows; Book review: Experimental Eating; Super Meal, Cobalt 60 Sauce, a barbecue sauce made from ‘supermarket mutants’, etc.

Source

NBA players Tobias Harris and Boban Marjanovi? advertise the biggest Goldfish crackers after last year’s ‘Go for the Handful’ campaign.

Marketing and media events to watch.

Measurement was all the buzz at Advertising Week New York.