Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Why B2B should STOP using YouTube in Social Media / Content Marketing

B2B organizations have been dependent on YouTube for sharing product demo videos, insights on new developments, product servicing videos, etc. to customers. These videos are used for marketing and customer support as well.

But YouTube has been blocked by most of the corporates, so employees cannot view videos during work hours and as it distracts.  YouTube doesn’t offer landing page for videos or lead generation facility for B2B. These have adversely affected B2B organization’s as they have to courier CDs of product demo and servicing videos to customers, and use other content marketing tools for lead generation. Time has come for B2B organization’s to identify better tools for video sharing, along with landing pages for lead generation and analytics.

Content marketing is most essential for B2B organizations and videos play major role in content marketing. Most B2B organizations have corporate clients for whom they offer products or services, as YouTube is blocked this becomes very difficult to engage with them.  Here are few examples how Video helps B2B in engagement.

  1. Email marketing with Videos: Using videos for email marketing can increase Click – Through – Ratio (CTR) for the campaign. Using video streaming server helps to view the video in the email box itself thus increases engagement with customers. These videos should be not more than 60 seconds and have landing pages incorporated in the emailer for lead generation, which helps to attract customers to website by showing trailer videos. 
  2. Video landing Pages: Using video landing pages during social media and search engine optimization campaign helps for more time spent on each page, thus increasing engagement with customer. Usually website visitors tend to view video rather than spend time reading the entire content. 
  3. Analytics of videos: Video streaming websites offer better analytics about viewing patterns of the video; this helps to filter target audience based on engagement levels. Better the analytics and better will be the marketing strategy. 
  4. Customer Support: This is the most important element of marketing, whether offering demo of the product / service or helping in solving errors in the product. As YouTube is blocked by most corporates, sending a video of product demo or servicing becomes tedious process, with video streaming, B2B doesn’t have to worry about blocked content; the video directly opens in email box. Since it is stream from different server’s chances of the server getting blocked is very less. 
  5. Testimonials: One of the best marketing tools for B2B organizations are testimonials from clients, these are the most effective tools and can be marketed along with case studies. As most customers don’t have time to read through the content, viewing videos  with case study and testimonial capsules helps to engage, since it increases me-too factor and spread word – of – mouth.
 There are many companies offering services of video streaming like

  • Bomb Bomb
  • Get Response
  • HTML5 video plugin is supported by high number of mail boxes, which can help in video marketing