It’s hard to believe there was ever a time when going live on-screen required a six- to seven-figure media budget. As the barrier of entry gets lower for video marketing, everyone from our grandparents to our second cousins, and even our pets, are going live.

And you better believe B2B marketers are getting in on the action. But as more B2B brands rush in, how exactly should you be using video marketing to stand out and grow more pipeline?

In this go-to guide to effective B2B video marketing, we’ll share successful video strategies, plus tips for how your events can make them easy to execute.

If you’re here, you’ve probably tried your hand at video marketing. Between the planning, re-watching, timestamping, and editing—you know it’s a lot harder than it looks.

But you can’t win the game if you’re not on the field. And with 82% of consumers saying they’ve been persuaded to make a purchase because of a video, you can’t afford to sit this one out.

For many B2B marketers, events are the natural place to start.

They’re live. They’re authentic. And with the right platform, they can help you form a strategy where both engagement and ROI can be tracked and measured.

Here are just some of the ways video can roll into your broader multichannel marketing strategy:

• Set clear goals: Pinpoint the broader marketing goals your video marketing should contribute to so you can assign the right metrics to the right programs.
• Repurpose content for other programs: For maximum ROI, use your video source content to fuel snackable snippets for social media, sales follow-ups, account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, and more.
• Allocate production budget to video: By investing some of your production or media spend to in-house video creation, you can layer it into your existing processes and begin to identify the use cases with the best ROI.
• Find the right partners: Depending on your scope and budget, you could opt to partner with an agency, build or tap into your internal team, or opt for a hybrid approach.

Last but in no way least: use events as source material.

From spicy hot takes delivered by big-name keynotes to shared laughs with an engaged target audience, digital events are a goldmine of long-form video content that can be repurposed into smaller videos to capture attention quickly on any channel.

That is, as long as you’ve got strong production value and plenty of engaging, shareworthy moments to pick from. But more on that in a minute. First, let’s examine some of the hard benefits video marketing can deliver.

At the end of the day, B2B customers are people too.

With the rise of the creator economy, they expect immersive content marketing experiences just like the rest of us. And they want access to those experiences whenever and wherever they choose.

“For us, audio and video is hugely important and is a growing percentage of our content offering. And it’s really because we want to meet advisors where they are and serve up our content in the way they want to consume it," says Sarah Johnson, Co-Head of Global Marketing at Capital Group during a recent episode of CMO Diaries.

Like so many others, Sarah’s prospects are spending more time on social media. In fact, according to data from LinkedIn, 75% of B2B buyers currently use social media to make buying decisions.

And that’s not all. Here are a few more reasons why video is one of the sharpest weapons in the B2B marketing toolkit:

• Video ads tend to have cheaper cost per engagement than other formats.
• Viewers retain 95% of a video's message compared to 10 % when reading text.
• By some estimates, social video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined.

“If you’re a financial advisor driving to work in the morning listening to your favorite podcast platform we want to be there. If you’re watching a YouTube video on your lunch break, we want to be there… It’s really just wanting to meet that expectation,” explains Sarah.

In an age when the average consumer’s day begins with Alexa and ends with Netflix, B2B video marketing is effective because it gives prospects the ‘everything everywhere’ experience they’ve come to expect.

But in order to get there, you’ll need an effective, trackable, and above all, ROI-friendly, video marketing strategy.

Alright, you’re all in on video. Next question: where the heck do you even start?

Here are the essential elements every effective B2B video marketing strategy should include.

With 500 minutes of video uploaded to the internet per second the noise is loud. To create video content that actually moves the needle, you need to know what you want out of the process to begin with.

Your overarching objective for your video marketing could be any number of things, including:

• Increase brand awareness
• Build thought leadership
• Reach new target audiences
• Drive engagement
• Grow brand loyalty

Based on what you already know about your ideal customer profile (ICP) and where they hang out, you can start devising a plan for how you’ll use video to capture their attention and guide them toward your ultimate goal.

Your budget is the backbone that supports your reach and impact with B2B video marketing. But with 89% of marketers planning to increase their spend on audio and video programs, where exactly should you be focusing?

Here are a few steps to take while setting your video marketing budget:

• Research the landscape: This preliminary stage of planning can make or break your ROI on video. Before you shell out for celebrity speakers, take time to understand your niche, goals, and the type of video content your ICP engages with.
• Scope and strategy: You know you need high-end production, but what about everything else? B2B influencers, marketing automation technology, and external agencies should all be accounted for in your video marketing budget.
• Program and media spend: Review your entire marketing budget and consider the ways video might add cost pressure in some areas, while driving ROI in others. Can you safely or effectively reallocate parts of the budget to video?
• Use the tools you have: If you’re already using a digital event platform for your webinars and virtual events, you don’t need to invest in a video production agency or expensive editing software. Consider the resources you have before thinking about bringing on new partners or tools.

Once you’ve got your budget mapped out, you can keep it organized and on-track using a project kickoff template. With a central document for the whole team, you can ensure every penny of your budget is allocated to an element that supports your key objectives.

No matter where or when potential customers are viewing your content, your brand’s story is the thing that ties it all together.

Here are some practical tips to help you produce branded video content at scale:

• Showcase your brand's personality: Whether it’s a deep dive or a two-minute snippet, build trust with viewers by maintaining a consistent voice and tone across channels. And don’t be afraid to have a little fun with it!
• Think like a media company: Branded entertainment is another powerful way of engaging your audience. By owning your channel and your audience, you can use your video content to educate, entertain, and enlighten—then turn around and use that engagement as a gateway to long-term sales.
• Keep a consistent style: People trust consistency. Use high-impact branding to help your videos stand out in a sea of competition and ensure that viewers immediately associate the video with your unique brand.

When it came to repurposing his video content for social, Devin Reed, Head of Content at enterprise revenue platform Clari, knew he had to keep the focus on solving his audience’s pain points with real sales plays his audience could immediately act on to increase their commissions.

From a single long-form event video, he clipped three unique prospecting power plays to keep the conversation going. And the best part? He generated all three in a matter of minutes.

When it comes to video, it's all about delivering the right message at the right time to the right people.

Your content should align with both the channel and the stage of the buying journey your prospect is currently in.

Here are some of the types of B2B video marketing assets you can create:

• Snackable content for social media
• Explainer videos
• Tutorials and how-to videos
• Case studies
• Live streams
• Live events
• Webinars
• Team/Customer culture videos
• Educational videos
• Video podcasts
• Expert interviews
• New product demos
• Product videos
• Animations
• On-demand video library

Honestly, sky’s the limit. At the early stages of the funnel, you might choose to lean into content that includes industry trends and thought leadership, like a video discussing the state of your industry from a trusted subject matter expert.

When your buyers move into the consideration phase, you can prioritize product how-tos and case studies. And of course, customer testimonial videos are powerful action triggers no matter what stage your prospective buyers are in.

With multiple formats to choose from, you’ll have full-funnel video content that fuels the entire B2B buyer journey.

Despite the fact that half of in-house marketers say deep subject matter expertise is their top priority when outsourcing B2B content, the pressure to keep up often results in cut corners and mediocre content.

Rather than having to constantly create new material for new channels, smart B2B marketers are repurposing their B2B video content to extend its marketing shelf life and maximize their overall ROI.

All you need is one valuable, high-impact piece of content to pull from—and maybe a little help from AI.

Here are some of the ways you can use AI to rapidly create video content for multiple marketing channels:

• Remove filler words from large video transcripts
• Make faster video edits
• Automatically apply your branding and call to action (CTA)
• Format to meet the tech specifications for each channel
• Ask it to suggest new content ideas based on your long-form video content

Check out how Goldcasts Content Lab uses AI to make video repurposing easier:

With the right process in place, content repurposing can allow you to save time and resources, while maintaining an active presence on all the right channels.

And by integrating time-saving tools like AI into the video repurposing process, you can bring content projects in-house to reduce costs, bypass agency deliverability dates, and give teams the content they need to elevate your email marketing and follow up faster with key accounts.

Rather than staged actors or stock footage, events are live and authentic. They deliver real moments of engagement with a real audience—one that’s already bought into your brand’s story.

And by turning your event content into collateral fuel your long-term video marketing strategy, you can deliver excellent ROI on your video marketing efforts.

Goldcast is here to help make it happen. With high-quality video production and engagement tools, you can make your digital events your number one source of top-performing video content. You can harness the power of live translations and captioning to make your videos accessible to the widest possible audience, and use Goldcast’s On-Demand branded event hubs to provide 24/7 access to your audience long after your event closes.

And that’s not all. With a little help from Content Lab, you can use AI to create shareable video content fit for any channel, in a fraction of the time.

[Raise your game with B2B video marketing. Book a demo of Goldcast today or request your free trial of Content Lab and start repurposing!]