When it comes to social media marketing, you already know video is where it’s at. And although B2B hasn’t historically been a video-focused sector, the rules of the game are changing fast.

If your social media posts aren’t creating the impact you need, now might be the time to take another look at video. In this guide, we’ll share the latest data on the rising role of video content in social media marketing, plus strategies to achieve positive results on video-focused social media platforms and others.

Hear from leading B2B experts on all things marketing. Check out our very first episode of Coffee Corner, Video Marketing: Insights and Tips for Modern Marketers.

Not too long ago, video production was complicated and expensive. Brands needed massive budgets to cover the cost of professional videographers and editors, plus specialized software and equipment.

Not anymore. Today, video is accessible and ubiquitous. B2B companies are catching up to their B2C counterparts, sharing relatable content audiences love. But as more brands rush in, the bar for high-quality content is rising.

The following steps will help you create a social media video marketing strategy you can scale, without requiring time and resources you don’t have.

The first thing to know about video, is that there’s no one blanket strategy for success. Like all things marketing, your video content should be aligned to real prospect pain points, questions, and motivations at every stage of the funnel.

For example, you wouldn’t send a trending TikTok video to a prospect who’s asking about specific product use cases. Instead, you might save the entertaining snackable videos for your brand awareness channels, and send a personalized email with a powerful video case study to your high-intent prospects.

Here are a few ways to align your video content to your marketing funnel:

• Brand awareness: Engaging video content like live streams, animations, social media trends and challenges, and how-to videos are all great video formats for capturing attention at the awareness stage.
• Capturing demand: As prospects move down the funnel to the interest stage, explainer videos, tutorials, and webinars can provide more detailed information on who you are, what you do, and how your product helps users.
• Accelerating evaluation: During the evaluation phase, video case studies, product reviews, and product videos can establish credibility and assist in the decision-making process by ensuring your prospects get their questions answered quickly.
• Customer retention: Videos can also help you increase product adoption and customer retention after the purchase stage by reinforcing trust and rapport through customer testimonials, team culture videos, and more.

With close alignment between your audience’s needs and your content, the right video can work wonders for increasing engagement at each stage of the B2B marketing funnel.

For example, the marketing team at AspenCore transformed their recorded event content into a Linkedin video post. The result?

The team got 69% of their engagement on one video post, more than they’d gotten with the entire campaign. And with the ability to repurpose videos for social media quickly via Content Lab, they were able to scale their video creation from one video per event to three or more.

Interested in transforming your B2B event videos into many different types of content? Download the full report on Rethinking Video: Why Repurposing Matters.

According to research from HubSpot, 63% of marketers believe social media is the most effective channel for promoting video. But as a consumer, you know instinctively that different platforms work better for different types of videos.

And while a Wyzowl survey of video marketers revealed that the top three most effective video marketing platforms are YouTube (78%), Facebook (71%), and Instagram (64%)—every B2B marketer knows that LinkedIn is a must.

LinkedIn generates the highest visitor-to-lead ratio conversion rate at 2.74% compared to Twitter (0.69%) and Facebook (0.77%). With figures like that, the importance of leveraging LinkedIn video for B2B marketing can’t be overemphasized.

Here are some tips from LinkedIn expert Mark Jung for leveling up your LinkedIn posts:

• Keep it brief: According to research, 39% of marketers say 30-60 seconds is the most effective video length, followed by 28% who said 1-2 minutes is best.
• Include data: B2B prospects love numbers. Aim to include data as part of your storytelling to combat short attention spans and entice them to watch your video all the way through.
• Share a unique point of view (POV): Nothing will hook your attention like a contrarian or dare we say, controversial POV. In a sea of sameness, put your unique POV in the first lines of your posts to capture that engagement.
• Only tag people you know will engage: Nothing’s worse than getting ghosted by the folks you tagged in your LinkedIn post—except maybe being the reluctant person who gets tagged. Set yourself up to win by only tagging people who you know will be happy to engage.
• Resize your images to 800x999: Proper formatting will help you take up the right amount of space on screen so you can grab your audience’s attention quickly.

While YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all have a role to play, LinkedIn remains the clear winner for B2B video marketing. Focus on optimizing your video content there first, before moving into other content types and social platforms.

Get expert insights on how to use visuals and videos on LinkedIn. Watch the full session on Get Noticed on LinkedIn: The Secret to Getting More Attention & Engagements!

As with the rest of your marketing, it’s crucial to create your video content with your marketing goals in mind. To start, consider how each video asset fits into your content flywheel.

From there, you can start designing a video production assembly line to support your objectives, without having to secure more budget for expert videographers and editors.

Think about ways you can streamline the steps involved in creating video content:

• Pre-production: This includes all the pre-planning from conceptualization, to scriptwriting, storyboarding, and more.
• Production: This part of the process encompasses both the setup and filming.
• Post-production: Here’s where you work your magic through editing and customizing each video with the right brand elements, including your custom fonts, logos, and colors.
• Review and revisions: Depending on your process and the number of people involved, you may need to add a step for collecting feedback and making revisions.
• Distribution: This includes publishing, promotion, and mobilizing any influencer partnerships you might have to make sure your video content is shared far and wide.
• Analysis: Rinse and repeat. By regularly tracking key metrics like views and engagements, you can keep your finger on the pulse of what works for each platform and adjust your social media video strategy accordingly.

If you’re doing it right, planning your content production process will go beyond video to support a multichannel marketing strategy. You can even plan your events with video content production as a goal.

For example, a webinar can be broken down into shorter clips formatted for your top social media channels and/or email marketing campaigns.You can also use those clips to promote future events on social media, increase your attendance rates, and create a virtuous cycle where your events strategy supports your video strategy, and vice versa.

Learn how to leverage social media to build excitement and cultivate loyal fans. Check out the below episode of Event Marketers Live with Darlene Smith of Guidewire & marketing consultant Susan Moore.

61% of companies cite time and bandwidth as major challenges preventing them from getting into video. But with the rise of AI and automation, it’s easy to get more out of the existing videos you already have sitting right there in your archive files.

"If you create, produce, and promote a webinar for just one hour of content and then you leave it there, it's kind of a waste,” explains Digital Marketing Manager at Birdeye, Justin Meredith. “What's great about tools like Content Lab is that they allow us to make more content out of that webinar, like a blog and video clips.”

Here are some of the ways B2B events can be repurposed for video content:

• Use reels and highlight clips from past events to promote future events
• Highlight quotes, clips, and hot takes from event speakers to build social proof
• Optimize video for search engine optimization (SEO) and add it to your top blog posts for an extra boost of traffic
• Share clips in your email marketing and sales follow-ups

No matter what type of video you’re looking to produce, the key to effective video content repurposing is to make sure each piece is tailored for the right audiences and platforms. To make it easy, consider using an AI-powered tool that can automatically generate the best clips for you.

For example, the marketing team at Qualio was able to 6x productivity by using Content Lab to repurpose their event content for social media. Senior Marketing Manager, Alex Pavolić went from spending 2-5 hours for each hour repurposing recorded event content, to generating shareable content in just five minutes.

Using Goldcast’s Smart Events feature, you can generate a range of post-event content assets in about 90 minutes. Create video clips, social content, emails and more from the same platform where you host your virtual events, webinars, and podcasts.

When it comes to getting more from less with your social media video marketing, the right automations can give you a major efficiency boost, so you can get back to your most important projects.

According to data, 63% of marketers say manual tasks prevent them from focusing on high-impact work. Meanwhile, 55% of social media marketers who use social media management tools say their social efforts contribute to revenue.

To get the revenue benefits of social media videos, without sacrificing extra bandwidth, focus on the following areas:

• Captions impact: Whatever you do, don’t skip the captions. Adding captions and subtitles to video content can boost viewer affinity by 95%, recall by 58%, likability by 31%, and uniqueness by 25%. Today, there are plenty of AI-powered tools that can quickly add captions to all your video content for you, and even translate them into different languages to help you reach a wider audience.
• Social media automation: With a content calendar and social media scheduler, you can automatically share video content across your chosen social media channels, without having to manually log in and out of each platform.
• AI integration: Marketers are already leveraging AI to generate captions, transcripts, descriptions, time stamps and more. Take time to intentionally choose the right tool for your needs and decide which parts of the process should always have human involvement vs. those that can be effectively outsourced to AI.

The right AI and automation tools are like a magic wand for your social media strategy. You get to skip the manual grind of watching, rewatching, time stamping, and clipping, and dive straight into the stuff that leaves a lasting impact on your audience.

Join us as we debate, dissect, and discuss the most pressing issues and innovative strategies in B2B marketing. Sign up for the Coffee Corner series and find out what really works in B2B!

So, you've created stunning video content. Congrats! Unfortunately, the work’s not done just yet.

Now it's time to get your videos out there and seen by the right audience. The following steps will help you maximize the reach and impact of your videos across channels:

• Optimize for each platform: Tailor your videos for specific social media platforms, considering the audience behaviors and preferences on each. For example, you might create short, attention-grabbing clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts, and more informative long-form videos for YouTube and LinkedIn.
• Enhance visibility: Keep it eye-catching with engaging thumbnails, compelling captions, and relevant hashtags to draw users in and ensure your videos capture their attention and win their view.
• Leverage multimodal content pipeline: Embrace the power of mixed content. Break down your recordings into bite-sized snippets, quote graphics, audiograms, and infographics suited for different platforms.

“When looking at statistics, we know that human beings prefer to consume messaging and content that is mixed. Pure text isn’t as appealing as text plus video and text plus video plus images,” says Kelly Cheng, Head of Marketing at Goldcast.

By combining text, video, and images in your social media marketing, you can make every post more appealing and amplify the impact of your videos across channels.

The goal posts with video marketing are constantly moving. Take time to track and analyze the performance of your video assets so you can do more of what works.

Let’s take a closer look at the top three metrics to focus on.

Different platforms have different ways of measuring your view counts. Here’s how the major platforms measure a view, according to the folks at Sprout Social:

• YouTube: When someone intentionally watches your YouTube video for 30 seconds.
• Facebook: When someone views your video for 3 seconds (this is the same for Live videos).
• Instagram: Video views count after 3 seconds. Live video views count as soon as someone joins the broadcast.
• Twitter: When a viewer watches your video for two seconds with at least 50% of the video player on their screen.
• LinkedIn: Views here are also counted after two seconds with at least half the video in view.
• TikTok: Views count as soon as your video starts playing in someone’s feed.

According to Wistia’s 2024 State of Video report, engagement rates peak for shorter videos, decrease for videos between 5 and 30 minutes in length, and significantly drop for videos that are an hour long. Below are the average engagement rates, broken down by video length:

• >1 minute - 50%
• 1-3 minutes - 48%
• 3-5 minutes - 47%
• 5-30 minutes - 39%
• 30-60 minutes - 26%
• >60 minutes - 17%

According to Wistia’s findings, videos that run over five minutes often see higher conversions and click-through rates (CTRs). The report also found that the best place to place a conversion opportunity is within the first or final quarter of a video.

The top conversion opportunities in videos are:

• Annotation links (45%)
• Call-to-action (CTA) (40%)
• Email capture forms (15%)

By tracking the right metrics, you can make sure your investment in video continues to pay off long-term, even as you expand your strategy to include new channels and formats.

As mentioned, AI can be a powerful ally in executing a high-impact video marketing strategy—but it’s far from perfect. “It's a super versatile tool. And so what you don't want to do is use it as a hammer when it really should be being used as a screwdriver,” explains Dr. Lisa Palmer, CEO and founder of Dr. Lisa AI.

Here are some of the do’s and don’ts when enlisting the help of AI in your social media video marketing strategy.

Use AI for:

• Automated closed captioning: AI works like a charm when it comes to text recognition. Use it to rapidly generate closed captions for social media videos to make your content more accessible for a wider audience.
• Graphics enhancement: AI also shines with visual elements. Use it to update or customize your branding and create more engaging, interactive, and visually appealing content for viewers.
• Video editing assistance: AI-powered video editing tools can help streamline the editing process and make it easy to maintain quality and consistency across platforms.

Do not use AI for:

• Content strategy development: AI isn’t suitable for determining the overall content strategy for your social media video marketing. It takes human creativity and a deep understanding of the target audience to craft engaging video content.
• Real-time engagement and responses: Avoid relying solely on AI for real-time engagement with your audience on social media. Personalized responses are essential for building genuine connections with followers.
• Creative storytelling and brand voice: AI may fall short in capturing the nuances of creative storytelling and maintaining your brand's unique voice. For an authentic and compelling narrative, keep a human marketer behind the wheel.
• Impact assessment: While AI can assist in data analysis, it may not always capture the full impact of video marketing efforts accurately. To fully understand the effectiveness of your video campaigns, rely on an expert marketer who can put the numbers in context.

When deciding which tasks to delegate to AI, experts like Lisa recommend thinking of AI as a “wildly informed digital concierge” as a way to work within its limitations and identify tasks where AI can truly shine. “Make sure you're asking it for appropriate assistance, just like you would a concierge,” she suggests.

When it comes to social media video marketing, it's all about finding the right balance between human creativity and the power of AI. That’s where the right tools can be a game changer for B2B marketing teams.

Goldcast's engagement tools not only help you create authentic moments that can be transformed into attention-grabbing social media videos, they also give you insights into how your audience is engaging with your content so you know exactly which moments to clip.

With Content Lab, you can turn your event highlights into catchy, shareable videos for social media platforms in a click.

Elevate your marketing strategy with the power of video. Try the freemium version of Content Lab and start building your own video production assembly line. Or book a demo of Goldcast to see Smart Events in action.