The Ultimate B2B Video Production Guide

Over the last several decades, text and print media has been the primary communication, marketing, advertising, and sales medium for businesses looking to acquire B2B (business-to-business) clients for their products or services.  In the last few years, however, the game has changed entirely.  Video and B2B Video Production now dominates most content consumption on the internet, with the average person spending 100 minutes each day watching video content online.

For businesses who aren’t utilizing video in their current marketing and outreach strategies, this is missing an enormous segment of the market and an opportunity that’ll only get more saturated as time goes on.

Nowadays, it’s become more critical for businesses to step up and embrace video production if they want to grab potential clients’ attention and keep them engaged.

In this guide, we’ll walk through everything your business needs to know to start producing excellent videos, from start to finish. We’ll begin by exploring why B2B video marketing and B2B video production is vital for business, how you can create a video production plan, what the production process typically looks like, and then dive into what you do with the video content you produce to grow your business.

Ready to dive into video production? Let’s begin!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine what you can communicate through a well-intentioned video? What would take several paragraphs of text or multiple images to explain can now be done in a matter of seconds.

This is the essence of B2B video production, creating video content that’s used for marketing and promoting your products and services.

The Rapid Rise of Video Content

Since video is increasingly being used on every corner of the web, now more than ever, it makes sense to incorporate a video production strategy into your company if you want to experience rapid growth and reach vast numbers of prospective customers you previously wouldn’t have access to.

Video allows you to visually educate your audience about your business while supporting those visuals with audio narration and explaining why they should pay attention to your offerings.

Best of all, creating video content lets you reach prospects at every stage of the customer journey. You can create videos intended to grab the attention of cold prospects who have never heard of you and create videos for prospective customers who are further along in the customer journey and just need an extra “push” to get them to partner with you.

Video is quickly becoming one of the essential communication mediums on the internet, and taking advantage of this trend by creating a B2B video production strategy and workflow is very likely to pay dividends in the long run.

B2B vs. B2C Video Production

Is there a difference between B2B and B2C video production? The answer is a resounding yes.

B2C (business-to-consumer) video production is typically all about branding and highlighting certain features and benefits of a product or service. In this case, the decision maker and the buyer are the same individuals, and you must persuade them that your solution is the one they should go with.

B2B videos, on the other hand, require you to target both the decision makers and the end users simultaneously. Often it isn’t the decision-makers who find out about products or services that can help them streamline or grow certain aspects of their business, but employees and workers who are dealing with that particular problem daily and suggest a solution to their higher-ups.

On a B2B level, your video content should get both internal buy-in and decision-maker approval if you want to land a new impactful client. Since B2B products and services are usually more complex than their consumer counterparts, you’ll also need to include enough detail in your video production efforts to explain the exact benefits and use-cases of your products or services.

To put it simply, B2B and B2C video production have some similarities, but B2B videos must target end-users and decision-makers, while also including enough compelling information about the solutions they offer to make them a “no-brainer” to your target audience.

In the following few chapters, we will discuss the process of creating compelling B2B videos that help your company land more clients and achieve your growth and revenue goals.

Before you start producing your B2B video, you need to identify a clear objective for your video content, what clients you’ll target, and what stage of the customer journey your video intends to go after.

As they say, “Failing to plan is planning to fail,” and this couldn’t hold more true when it comes to producing a video that’s compelling, attention-grabbing, and easy to understand. Throwing different ideas at the wall and “hoping” something sticks doesn’t cut it, especially if you have a strict budget, timeline, and resources to create a video for your company.

In this chapter, we’ll walk through the first steps your business needs to complete before you go any further, including ensuring your customer research is complete and determining the customer awareness stage your video content is intended to target.

This means defining your brand tone, identifying your target audience, polishing your messaging, and ensuring your video content will meet specific campaign goals.

Dive Into Customer Research

Customer research is critical to successful marketing, advertising, promotional, or educational campaigns. If you don’t know who your video is intended to sway or persuade, how will you ever be able to achieve your goals?

When doing market research for B2B, remember that your B2B prospects may need more convincing compared to standard consumers. Additionally, B2B customers will be more scarce, meaning you need to have a distinct competitive advantage that you clearly illustrate in your marketing.

To execute a solid B2B market research plan and understand your prospects better than they understand themselves, your business should:

• Identify the stakeholders – Who are the decision makers responsible for choosing whether or not to work with your company?
• Talk to those who’ll use your product or service  – No matter what product or service your business is pitching to prospective B2B clients, it’s always worth asking the actual end-users (i.e., employees, workers, executives) what they think of your solution, and what it would take for them to pitch it to their management.
• Sort through the data – Look at data from research panels, surveys, or other industry trends that can help you identify what your clients want.

As we’ve previously mentioned, your ultimate goal in this stage is to understand your prospective clients better than they understand themselves. To get to this stage, you’ll have to do some digging, ask questions, and “pick up the floorboards” to find the true hidden gems underneath.

Determine Customer Awareness Stages and Video Goals

Every video you produce should have a specific goal, targeting a persona at a certain stage in the customer journey.

When creating compelling content that speaks to your target audience, the only way to create something that stands out from the crowd and resonates is by narrowing down your focus and creating a video that’s made specifically for that individual.

For example, say you identified what the executives in your industry are looking for in the product or service you provide. You know what they need to hear to allocate budget and resources to begin working with your company. Your business should leverage this understanding to create a video targeted to that particular executive and speak to what they are thinking and wanting to hear. It should be as if your solution fell in their lap, precisely what they’ve been looking for this entire time.

Similarly, suppose you’re targeting prospective customers who are “cold targets” and aren’t even aware your business exists. In that case, your first order of business is creating video content that educates them about the problem and informs them that there are solutions that exist.

Take some time to brainstorm your goals and narrow down the exact stage of the customer journey that your video targets. After you’ve completed your customer research and identified your primary video production goals, it’s time to move on to video pre-production.

The video pre-production stage is where the rough form of your video content begins to take shape, but it can often take the most significant amount of time to get just right.

Believe it or not, actually filming your video is one of the shortest parts of the entire video production process! Most of the work is done upfront, researching information about your target audience and planning your video content from start to finish.

The Pre-Production Checklist

Since this is the most important stage of the video production process, it’s important to slow down, take your time, and flesh out any ideas you may have in the pre-production phase. Talk to your teammates and coworkers and make sure you’re all on the same page, and only move onto the video production live shooting stage when everyone is satisfied with the plan for your video.

To make the video production planning process as simple as possible, we’ve put together a checklist of items you should complete in the pre-production stage. Complete and review each item, and you’ll quickly begin to see the vision for your video come to life.

The Video Production Planning Process:

• Create a timeline for your video – This is the “core” of your video and will identify what needs to occur at each moment.
• Put together a creative brief – A creative brief is a document that keeps everyone on the same page. This will include information about the purpose of your video, your target audience, the tone of the video, resources required, and budget information.
• Identify a budget for your video – Identify the budget and resources your business can allocate to your video. To come up with a more realistic estimate, you can identify the potential return on investment (ROI) your video will provide and work from there.
• Write the script – Write out everything that will happen in the video from start to finish, and who will say what if narration or actors are required.
• Create a storyboard – To flesh out the vision for your video in more detail, draw out frames at critical moments in your video to bring the timeline to life. No need to get artistic here and rough sketches are fine. The important thing is that everyone agrees with the flow and content of your video.
• Recruit actors and extras if necessary – If you have a larger budget for hiring actors or extras, recruit them and make the necessary preparations to have them come in for live shooting.

If your business follows this checklist, no matter what type of video budget you may have, you’ll be able to create a compelling video that speaks to your target market. Looking at the long view, this helps your company grow and very likely helps you achieve a positive ROI on video production.

It’s finally time to flip on the lights, fire up those cameras, and shoot live footage for your video. Most people think this is where the bulk of the time and effort goes, but at this point, you should have already spent approximately 80% of your time in the pre-planning and customer research phase. Now that you’re here, you have a solid plan for your video, and it’s complete and ready to execute with precision.

Choose a Location

If you already know where to shoot your video, you should prepare that location for your live-action production efforts. If you haven’t, this is the time to find a location that would best match the storyboard you put together earlier.

Take the time to prepare the background and foreground at the location you’ll be shooting, and make sure there aren’t any distractions that’ll take focus away from the primary subjects in your scene. For a better shot, you can also utilize the “rule of thirds” in your scene’s staging.

Configure Camera Settings

Your camera settings and video quality must be clear and crisp to represent your business professionally. Filming with a high-quality DSLR or mirrorless camera is recommended. If you aren’t sure about how to go about filming yourself, note that it may be worth hiring a professional videographer if it plays into your budget.

Set Up Lighting and Sound

The lighting of your scene and any sound the viewer will hear are just as important as the scene itself. What type of feel or tone do you want to demonstrate in your video? While most of this can be added later in post-production, it’s essential to set up the scene in a way that still gets you at least halfway there to be more efficient and save editing time.

Shoot Your Shot

Once your location is chosen, the camera is set up and ready to go, and your lighting and sound are configured, you’re ready to begin taking your live-action shots!

This is the part of the process where you’ll need to go with your storyboard and film each shot in the way you had them set up and planned for. Once this step is complete, congratulations! You now have the footage you need to move into post-production and create a video your business is truly proud of.

Once your video footage has been captured, it’s time to move into the post-production stage and edit your video into the masterpiece that your audience will see. This step can be time-consuming and involves a lot of effort, talent, software tools, and patience.

Businesses often underestimate how much time it’ll take to edit a video after all of the footage has been filmed. Still, editing makes your scenes flow together and provides the experience you truly want for your viewers.

Determining Whether You’ll Hire Editors

Suppose you have experience editing videos and know your way around some of the professional video production software available on the market today. In that case, it is possible to edit your video yourself.

However, If your company’s budget allows for it, it may be worth hiring a professional video editor. A professional can make short work of your video and turn your footage into precisely the type of flow and post-production masterpiece you’re looking for.

Identify Video Editing Software and Add-ons

If your business opts to hire a professional video editor, they’ll likely bring their software and video editing toolkit that they’re familiar and comfortable with.

On the other hand, if you’re going to be editing in-house and don’t already have video editing software, some of the most commonly used software packages include:

• Adobe Premiere Professional
• VEGAS Professional
• CyberLink PowerDirector
• Adobe Premiere Elements
• Pinnacle Studio
• Apple iMovie

The software you choose is essential, but what’s even more important is that you can learn it quickly and use it efficiently.

Find a video software package that balances your skillset and the time you have to spend in post-production.

Animation & Visual FX

To make your video more engaging, you can add animations and visual effects into your video during post-production. This can include adding branded intros and outros, fine-tuning audio and sound effects, and placing transitions that complement the flow of the video.

Video Optimization

Since you’ll likely be publishing your video across multiple platforms and various forms of media, it’s important to optimize your video for the web and multiple devices. This is done in post-production by changing the dimensions of your rendered video and using video compression to make the video file portable.

Once your video has been created, it’s time to promote it and show it to the world!

This is the step you’ve been waiting for, where your target audience can finally see your creation and decide if they want to partner with your business. We’ll explain the best ways you can promote your video and where the ideal locations for publishing your video are around the web.

Social Media Platforms

One of the most common places businesses publish video content is social media. Whether this is Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform your target audience hangs out on, your business should always publish your video there for maximum exposure.

Keep track of how many people interact with your video on each social media platform, and determine which platform gets the most engagement. Are there more comments and reactions on LinkedIn compared to other platforms? If so, your company should consider prioritizing your video efforts there.

YouTube and Streaming Channels

YouTube and online video platforms are quickly becoming one of the most frequented and viewed sites on the web. If your business isn’t publishing your video content to these platforms, you could miss out on thousands of potential views and even customers who might have purchased or converted if given a chance.

Best of all, platforms like YouTube also index your video in search engines like Google, making it possible for your video to be found organically by people searching for topics around your business online. These organic visitors are highly valued and have more potential to convert and purchase from your business.

Advertising and Marketing Campaigns

Another common use-case for video content in B2B production is using your video in online advertising. This could be advertising across third-party websites, social media, or other channels you know your audience frequents.

Paid advertising is a great way to get instant exposure to your video content and ensure that the viewers you want to see your video are actually seeing it on the web.

In addition to the instant exposure paid advertising provides, your business will also receive a slew of valuable data and information about how your video is performing, allowing you to make data-driven changes and improve your marketing and promotion efforts in the future.

While most B2B companies will create a video and stop there, there are ways you can repurpose your videos into different file formats and mediums, making them more accessible to your target market.

The possibilities for multipurpose videos are endless, such as taking out clips and creating short video snippets that can be consumed more quickly.

In this chapter, we’re going to discuss multipurpose video content and how you can simultaneously create videos that appeal to multiple segments of your target audience or videos that can be repurposed to accomplish your promotional and marketing goals.

Repurposing Video Content

When you create your first B2B video, the final video file you receive from post-production isn’t all that your content can be. That one video clip can be repurposed into multiple platforms and file formats.

Consider repurposing your video content and making it easier for your audience to consume by:

• Splitting up your larger video into smaller clips – When browsing online, some people only give a video that catches their eye a few seconds of attention. If you can split up your primary video into smaller clips that are some of the most attention-grabbing and provocative, you can prompt someone to learn more about your business.
• Turning your video into audio content – You can strip out the video channel and leave the audio on its own, creating an audiobook or possible podcast. Of course, this depends on how visual the content you’re describing in your video is, but if it can be understood by just listening to the audio alone, this could be an excellent way to repurpose your primary content into other mediums.
• Transcribing your video – Turn your video content into a blog post or text snippets by transcribing your video’s audio content and re-publishing the text in locations where your target audience resides.

We hope this section has given you some creative ideas about repurposing your video content and using it in more ways than one. Instead of creating new content batches every single time, taking your video and turning it into smaller short clips, audiobooks, podcasts, blog posts, or text snippets can be a great way to reach a larger audience without more work.

Your video is live and getting views; what do you do next? If your business isn’t already set up to track video analytics and how viewers are interacting with your video content, you’re missing a valuable source of data. This data can give insight into what people like and don’t like and whether they are sticking around until the end.

Measuring the success of your video is as important as the creation of your video itself. This means your business needs to identify the metrics you’ll track to measure whether your video is a success.

Some of the metrics your company may want to consider measuring include:

• Video views – How many people have watched your video to date?
• Video play rate – Out of all of the impressions your video gets, how many people stop and play your video?
• Social media shares – If your video is engaging, you should see it being shared across social media. How many social media shares is your video content getting?
• Click through rate (CTR) – If you have a call to action on your video, what percentage of video viewers are clicking through to your landing page or target destination? If this number is low, what can you do to optimize our click-through rate?
• Conversion rate – This is the most important metric of all, and it measures what percentage of video viewers convert and take the final action you want them to take. This could be signing up to your email list or purchasing your product or service.

Video analytics and tracking are as important as the video you’ve spent all this time creating.

By periodically looking at your video’s data, which sections of your video people are watching, and whether or not they are converting, you’ll be able to identify areas you can improve instantaneously.

When it comes to producing a B2B video, there’s no shortage of potential topics or types of videos your business can choose to make. We’re going to walk through several types of videos you can make and explore what makes these types of videos great for B2B marketing and promotion.

Explainer Videos – These videos typically speak to prospects who are still in the “awareness stage” and need more information about how your products or services work. You aim to teach your audience something novel that they don’t already know about your product or service and show them why your solutions matter.

Product Videos – Product videos are perfect for showing off all the benefits of your product (or service) and are intended for customers in the decision stage. These prospects know that they are ready to invest in a solution to their problem, one that your product or service solves, but they need convincing that going with you is the best choice.

Case Study Videos – Case studies are a great way to illustrate that the products or services you provide work and that others use them to benefit their business directly. You can use case studies to tell a compelling story about your business, your products or services, and dive into the benefits of the solutions you provide in greater detail.

Branding Videos – Branding videos would appear on generic areas of your company website, such as your homepage, and are used to show customers who you are and what you do in a simple and straightforward way.

Expert Interviews – Interviewing experts fall into multiple areas of the customer journey since it appeals to people in the awareness, consideration, and decision stages simultaneously. A great interview will show prospective customers what your business is about, help answer questions they may have, and get them more familiar with what you’re all about.

Behind the Scenes Videos – Everything so far has been about the customer-facing image your business exemplifies, but what about showing prospects what you have going on behind the scenes? Doing a behind-the-scenes video will allow your audience to understand your background processes and workflows and even learn something they didn’t know before.

Event Videos – If your company hosts or attends a particular industry-wide event that can resonate with your target audience, it may be worth documenting it in a video that can be shared across social media, on your website, and across other video distribution channels. This provides a more “informal” friendly view of your business.

Even though this wasn’t an exhaustive list, these types of videos should get you started and heading in the right direction when it comes to your video production efforts. Each of these video types is intended for a specific phase of the customer journey, and each of them has its own appeal.

Be sure to mix and match different video types in order to gain maximum results and exposure to your target audience. What resonates with one individual won’t typically resonate with everyone else, and having different types of video content ensures that you’ll be able to capture more attention and, as a result, grow your business further over time with video production. 

You’ve produced your B2B video and are ready to utilize it to its fullest potential – what do you do next? This chapter will cover the power of B2B video content and where companies typically use their videos to extract maximum utility and ROI.

Video and the Client Experience

There’s no better way to share your vision, goals, and enthusiasm for the products and services you provide than through video that snags viewers’ attention and shows them how to solve their long-lasting problems.

Your potential B2B clients will appreciate the improved customer experience you can provide with video content, especially when it comes to educating them about your solutions or helping them troubleshoot while using your product or service.

Educational videos can show your clients what your offerings are all about and give them a clear picture and understanding of how your company can benefit them.

Similarly, your existing clients will appreciate common frequently asked questions, troubleshooting guides, or usage guides in a video format that they can easily digest.

The final point remains – video content is a great way to level up your client experience and give your prospects or existing clients a simple way to digest the information you provide.

B2B Buyers Love Video 

Video is often called the “king of content, ” which couldn’t be more true in our digital age. If a B2B client has a particular problem they want to be solved, one that your business provides the solution for, one of the largest barriers standing in the way is their understanding and clarity of your solution.

Video content lets your company point out the primary features and benefits of your products or services and show them what your offerings can do for them in real-time. Instead of trying to explain your product through text or over the phone on a sales call, video content gives them clarity like never before.  This makes them much more likely to see the benefits and partner with your business.

When it comes to branding, first impressions matter. What do your prospects see when they first notice your company? Are they thinking what you want them to be thinking?

Video is an excellent medium for brand growth.  It allows you to make a professional first impression and explain what you do in a visual way that anyone can understand. The combination of video and audio content helps your potential clients understand what your business can do for them and what solutions you’ll be able to offer.

Video is Effortlessly Shareable

Growing your brand is about creating a consistent image across all media, one your customers can recognize anywhere. Fortunately, the shareable nature of video content can significantly level up your branding efforts.

When your brand’s logo, colors, or name are mentioned, potential clients should immediately be able to relate your brand with a particular industry or niche. If you can get to this point, you’ve successfully won the branding game.

Using video content, your brand can create videos that grab attention and cause viewers to share them with friends, family members, and acquaintances. This “viral” spread can lead to instant recognition of your brand, something that would’ve taken significantly longer had it not been for your company’s video production efforts.

Choosing the right B2B Video Production Agency for your business is no easy task.  Especially if you want to produce professional videos representing your company in the best way possible. We’ll explore several strategies you can implement to narrow your search, ensuring you find an agency that’s a good fit.

Your first order of business should be to verify the reputation of the agency you want to work with. Are they real experts in their field? Do they have happy customers who they’ve produced video content for in the past? Determine whether or not the agency has delivered results in the past.  This is often the best predictor of the future.

Once the vetting stage has been completed, you’ll want to get in touch with the agency.  Talk with them about your specific goals for video production. They should be clear on what your business wants to achieve and may even provide valuable feedback.

If your business is ready to work with a trusted B2B Video Production Agency and turn your vision into a video masterpiece, contact the GoingClear team today to discuss your B2B Video Production goals.