Most industries are now turning to video as a key marketing and sales channel. Here we consider a sector using it to great effect.
According to industry data, tech marketers are creating the most video, ahead of professional services and media (source: Smart Insights).
Small wonder social media platforms from tech giants like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok are driven by visual content. They’re also adept at using video for their own marketing, from explainer animations for complicated features, to high-spec brand ads showcasing the latest must-have products.
So the saying goes, a video is worth 1.8 million words (source: Forrester/Dr James McQuivey). For an area at the mercy of a consumer culture of ‘look before you buy’, giving people the opportunity to explore products and services via video is crucial.
In fact, almost half of internet users seek out video before heading in-store (source: HubSpot); a figure that’s only likely to increase following the Coronavirus pandemic. Video also has a strong foothold in b2b. It ranks as the fourth-favoured marketing tactic among b2b marketers at IT companies in North America and Europe (source: Spiceworks) on 31%, behind ABM at 49%, as well as on-demand content and influencer marketing.
The same group ranked video among the top three types of marketing content they produced in 2019 across a number of uses, ranging from driving leads to driving brand or product awareness. Tech is on top of the pile in video marketing output with some great stories other sectors can learn from.
Levels of sophistication
Ruth Plater, CEO & Founder at Radial Path and former senior marketer at multiple leading telco organisations, gives us the following insight:
“For launching technology, video is an essential part of the marketing mix. Some complex solutions are much easier to explain in a video than on a sales call. Technical solutions, solving nascent problems, can often require an element of audience education. Video is a very good neutral ground for this type of communication and can remove any awkwardness.”
“In the digital infrastructure space, a new breed of network operators are taking the lead, using lots of video to convey their stories, and at different points in a customer’s buying journey and user experience. Data centres are another example, using video for virtual tours of centres that are still being built, to show off security and sustainability credentials”
“Cloud computing and Software- as-a-Service companies – for example Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Zendesk – use video effectively for top-of-funnel promotion, social media snippets, explainer videos, demos and so on”
“They use video at different levels of sophistication. At a promotional level it will be more polished,
at the knowledge-base level they will quite happily use lower production value videos of their technical teams doing screencasts or white-boarding sessions, which are mostly well received.”
For more insights like this download our latest free video marketing report where we discuss the main drivers in video’s phenomenal success and how to best utilise it to create awareness, deliver engagement and influencing the decision-making process.
