1. Get clear on what you need video to achieve

Every useful video strategy needs a clear business or marketing objective behind it.

That could be generating more qualified leads, increasing registrations for an event, helping your sales team convert opportunities, launching a new proposition, building awareness in a particular market or improving internal engagement.

The objective gives you something meaningful to plan around.

For example, “we need a video about our new service” gives you very little direction. Knowing that prospects are struggling to understand why the service is different, and that marketing needs to generate more conversations around it, is much more useful.

You can then shape the content, message, format and distribution around the result you’re trying to achieve.

2. Understand who you're trying to influence

B2B buying decisions usually involve more than one person.

The person who first comes across your content may not be the person using your product, signing off the budget or making the final decision. Each of them can have different priorities and questions.

Think about the people you need the content to reach and what matters to them.

What are they trying to achieve? What problems are they dealing with? What questions keep coming up in sales conversations? What would make them feel more confident about choosing you?

That understanding should shape the content you create.

It might also show that one big video isn’t the most useful approach. Different audiences or stages of the buying journey may need different messages, which can often be planned and captured as part of the same production.

3. Give every video a clear job

A useful way to sharpen the strategy is to define what you want the audience to think, understand, feel or do after watching.

Perhaps they need to understand a complicated product more clearly. They might need proof that you’ve delivered for businesses like theirs. You may want them to recognise a challenge, remember your brand or take the next step towards an enquiry.

This helps you choose the right type of content for the job.

If prospects understand your product but aren’t convinced you can deliver, a customer case study could be far more valuable than another explainer video.

If people aren’t engaging with your proposition because it feels complicated, clear product content might be the priority.

The right format depends on what you’re trying to change.

4. Look at where video can support the buyer journey

Video can play different roles as someone moves from first discovering your business through to making a decision.

At the awareness stage, you might use short social content, campaign videos or thought leadership to introduce an idea, challenge or point of view.

As buyers begin considering their options, product explainers, customer stories and expert content can help them understand your offer and build trust in your business.

Later in the journey, detailed case studies, testimonials, product demonstrations and content addressing common questions can give people the proof they need to move forward.

You don’t need a video for every stage or every possible interaction. The aim is to identify the places where video can have the most useful role.

5. Plan content together rather than project by project

Video budgets work much harder when you’re thinking beyond the main video.

A customer case study shoot could give you a hero video for your website, shorter edits for LinkedIn, customer quotes, clips focused on individual challenges, content for sales presentations and footage for future campaigns.

The same applies to events, interviews, thought leadership and brand content.

Knowing what your marketing team will need over the coming months makes it possible to capture more of the right material while you’ve already got the contributors, crew and location in place.

It also gives you a more consistent stream of content instead of returning to production every time another channel needs something new.

6. Build distribution into the plan

Where people will see the content has a big impact on what you should create.

LinkedIn content needs to earn attention quickly and make sense in-feed. A customer case study being used by the sales team may need a different edit depending on the conversation they’re having. An event video designed to increase registrations next year should capture the experience and value of attending, rather than simply documenting what happened.

Your wider marketing plan should help determine where video needs to work.

That could include LinkedIn, paid campaigns, landing pages, email, sales outreach, events, presentations, internal channels or partner activity.

Thinking about those channels together means you can create the right versions from the outset and make more use of the footage you’ve invested in.

7. Agree what success looks like

Views can be useful, but they aren’t always the result that matters.

The measures you use should reflect the reason the content exists.

For an event campaign, that might be registrations. For demand generation, it could be landing-page conversions, enquiries or qualified leads. Sales content might be judged by how frequently it’s used, the opportunities it supports or its influence on conversations with prospects.

Other videos may be designed to improve reach, engagement, completion rates, recruitment applications or internal participation.

Having those measures in place gives you a clearer picture of what’s working and what you should change next time.

Over time, that becomes particularly valuable. Your video strategy can develop based on evidence from your own audience rather than assumptions about what content should work.

What should a B2B video strategy include?

It doesn’t need to become an enormous strategy document.

A practical plan should give your team clarity on:

• the marketing or business objectives you’re supporting
• the audiences you need to influence
• the role video needs to play
• the messages and stories that matter
• the content you need to create
• the channels where it will be used
• how the content can be repurposed
• the results you’ll measure

That gives each video a reason to exist and helps you make better decisions about where to spend your budget.

Make video work harder across your marketing

For most B2B marketing teams, video is one part of a much bigger plan.

You’re managing campaigns, events, content, paid activity, sales support, product launches and plenty more at the same time.

A good video strategy joins those things up. It helps you see where video can support your biggest priorities, where one production can create value across several channels and where your budget is most likely to make a difference.

The result is a more focused approach to video, a stronger bank of useful content and a much clearer link between what you’re creating and what the business is trying to achieve.

If you’re planning your video activity and want a clearer view of where to focus, get in touch with us. We’ll help you look at your objectives, audience and current plans, then identify where video could have the biggest impact.