LinkedIn claims B2B marketers use video content to drive up lead volume

In today’s landscape of information overload, B2B marketers face the dual challenge of capturing their audience’s attention, quickly, and finding the quality of environment in which to reach them.According to LinkedIn, B2B marketers see video as a medium that drives lead volume, hence, has become a key priority in 2018. Approximately 75%  of B2B marketers believe that video is one of the most important content formats in a B2B digital strategy, followed by social media creative (60.19%) and e-mail (46.60%). 83% of B2B marketers believe video helps drive lead volume and 86% percent think it produces high quality leads.LinkedIn said that brands that put themselves on video are able to build better familiarity and comfort with prospects – creating more meaningful engagements.In fact, in Singapore, a high majority of marketers believe that video can result in better quality leads because of the variety of creative content using video. In fact,  67% of B2B marketers in Singapore spent over SG$100,000 in 2017, while 74% are planning to spend over S$100,000 in 2018.Moreover, 9 out of 10 marketers believe that videos give their brand more room to be creative and tell a story as video content that is energetic (16.90%), inspiring (13.50%), informative (12.60%) and humorous (11.90%). This is found to have worked best for B2B marketers.In March this year, the platform announced its video for Sponsored Content initiative. It added that this was because of an internal LinkedIn study that said over 46% of B2B advertisers surveyed said this was a top challenge when running video campaigns on other platforms.When asked what he made of the trend, V.R. Srivatsan, managing director of Adobe Southeast Asia, said whether it is B2B or B2C content, video has become a priority for marketers and advertisers in recent years, and the video advertising market is expected to further expand by 21% per year through 2019, according to a Zenith study.He added that video as a content format has been getting more popular, thanks to the increasing availability of high-quality content, publishing platforms, and improvements to the mobile viewing experience – including better displays and faster connections.“The transition to programmatic buying of display ads (which includes online video) has also allowed advertisers and agencies to target audiences more effectively with personalised creative. For B2B clients, there has never been a better time to dynamically target specific profiles with tailored video content on a large scale, and track how viewers are interacting with them,” he said.Adobe, in particular, has been producing more videos in the past few years – from customer stories, to event live-streams, how-to tutorials, and thought-leadership discussions.The results, he added have been positive with the company seeing an increased engagement level through them.“In fact, we are not just producing more videos for external audience, we are experimenting with more video content even for internal bulletins, such as executive business updates, social media news, employee enablement sessions, and more,” he said. Srivatsan added that with the rise of immersive technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR), it may not even be long before B2B marketers start incorporating these elements into their content marketing tool kits.In a statement to Marketing, Antoine Bouchacourt, VP of Asia at Shootsta, said one third of its clients in Singapore come from the B2B sector. As such, this demonstrates that B2B marketers are ramping up their video usage."Social selling is a growing trend, where companies use their employees as their ambassadors on social channels, particularly on LinkedIn. With Linkedin having recently rolled out its native video capabilities, most B2B marketers are looking at how to leverage this opportunity, and regular video content is the most effective way to engage audiences," Bouchacourt said.