Key Video Stats for B2B Sales and Marketing Operations

The expanded use of of video to help buyers buy more effectively and sellers sell more effectively is common knowledge for most B2B sales and marketing operation teams. And its already common knowledge that exiting the pandemic, video was one of the breakout tools of the Digital First Transformation.  

But what are the latest video trends for B2B sales that small business owners need to be aware of right now?  What are the trends your Sales and Marketing Operations team need to be aware of?  And what should you be thinking about as you craft your short and long-term sales strategies for the coming quarters and years?

Buyers Continue to Watch More Video

If you thought the pandemic was going to be the high point of video, you would be wrong.  Buyers continue to engage with video at an increased rate.

Video Still Drives the Most Initial Engagement

• Using the word video in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%. (Syndacast)
• Video offers increase click-through rates by 65%, and reduces unsubscribes by 26%. (Syndacast)
• Video users have 27% higher click-through rates and 34% higher web conversion rates. (Pardot)

Video continues to be one of the most productive ways to improve the performance of your email marketing and nurturing campaigns.

Video is Great For Lead Scoring

• Video plays are one of the three most effective ways to score leads (Pardot)

Watch a Quick Video on How Lead Scoring Works

Watch this quick video to learn more about “Lead Scoring” and how your sales team can leverage video insights to close more business

Video Doubles the Time Spent on Your Website

• The average time spent on pages with video is 6 minutes, the average time spent on pages without video is 2.4 minutes.

If you invest time and money driving traffic to your website, you lose over 50% real engagement by not offering access to video on as many pages as possible.

Buyers Prefer “Video” Education over “Text” Articles When Learning About a Solution

• Where both video and text are available on the same page, 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service. (Net-Results)

As mentioned above, Buyers are continuing to increase video consumption and some of it has to do with the preference for video over text.

Video is Preferred When Nurturing Buyers and for Pre-Sales Education

• 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information from a series of videos and articles versus just articles. (Forester)
• 91% of Buyers believe that the pandemic made video even more important for understanding the specific value of a brand, product and/or service. (McKinsey)

Buyers continue to increase their use of video as part of their pre-sales education.

Buyers Are Watching Longer Videos and They Are Watching More of the Video

According to Vidyard and Syndacast, when videos are less than one minute, most Buyers watch 68% of the video.  But now, even when normalizing for videos between 30 seconds to 1 hour: 

• 54% of viewers now watch a video all the way to the end. (That’s up from 45% in 2020.)
• The average length of videos increased to 9:48 seconds in 2021. (That’s up from 4:50 seconds in 2022. )

Buyers are becoming conditioned to videos as part of their Buyer’s Journey. Sellers can now break up longer presentations and use video to replace many of the presentations that were historically done during one-to-one meetings as part of the pre-sales education process.

User Generated Video is Now “In”

• 80% of all videos created in 2021 were user-generated videos, versus just 60% in 2020. (Vidyard)
• Two-thirds of user-generated videos were either screen recordings (capturing just what’s on-screen) or “hybrid” videos (which include a webcam feed in the corner of the screen recording to show the presenter’s face at the same time). (Vidyard)
• 81% of the videos created by companies under 200 employees were user-generated. For companies over 600 employees, 75% of all videos were user-generated. (Vidyard)
• Large and medium companies moved away from external video creation, focusing instead on leveraging a combination of internal and external resources. (Vidyard)

User- generated video has a few distinct advantages: It’s quicker to create, it’s cheaper, and it shows the relatable humanity of the person behind the screen.   This is great news for the small business owner and sales and marketing operations team because it gives them parity and makes it easier for them to compete with larger competitors.

B2B Companies That Need to Demonstrate “Thought Leadership” or “Demo” Product Create the Most Videos

• Technology Companies, Consulting and Professional Services Companies create the most videos for both awareness and nurturing. (Vidyard)
• These same B2B Sellers increased their average video production in 2021 by 334% compared to 2020. (Wisita)

Now that user-generated videos have reached mainstream adoption, combined with all the advantages of video for increased engagement and pre-sales education, B2B sales competitors with more complex sales cycles are bullish on the value of video to make their Buyer’s Journey as frictionless as possible.

Buyers Convert to Sales Ready Leads After Watching Three or More Videos

• 80% of Buyers that convert to Sales Ready Leads have watched 3 or more videos. (Patel Industries)

Pushing the play button is an “active” action vs. the “passive” act of clicking through ad offers and scrolling through a web page.  Buyers that are interested in considering your solution will typically engage in three or more active acts.   This makes video one of the most effective ways to prioritize  potential opportunities for your sales team.

Conclusion

Successful Sales and Marketing Operations, especially for Pre-Sales Education, now requires leveraging video at every stage of your sales funnel.

This means you need to strongly consider leveraging video for your awareness and pre-sales education process to replace your historical rep driven process The B2B Buyer now expects you to leverage video to help them learn about your solution and the Buyer rewards the Seller for this process. This is the main takeaway regarding video trends for B2B sales.

About Digital Demand Center™

When you are ready to get started  integrating video into your lead generation, lead nurturing process and sales automation process Digital Demand Center™can help.  Video is critical feature of our turnkey solution designed specifically for SMBs that turns the Digital First Buyers into Sales Ready Leads. Watch the video below to learn more about our approach and solution.

Watch Now: The Digital First Buyer and Digital Demand Center™

And if you are new to video marketing and the Digital First Transformation and feel like you would like a much deeper crash course on all challenges and tactics required for success, we invite you to check out our Educational Video Series on The Digital First Transformation and Small and Medium Sized Businesses.