Why you absolutely must include video within your content marketing strategy
The benefits of a content strategy that includes video
Video creates greater engagement
Video generates more engagement simply because it’s more entertaining than text or a picture. It also makes it possible to convey a richer and more stimulating message to the individual being targeted. The average conversion rates achieved by landing pages, sponsored campaigns and emails that include a video instead of an image are always higher.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, replacing images with a video delivers a worthwhile increase in your conversion rate.
Video content has an SEO impact
The SEO impact for your website is significant. Users spend more time on a page if there’s a video to watch, and the length of time spent on a page is a factor used by search engine algorithms. In addition, the Google bot particularly likes to see YouTube videos embedded on websites.
Subtitles also play an important role in SEO. Google and YouTube (currently the two largest search engines) pay special attention to subtitles because they improve a video’s readability and make it accessible to a wider audience, including the hard of hearing.
Visual content grabs attention on all channels
In terms of an emotional connection and stirring the senses, you are a human being speaking directly to your targets. Video is also more stimulating, because watchers use their senses of sight and hearing, making it easier to grab their attention to convey your message.
Videos can meet a number of objectives, furthering the aims of communication, marketing, commerce, recruitment, or customer service:
- Product and company presentations
- Training and tutorials
- Customer testimonials
- Employee interviews
- Replays of webinars or company events
- Information snippets
- And so on.
Another important point is that video can be successfully integrated into almost all communication channels, so they work on websites, social networks, sponsored campaigns, displays, emails, and elsewhere.
Highly influential in purchasing decisions
The statistics on internet users’ purchasing decisions are fairly astonishing. For 95% of B2B buyers, video is a decisive factor in their decision-making process.
Nowadays, decision-makers view video as essential during the benchmarking phase, allowing them to gather information, and to find and compare different solutions.
Video conveys a feeling of trust and transparency about products and companies. This medium is becoming a central pillar of the decision-making process. Don’t miss out.
The surge in video use for marketing strategies and its benefit in advertising campaigns
A number of sources, including the Wall Street Journal, have reported how YouTube holds top spot in the rankings for video-sharing platforms, with over a billion hours of videos watched every day worldwide. –

With such growth in the use of video content, it is high time to look into advertising formats, starting with YouTube Retargeting based on Google search terms, which is a campaign, easily set up in Google Ads, that aims to promote your existing videos on YouTube to users who have typed in search strings of interest to you. We advise you to keep to highly qualified expressions. Do not aim for too broad a target or use Google’s “purchase intent” audiences, which can quickly become unqualified and result in a surge in “Dislikes” on your videos, which is obviously not the outcome you want to see…
Another solution is to create videos specifically for YouTube ads. These can be shorter videos concentrating on use cases for your software, either confirming that it resolves a prospect’s pain point, or creating a need by showing the benefits it brings to everyday situations.
Best practice for successfully creating short-form videos remains broadly the same as for longer content: hone the script and storytelling to make sure you connect with your audience and create an emotional response, so as to maximize the conversion rate by directing the person to specific and impactful CTAs. It will therefore be key for your 2021 marketing plan to learn how to use online video design solutions(e.g. playplay.com, pitchy.io, or canva.com to name but three) that allow you to produce videos of this kind easily, and to regularly fine-tune them as part of new ongoing campaigns…
The rise of B2B live-streaming
We should also look closely at the rise of live streaming in B2B, as it is directly related to the subject of video content.
It’s not anything new, but we wanted to examine it here because it’s expanding more and more, including in the IT sector. Live streaming means the broadcasting of live video content on social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter/X and so on). The pandemic was certainly a catalyst for more widespread adoption with the decrease in physical events and direct interaction.
Let’s start to illustrate this subject with a piece of news. An illustration, not from the B2B arena, shows how use of live streaming has developed beyond the preconception that it is mainly for a young audience. The success of the Newegg channel on the live video platform Twitch, covering hardware and consumer electronics for a third of a million followers, shows that live-streaming now reaches a broader audience. –
In B2B, especially for the SME software publishers and IT services market that we know best, there are many uses for live streaming: sharing a live event being organized or attended, presenting a new service or software version, and training of course, but also simply to make discussions with prospects, customers, or even job applicants, an easier matter. A virtual tour of your premises is consequently perfectly suited to live streaming.
The goal is to bring businesses closer to their prospects and customers, by showcasing their expertise through the people who embody it. The “live” aspect increases the possibility of discussion and interaction, and so the impact in terms of shares and reactions on social media is much greater.
LinkedIn has certainly realized this and now offers LinkedIn Live, a feature that allows live broadcasting of video content. As LinkedIn users, we see notifications pop up with messages like “X was live: great live streaming pitch“.
And when it comes to numbers, LinkedIn reports that LinkedIn Live videos get, on average, 7 times more reactions and 24 times more comments than native videos produced by the same advertisers.
So, are videos and podcasts fighting over the same turf?
Are podcasts the future of SEO and voice searches?
A trend of growing podcast consumption on listening platforms (platforms, applications, websites…) has certainly been seen:
- As of 2023, 42% of Americans ages 12 and older have listened to a podcast in the past month.
- The number of listeners worldwide has gone from 424.2 million in 2022 to 464.7 million in 2023.
Europe is still lagging compared to the US, with only 25% of the population listening to podcasts, compared to 41% for the US.
B2B podcasting: position yourself as an expert
Podcasting is a great way to build trust, retain your audience, and highlight your areas of expertise to continue to assert your legitimacy in your field and boost brand image. As with blog articles, podcasting should diligently follow a calendar for new episodes to drop, and subjects for each episode should be thoroughly prepared, with all of them being variations on the basic point of the podcast. Feel free to address a fairly specific topic, even if it means fewer listeners but attracting a higher quality audience.
Other key points include the importance of deciding on a format and sticking to it (duration, tone, frequency, your intro jingle, transitions, etc.), the seamless integration of the podcast into your overall editorial line and marketing strategy (meeting your personas’ expectations with a real value proposition), and of course, as mentioned earlier, boosting your impact not only by carefully managed distribution (deciding on which platforms your audio content is to appear) but also by repurposing content in different formats (breaking content into smaller chunks, converting it into text or indeed a video, etc.).
SEO impact of podcasts
Like all other content (text, audio, video, visuals), podcasts can be optimized. To rank well on Google, follow the same SEO strategy as usual:
- Determine your keyword based on search volumes, the subject of the podcast, and the topic for the episode
- Always enter your H1 title and a podcast description
- Also consider creating a page on your website dedicated solely to the podcast, and optimize its SEO as well
As we just said, providing a text transcription for the episode will not only make the content accessible to a larger number of internet users, including the hard of hearing, but it will also help Google better understand the content, and categorize it under the right search intentions. So, even though Google is actually able to detect spoken words in an audio file to improve its positioning, you could turn your podcast into a blog post.
For the rest, beyond the technical aspects, follow the other conventional SEO rules by focusing on your netlinking and circulation on social media. With a bit of luck, and a degree of hard work, you might gain access to Google Podcasts. This podcast platform, developed by Google in 2018, is becoming increasingly influential in the digital landscape. And since Google alone decides whether you get on it, optimizing your episodes properly will probably hold the key to achieving a decent ranking.
