Video Ads Offer For YouTube

The use of video for all of us has changed remarkably. For example, in the B2B buying process, we're seeing a huge increase in the number of people using video as part of that process, going from somewhere around about 29% of B2B buyers only two years ago to 70% of B2B buyers today.

It's not only that more B2B buyers are actually watching video, but it's the amount of time that they're spending watching that video as well. What we're seeing is that nearly half of B2B decision-makers are now spending 30 minutes consuming video content as part of a B2B buying process.

The second key thing is that we're seeing a huge increase in the number of videos that have been created and posted by B2B companies. And interestingly, the quality of those videos is changing as well. They're actually becoming more engaging.

Companies really need to set in place a video strategy. It's not a case of just creating content and putting it on your website, or putting on YouTube and just pushing it out there. You really need to understand what your customers are looking for, what information they're looking for, and then engage them in the right video format.

We see that there's three areas of a video content strategy. Firstly, you need to create content that people are looking for on a regular basis. Think of this as the hygiene content. It's when people are looking at "how to", "how do I", feature function type content around your products and solutions.

The second area is to create what we call hero content. This is the content that really inspires your audience. It can help you change the way that they feel about your brand and your products and services.

The final part of your content strategy should be, where is this housed? You need to create a hub where people know where to go and get that content. It's about bringing people back on an ongoing basis, so that they don't just see a video once and then don't engage with you again, but they're able to find more and more information about you and your brand in one particular area. So we very strongly recommend a video content strategy should be based around this hero, hub and hygiene framework.

Why is this important? Well, our research has shown that video, alongside mobile, has the strongest impact on increasing consideration rates during the B2B buying process. Mobile is the most personal piece of technology that any of us have. We get it out and we look at it 150 times a day, and that's happening to us as consumers, so therefore that's happening to us as B2B buyers and decision-makers as well.

Our obsession of using mobile is being reflected in what we're seeing in search. So in the last two years, we've seen in B2B that search queries via mobile devices have tripled. So we really need to understand that mobile is an absolute pivotal technology for internet access. It's almost a de facto internet access device.

Our research shows that 42% of B2B buyers are using their mobile device in their purchase process, and 91% of those buyers are actually using it in all stages of their buying process. Now, this is a dramatic shift from what we've seen in the past, where mobile was very much upper funnel terms and looking at the real early stage of the buying process. We're now starting to see B2B buyers using that throughout that, even down to the purchase phase.