I meet a lot of people in the B2B marketing world who are moving more and more of their communications to video. The thought is that video will improve the impact of their communication and build better emotional connection.  This is absolutely the right direction, in my opinion, but it worries me that many organisation go about go distributing video the wrong way.

Like all communication we need to think carefully about who we want to target with our messages but, equally importantly, HOW are we going to target our communication.  For example, many people think that the job is done once they have created their video, put it onto their website and downloaded a copy to YouTube.  Most organisations focus on the creation of he video and give little thought to distribution.  Let me explain…..

Content is of course critical to the success of video - just like any communication. But, just like you wouldn't create an expensive above-the-line campaign and place it in the wrong publications, similar standards need to be applied to video.  (I have already blogged on the importance of measuring RoI on digital assets. Check out http://www.credcomms.com/blog/roi-on-digital-assets.aspx).

In B2B communication (of any sort) should be accurately targeted - a statement of the obvious.  But, unlike B2C where we could be talking about million and millions of consumers as a potential target, in B2B we are rarely talking about anywhere near such numbers.  For most B2B salespeople their target audience is a small number of accounts and a handful of targets in each account; for B2B PR the target audience is a small number of publications and journalist; for the Internal Communication manager or HR department it is possibly a few thousand employees; for the training department it is also small number of employees.  In other words our communication can be “narrowcast” not “broadcast”.   TV platforms are for broadcasting, YouTube is designed for broadcast - but for B2B video I feel we need to choose a platform designed for both broadcast and narrowcast.  Don’t automatically default to your website and Youtube is you work in a B2B environment.

Clearly, if we narrowcast we want different features from our video platform than if we broadcast.  For example, if I narrowcast video, I want to track each individual viewer, what they watch, when they watch, what parts they watch and what they ignore.  I don’t want group stats and mass trends - i want specific, down to the individual information.  If I am a B2B salesperson i want to know which individuals have viewed my video customer reference stories, what part of the content the watched and replayed, which content they skip.  Follow up conversations with my prospect are informed and accurate - based on their interests. 

Also, I need easy ways of embedding video content into directly targeted emails.  I need to be able to take a video and segment into smaller distributable clips - where each clip can be distributed to different tools (website, email, ebrochures, for example) - and then individually tracked. 
Finally I will need enterprise levels of security whereby I can create different secured views of my master video library - allowing me, for example, to create a salespersons area for customer references, a channel for internal communications, training libraries, and product marketing portals.

So, when thinking about using video I recommend you consider carefully the platform you use.  Think, “fit for purpose”.  Think broadcast, or narrowcast, or both.