Case study – Volvo feat. Jean-Claude Van Damme

At the beginning of this post we said expensive productions might not be the most relevant for you..

But if you’re going to do one of these B2B Marketing videos, do it like Volvo.

Their ‘Epic Split’ video with Jean-Claude Van Damme hit 40 million within 10 days of being launched in 2014.

The video featured Van Damme doing the splits while standing on the wing mirrors of two Volvo trucks driving backwards.

It was meant to demonstrate the precision of Volvo Dynamic Steering.

The video reportedly cost $3-4 million and generated $170 million in revenue for Volvo in a single year.

Case study – Nuance

B2B enterprise vendor Nuance needed a marketing strategy to boost awareness of their customer experience software.

Here’s the problem: software products can be tedious to explain.

Here’s what the Vice President of Solutions Marketing at Nuance said:

“We wanted to refresh the messaging and positioning of our enterprise solutions portfolio through a video. A typical corporate video seemed a bit dry, so we needed a creative approach to really tease out the pain points that resonate with our audiences and buyers.”

The result was a video called ‘We, The Customers’, which spoke to the pain points felt by customers and the pain points felt by the enterprise clients Nuance was targeting.

The video became Nuance’s #1 performing enterprise video with 70% more views than the #2 performing video.

Two months later, Nuance was acquired by Microsoft.

Case study – Premiumbeat.com

PremiumBeat.com sells high-quality audio tracks for filmmakers and video editing studios.

But they wanted an advertising campaign to increase brand exposure among the small market they sold to

Here’s how they did it.

They made an inside joke.

PremiumBeat.com lets editors try out their audio tracks for free with an audio watermark of someone reading out ‘premiumbeat.com’ every few seconds.

So in the video they made a joke about ‘Todd’, the employee who reads out ‘premiumbeat.com’ on every track.

It was a joke only people in the industry would get.

But here’s why it worked.

Without spending a dollar on advertising the video got 50x more engagement on social media as well as a 95% increase in website click – increasing sales.

A video like this has its production costs, and humor can be tough to pull off…

But the tactic here is about creating a video that your target audience wants to share and so save you the advertising cost.

Case study – Salesloft

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform.

Ellie Twigger is one of their top SDRs who managed to hit 120% of her sales target by using a hyper-personalized video method.

Here’s how her process works:

Ellie says she gets email responses like this: “You’ve completely got my attention. I wish my reps would do stuff like this. Let’s have a conversation.”

Bonus tip.

Ellie used to make 90-second-long videos but noticed people drop off after 45 seconds.

Now she makes her videos only 40-50 seconds long.

Case study – Umault

Umault is a B2B video marketing agency.

As they specialize in B2B video marketing, they wanted to produce their own video to generate leads and new business.

Here’s how they did it:

Umault wanted to connect with businesses not currently looking for video marketing.

Why?

Because according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, only 5-01% of customers are in-market.

That means around 90-95% of your potential customers are not looking to buy right now.

Is it worth targeting them?

Umault’s B2B marketing video proves it is.

Umault wanted to create an emotional response so that their name would pop up anytime someone thought of making a video in the future.

They did this by making their audience laugh with a video about sending your kids to space for 2 weeks.

(The video was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The result?

Huge traffic on the website, a doubling of MQLs in the 30 days after the video’s release and 6x ROI on the video’s production costs.

An important factor was that the video featured on the front page of Reddit and on the front page of Ads of the World.

It was then picked up by AdSpot and featured alongside agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi and Droga5.

Of course, it takes a budget and marketing genius to pull off a video like this.

But the tactic here is: make an emotional connection with potential customers who aren’t in the market for your service… yet.

Case study – BBC

BBC is a Belgian B2B creative agency.

They wanted to see if they could use video to pitch and qualify new business while saving time.

BBC’s Head of Digital Experience Dieter Jaspers had already been recording his screen and sending personalized videos instead of writing emails to internal staff.

Then he thought… What if I use video to pitch new businesses?

To do this, here’s how he optimized the sales cadence

It’s easy for you to go online and find a list of the most popular B2B video marketing methods.

You’ll probably find a list like this: