Welcome back to Marketing Qualified! Here are this week’s topics:

• What you need to know about the State of Video. The most interesting parts of Wistia’s recent report.

• Don’t sell the product. Sell the vision. Emotional messages work (even in the B2B world).

🎥 What you need to know about the State of Video

Wistia recently dropped their latest State of Video Report. They surveyed over 2,000 people, examined 100,000 businesses, and analyzed 90 million video uploads.

As usual, we read the full report so that you don’t have to and pulled out the parts we thought you’d find the most interesting and helpful.

Here they are.

Strategy

93% of companies said that video was an important part of their marketing strategy.

And the most popular goals for video creation were to generate leads and drive sales as well as product education and adoption.

Creation

Video creation takes a lot of time, knowledge, and specialized skills, yet the majority of companies are managing creation in-house compared to using freelancers or agencies.

The volume of videos a company makes depends a lot on its size. The larger the company, the more videos they tend to produce.

On average, small businesses make one video every 24 days, medium businesses make one every 4 days, and large businesses make one every 3 days.

Certain types of videos were much more popular to create than others.

43% of companies created product videos.

38% created educational videos, instructional videos, or online courses.

35% created webinars or live streams.

35% created social media videos.

Videos get created for many different reasons, but the two most common are product launches and internal requests.

Distribution

Most companies are sharing their videos on their website and in emails. But LinkedIn is also a popular publishing destination.

Performance

A video’s success can be measured by the ratio of people who press play vs. scroll right past it. This is called play rate.

These are the play rate benchmarks by video length. Longer videos tended to have a higher play rate.

Engagement is a measure of what portion of a video actually holds a viewer’s attention.

This is a breakdown of engagement rate by video type. You can use this chart as a good guide for how long to make your videos based on the subject of the video.

For example, if you’re making a promotional video, you should probably focus on keeping it under 1 min long. But if you’re making an instructional video, 3-5 min is the sweet spot.

The conversion rate is the percentage of viewers who find a conversion opportunity in the video and take the desired action.

The longer the video, the higher the conversion rate tends to be:

And putting your CTA at the end of the video is most likely to drive the conversion action.

If you found these insights helpful and want to do a deeper dive, you can check out the full report here.

📰  In the news this week.

🔗 Google doesn’t care about links as much as it used to.

👵 Young people are adopting geriatric hobbies.

📄  A guide to using print and physical branding in a digital world.

🎵  ByteDance would rather shut down US TikTok than sell it.

🚂 10 customer onboarding challenges and how to fix them.

🔮 Don’t sell the product. Sell the vision.

We’ve got a challenge for you next week.

If you’re a B2B marketer, it’s easy to fall into promoting features and technical aspects of products.

Instead, we want you to try out something different — get emotional.

Hope, inspiration, motivation, pride, nostalgia…

These are all positive emotions that B2C marketers are pros at hitting on.

But B2B marketers?

Usually, we struggle to evoke these kinds of emotional reactions from our audiences.

But we need to get better at it because it works.

Take this ad from Lego, for example:

You don’t see blocks; you see the potential. They’re not selling little plastic bricks; they’re selling the dream.

It hits you in the heart.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “But my product is boring,” or “The stuff we sell is too technical.”

But the truth is, that doesn’t matter.

Will you have to think a little harder and get a little more creative than the B2C brands? Yes. But is it impossible to drive home emotional messages in the B2B world? Definitely not!

At the end of the day, you’re still selling to people. And people respond to emotional messages.

Think about what your audience wants or needs or dreams about.

Then, hit them with that message.

😂 Marketing meme of the week.

How'd we do with this week's newsletter?

• 😍 Loved it

• 😐 Meh, do better

• 👎 You didn't bring the heat 

A READER’S REVIEW

Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to a friend to spread the love.

Want us to write about something specific? Submit a topic or idea.