Beyond technology, rationality & facts & figures, B2B marketing is also about establishing genuine connections with the prospects & the existing customers alike.
A study by 6 sense depicts that 50% of all the B2B buyers are likely to make a purchase decision if they connect emotionally with a brand.
People prefer to purchase from people, rather than brands; hence, in order to expedite the journeys of the prospects through the conventional sales funnel, it is extremely important for the marketers to optimize personalization & users’ experiences (UX).
According to a research published in Epsilon, it was deduced that 80% of the customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. Humans are visual beings and if they can see themselves as a part of a story, it helps the marketers’ purpose of optimizing the sales. Also, several scientific studies have proven that humans are visual learners & 90% of the information transmitted to their brains is visual. Brains are more receptive when it comes to receiving, commiserating with & digesting pieces of content in the form of stories.
Visual storytelling or passing on a lot of information through visually appealing pieces of content, such as videos, webinars, images, infographics, photos & images, instigate customers to take actions to accelerate the sales’ conversions. Whereas stories told in the form of the text might be boring, stories told visually engage the audiences & optimize the sales. Visually appealing pieces of content weaved in the form of stories, videos in particular when employed in B2B marketing, help in convincingly fostering customers’ rendezvous & simultaneously help the marketers in optimizing the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).
A study conducted by SmallBizTrends inferred that by 2019 internet video traffic from customers across the globe will account for 80% of all the internet traffic constituted by the customers.
A study by SocialMediaToday implies that customers are 64% more likely to purchase a product after watching an online video; moreover, 96% of the key decision-makers in the IT industry watch videos that help them in making a buying decision. The trendy social media sites such as Pinterest, Instagram, SnapChat & Vine are all leveraging visually appealing pieces of content to attract, engage & convert audiences, by the means of effective storytelling.
According to a study published in socialmediaexaminer.com, with comprehensive inputs from 5,700 marketers; it was concluded that 80% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing strategies. In the study, videos were preferred by about 63% of the marketers, as the most valuable & engaging pieces of content for social media marketing, while blogs were preferred by 60% of them. Marketing Professionals across the globe need to coalesce text-based pieces of content with visually appealing pieces of content. Our cognitive intelligence & evolution as human beings have programmed us excellently for remembering pictures & B2B marketers need to effectively use this quality to engross the attention of the prospects, in order to compel them to take relevant actions to boost the website conversion rates.
A study by Brain Rules shows that humans are incredible at remembering pictures. Astonishingly, it was observed that only 10% of the text-based information was retained by the brain, post 3 days, which after adding pictures with the text improved, as now audiences retained 65% of the information originally deciphered (after the same interval).
Visual Storytelling Assistances B2B Marketers
1. It Simplifies the Content for the Users:
Before the prospects in their individual buyers’ cycle decide about the purchase of a product or a service, they go through the Awareness, Consideration & Decision Making process. Pieces of content are required throughout the buyers’ cycle as well as for the retention of the existing clients.
According to a study by HubSpot, about 80% of the users recall a video ad they viewed during the course of the past 30 days. Content in the form of videos makes a long-lasting impression in the minds of audiences & instigates them to take quick actions, which optimizes the conversion rate on the websites as well as helps in elevating the sales’ conversions.
Videos have a wider reach & as per a report by Digital Information World, 55% of the people using internets watch online videos on a daily basis.
2. Visual Storytelling allows the Conveyance of Lots of Information:
As has been reported by YouTube, mobile video consumption rises by 100% over the year. Visual storytelling makes it possible for the users to engage with & digest larger pieces of information. Audiences on the website are tech-savvy; though at times they might feel overwhelmed by larger piles of text-based information. To do away with the problem, visual storytelling comes into the picture.
With the help of videos, images, animated files & photos weaved in the form of stories, the marketers are not only able to evidently convey their marketing objectives, but are also able to interact with the prospects across omnichannel, once they are able to process & retain the advertised pieces of information.
3. Visual Storytelling Strikes Emotional Chords of the Prospects:
The single most important factor of visual storytelling is that it is able to address the pain points of both the prospects as well as the existing customers, by empathetically reflecting on their thought patterns. As soon as any story makes an impact on the prospects psychologically, the chances of the prospects getting converted are increased.
Moreover, a research study compiled by 3M (the corporation behind the Post It Notes) substantiates that visual pieces of content are processed 60,000 times faster than text, which means that it aids to the expedition of the prospects’ journeys through the sales funnel & helps them in achieving their prime objective of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
4. Visual Content Improves Personalization & Induces Perceived “Personal Value”:
By improving the personalizing & emotionally connecting with the brands for displaying value proposition, the B2B marketers are able to infuse positive emotions & a sense of credibility in the buyers, which allows them to make quicker buying decisions. Also instilling a sense of trust in the buyers by feeding them with valuable pieces of information, addressing their pain-points helps the brands in retaining their clients.
The International Journal of Market Research quoted M. Nick Hajili, the Associate Professor of Marketing at Swansea University as follows:
“Trust, encouraged by social media, significantly affects intention to buy. Therefore, trust has a significant role in eCommerce by directly influencing intention to buy and indirectly influencing perceived usefulness.”
Client retention, in turn, optimizes the revenue goals of a company as more clients come by means of positive word-of-mouth interactions & positive online reviews.
The threshold of “personal value” is extended further by video testimonials. Leveraging testimonials by happy customers assists in client acquisition, retention as well as conversions.
Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) is an indispensable advertising tool for optimizing conversions.
According to Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends & family over other types of advertising.
Word of mouth marketing has changed quite a lot in an era of omnichannel marketing & its prototypes have shifted from traditional ways (when word-of-mouth marketing was spread from one person to another based on recommendation) to modern marketing endeavors (encompassing both targeted efforts & consciously occurring instances). Nevertheless, offline word-of-mouth is still rated more valuable than online reviews or testimonials.
5. Visual Content telling Effective & Relevant stories is required throughout the Sales Funnel:
Educating the prospects throughout their journeys through the sales funnel is important. At the same time, it is also imperative for marketers to ensure that their marketing practices resonate with the imaginative aptitude of the prospects.
In a research report published by Demand metric, 70% of the marketers acceded to the fact that videos generate better conversions than other types of content & about 90% of the marketers create at least some form of visual content in-house.
Educating the prospects in an impactful manner & targeting & re-targeting them for the showing the value propositions of specific products or services by omnichannel marketing, supplemented with the other inbound marketing practices & hyper-targeted content strategies helps the marketers in optimizing the conversion rates for the brands as well as in constructing a perennially healthy sales pipeline.
Visual Content is Often Timeless:
Since visual story-telling is actualized by the core motivation of appealing to the emotional quotient of the prospects & statistical information is not much vital, such pieces of content are often evergreen. Even if there is some statistics involved in the form of infographics, it can be easily manipulated at negligible cost.
Visual Content can also be repurposed for sustaining several other marketing endeavors.
Conclusion
When it comes to B2B marketing, it can be a real channel to engage with the prospects – particularly when a majority of them are main decision-makers at the top of the hierarchy, wherein, decisions are triggered more by the logical route & people prefer to be left-brained. Nevertheless,
effective story-telling lies at the heart of B2B marketing. Ranging from
email marketing campaigns to the promotional ads being run on diverse
social-media platforms; visual storytelling is practiced virtually everywhere in impeccably unique, engaging, innovative & constantly evolving manner.
Almost all the most successful B2B and B2C companies have opted for peculiar approaches to employ visual pieces of content & have amalgamated them with their core marketing practices, to achieve success with their long & short-term marketing objectives. The well-known business companies such as HP, Microsoft,
Salesforce, Google, Cisco, Zoominfo, General Electric, Boeing & many more have trail blazed visual storytelling in their own unique ways & have prioritized thinking from the point of view of a storyteller over a marketer, time & again. While an extensive marketing budget isn’t essentially a priority when it comes to visual story-telling; prioritizing & living up-to the expectations of the prospects should be given special impetus all the time.
There are several tools available for designing beautiful photos, infographics as well as maps & data visualization platforms; however, marketers need to test-run & optimize their
visual content strategies to live up to the expectations of the ever-evolving buyer-persona & their researching habits.
We, at Valasys Media, are specialists when it comes to curating & running target & cluster-specific campaigns to help brands appeal to their audiences so as to attract, engage & convert them leveraging omnichannel marketing. We employ effective story-telling, after discovering what really matters for the prospects. By reflecting upon the value proposition of the products or services at disposal, we engross the attention of the prospective buyers & instigate them to take relevant actions, which bolster the Return on Investment (ROI) for our clients.
Our Content Syndication,
Lead Generation & Contact Discovery services have specifically been designed to captivate the attention of the audiences & to trigger actions associated with sales conversions. We assist in the expedition of the journeys of individual prospects through the sales funnel & help in crafting high-quality sales pipeline for our customers. We also have an array of other services such as Account-Based Marketing, Lead Nurturing & Appointment Setting, which have all been tailor-made to suffice the requirements of our clients.
For more information on any of our services or to avail them, feel free to
get in touch with us.
