B2B companies are not good at short video marketing

This article starts from the TO B industry and explores the factors for success from three aspects. It is recommended for those who want to understand the TO B industry and TO B enterprises.

After three years of market education, TO B companies have moved on from whether to make short videos to how to make short videos. In the TO B industry, the short video field is still a blue ocean, and the track is relatively smooth. Recently, our team had a typical case, and it was really easy to get millions of B-side traffic on Douyin.

From a physical sense, it seems that every company is working hard in the field of short videos, and more and more resources are being tilted towards this area. From my front-line observations in the past six months, this is not the case. Most companies are still in a wait-and-see state or do not pay much attention to it. After all, the cost of trial and error in entering the no-man's land is too high. In the commercial competition, it is more cost-effective to learn to borrow and copy others' success. Therefore, mainstream TO B companies still focus on traditional channels such as exhibitions, B2B platforms, and search engine marketing.

Of course, there are a small number of companies that have achieved results in the short video track, and they all have a distinct feature—they are not large in size. In my opinion, their success is driven by the following three factors:

1. More accurate positioning

The product line is not that complicated, and it will be more precise in product positioning and market segmentation. Correspondingly, the understanding of the target population will be deeper, and it will be easier to find highlights in content creativity to attract users.

2. High flexibility

The chain of coordination, management and decision-making within the company is shorter, which is a qualitative leap in execution efficiency. If you want to master Internet marketing, you have to start with efficiency improvement. When I was doing e-commerce in the early days, I felt it very deeply. The shipping process was very complicated, and cross-departmental collaboration was time-consuming and labor-intensive. The solution was to set up an e-commerce company to manage it separately.

3. Stronger interaction

The mainstream way of playing short videos is to create personal IP. Founders of small and medium-sized enterprises will have more time to connect, interact and increase stickiness with fans, which is also one of the keys to building personal IP.

Even so, bottlenecks are beginning to emerge.

I don’t know if you have this feeling, but traffic is starting to become expensive.

The initial playback volume of Douyin has dropped from hundreds to dozens now; DOU+ often has 50+ groups coming in to make up the numbers; even if all the data indicators are good, you still have to rely on luck to break into the traffic circle...

We often say that Internet platforms are changing with each passing day, and if we are not careful we will not be able to keep up with the rhythm and changes of the platforms. From various phenomena, it is not difficult to find that the rules of short video platforms are also rapidly iterating, and their review standards are becoming more and more stringent. The platform is using an invisible hand to push companies from "wild roads" to "regular troops."

In my opinion, the main reason why TO B companies perform poorly in the short video field is the problem of people, the path dependence and amateur thinking of decision makers, and the creative imagination and professional ability of executors. Therefore, as long as these two people fail to keep up with the pace of the platform, their work is mostly useless. The "ship" is difficult to turn around and often becomes their rhetoric to cover up their shame.

Companies with some ambition and pursuit have more or less been cut off by training institutions. Everyone's mentality has become more pragmatic and down-to-earth, and their attention has begun to turn to short video marketing service providers.

TO B companies are good at calculating. How much money can they get for how many leads? What can they get? This is what they care about most. What they hate most is uncertainty because they lack a sense of security. After all, Internet marketing has been around for decades, and they must have stepped on many pitfalls. They are still very vigilant and sensitive to this.

In fact, whether you participate in training, build your own team, or even seek assistance from an external team, you are essentially calculating the cost: making the front-end traffic cost lower and making the back-end conversion easier. These three methods are more about helping companies solve the problem of traffic shortcomings. They cannot completely make up for the problem of marketing conversion, because the conversion effect involves many aspects. Just like whether a movie can sell well at the box office, in addition to publicity and promotion, it is also closely related to the film's subject matter, quality, actors, schedule, scheduling, and behind-the-scenes production team.

So, where is the certainty in short video marketing? The account of this marketing service is destined to be unclear before the investment begins. If TO B companies want to do a good job in short videos, they must use business thinking to do it. It is unrealistic to only think about output and not investment. If someone can pat his chest and give you certainty, I think you are likely to meet a master of pie-in-the-sky painting.

This article was originally published by @黑来古 on Operation Party. Any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 agreement