First things first, let’s start with why retargeting matters in B2B marketing.
B2B decision-making involves many people, takes a long time, and there’s nothing linear about it. Research differs, however most studies place the average B2B sales cycle length somewhere between 6-12 months. Sometimes In B2B settings several years can pass between the first engagement and the signed agreement.
And sometimes the B2B buyers feel like the only option to quench their thirst is to drink from a firehose. Instead of feeling satisfied, they just feel drenched and directionless. A smart retargeting strategy leveraging the most effective content format in B2B marketing can help you build confidence and consensus across buying groups.
Using Video Retargeting to Improve Your B2B Campaign Results
The long, complex, and too-often confusing nature of B2B buying begs for salience, familiarity and trust. Video retargeting, powered by powerful retargeting tools like the LinkedIn Insight Tag, can help marketers achieve all three of these virtues.
The power of video in B2B marketing
Video is B2B marketers’ most-used and most-planned tactic these days, according to LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Benchmark. Why the popularity? Well, compared to other content formats, video gets shared 20X more often and lifts conversions by 68%.
Furthermore, marketing success often comes down to connecting on an emotional level. Video’s ability to humanize messaging and connect more deeply with people cannot be understated.
How video retargeting works
Video retargeting is a digital marketing tactic where video ads are displayed to people who have previously visited your website or have interacted with your content on a specific platform. Powered by the Insight Tag, LinkedIn video retargeting allows you to display video ads to specific audience segments who have engaged with content on your website or on LinkedIn.
With video retargeting you can create custom audiences based on which content they engaged with and how they interacted with it, allowing you to personalize ads and create unique campaigns for specific segments of your audience.
LinkedIn video retargeting empowers B2B marketers to increase the reach and effectiveness of LinkedIn campaigns because it focuses on professionals who have already shown an interest in your content. It’s a great opportunity for marketers who want to increase video usage while also boosting meaningful impressions among key audiences.
Why video retargeting is so effective
The B2B buying journey involves a series of micro conversions that build up to the big, macro conversion: the signed deal. The repetition of video retargeting builds recall and increases the likelihood of both micro and macro conversions.
Marketers can also move beyond awareness, using video retargeting to educate, inspire and nurture. For B2B marketers who must navigate complex buying committees, video retargeting is a multi-use tool. You can use it to educate or share thought leadership with specific members of the buying committee — helping individual members successfully execute their role within the buying process — and you can also use it to create shared messaging that builds consensus among the buying committee at large.
“Since using the new remarketing capabilities for Lead Gen Forms and videos our conversion rate has gone up by 20%, while our cost per conversion went down by 24%.” - Marit van der Louw, International Content Marketer, TOPdesk (Mastering Targeting on LinkedIn)
Video retargeting in action: Best practices
If your goal is about brand awareness or gaining access to the consideration stage, shorter video — about 15-30 seconds — works best. If your goal is to secure a conversion, all lengths of video are proven to work. That said, the shorter you can make your video, the easier it will be to maintain your audience’s attention throughout. Our B2B Marketing Benchmark report found that short-form social videos produce the best ROI among video types.
Promoting thought leadership? Lead with branding within the first two seconds of your video ad because doing so correlates with a 16% lift in engagement. But if you’re trying to build brand awareness, it may be better to wait as the same study found a 40% lift in completion rate when branding appeared in the second half of the video.
Try to feature people and workplaces that are relatable — it’s not all smiles at work, and audiences want to see a range of emotions in the workplace. Vidmob’s 2024 Creative Trends Report with LinkedIn found that campaigns embracing emotions like anger (+59%) and confusion (+21%) had higher view-through rates than those not featuring strong emotions.
If you’re in the bottom of the funnel, low-contrast videos tend to work better, perhaps because the softer contrast creates a more subtle tone during those high-stakes moments.
Finally, for an easier way to measure ROI, combine Lead Gen Forms with your video retargeting campaigns. Lead Gen Forms come prefilled with accurate LinkedIn profile data, making it easier for members to share their professional info, and easier for marketers to access, manage, and measure leads.
Building a video retargeting strategy
When building your video retargeting campaign, it’s important to align your objective with your audience’s intent and where you are in the funnel. Choosing a conversion-oriented goal when you still have nurturing to do, for instance, could cause you to “optimize” your campaign in ways that don’t jibe with your buyer’s context.
Once you have a good idea of where you’re working in the funnel and what action you want your audience to take, start building your audience segment from your existing traffic. It’s recommended that you have a minimum of 300 visitors per segment.
Video retargeting can be used to support paid campaigns, of course, but don’t forget that you can also use video retargeting to build your community and to support your organic marketing activities.
Connecting relevance to ROI
Video amplifies message clarity, consistency, and emotional impact; retargeting keeps your brand top-of-mind. Combined they become video retargeting — a supertool B2B marketers can use to accelerate pipeline and boost conversion efficiency.
Here are a few more resources to help you excel at B2B video and retargeting:
- LinkedIn Insight Tag Setup Guide
- 13 Tips for Compelling B2B Video Content on LinkedIn
- LinkedIn Video Ads Overview
- VidMob’s 2024 Creative Trends Report with LinkedIn
Discover more tips for creating videos that shine in the feed and drive results. Learn the fundamental strategies for B2B video on LinkedIn.
Topics: Content marketing
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