8 tips for distributing your B2B video

Most B2B videos start with a marketing team saying, “We need a video!” There’s very little discussion in the early project stages about where you’re actually going to put the thing beyond “our website” and “YouTube.”

Making a video is only step one. Step two is video distribution. You need to make sure that people see your beautiful new asset. These eight tips will help you develop a distribution plan for your B2B video.

How to create a distribution plan for a B2B video

1. Evaluate all your owned options, beyond your website homepage or a landing page. Can you use the video on blog posts? In email marketing? Product pages?
2. Plan a launch day for your video, and create a toolkit for your internal team to share the video across their personal channels.
3. If your video is an awareness campaign, budget for paid media from the start.
4. When creating your budget for paid media, use historical data and apply the majority of your budget to tried-and-true platforms. Save a small chunk of your budget for experimenting with new platforms.
5. For paid media, create a 15-30 second cutdown of your video to use for the ad. Make sure it cuts right to the point.
6. When you share the video on social (whether organic or paid), share it with a clear offer and a dedicated landing page for the campaign.
7. Post the video natively on all your corporate social media channels, and take the time to optimize the video for each platform with a clear title and detailed description.
8. Before your launch date, generate a list of influencers in your niche. Reach out to them with your video and offer (see tip 6) to share with their audience.

For more on each tip, listen to the full episode of “Death to the Corporate Video” or read the transcript below.

You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.

Episode transcript

Guy Bauer: Think about PESO: Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned. Paid is only a quarter. I feel like when people think of distribution, they automatically go toward paid. Yes, that's a pretty darn big important, but three-fourths of those categories are not paid.

Hope Morley: Hello and welcome to Death to the Corporate Video, a podcast of tools and advice to make B2B videos people actually want to watch. I'm Hope Morley.

Guy Bauer: I'm Guy Bauer.

Hope Morley: We're from Umault, the B2B video marketing company, and today-

Guy Bauer: The.

Hope Morley: ... The.

Guy Bauer: The only one.

Hope Morley: I'm taking it. Today, we're going to be talking about distribution plans. We've got eight tips today we're going to run through of how to create your distribution plan and why you need one. We'll get started thinking about coming from that place of, "Oh, we'll put it on our website and our YouTube."

Hope Morley: Tip number one is: I would encourage everyone just as a very basic distribution step is really think critically about what your actual owned options are for using this video and where you can use it. Even on your own website, you might have a landing page, homepage. Can you reshare it on blog posts that your company puts out? Are there landing pages? Are there product pages? Do you have an email newsletter that you can promote the video? There's so many options just within your own owned media that you can push the video out in. Really, if you have a separate content team, work with them to try to sync up your calendars and get the video on as many pieces of content as possible.

Hope Morley: On top of that, with social, people, their minds go to YouTube for video, which is obviously great, but we found that video performs extremely well on LinkedIn, Facebook. There's a ton of research that video is one of the best performing pieces of content on social media, even if you're not on TikTok or you're not making an Instagram Reel, sharing the video natively on your company LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, wherever your audience is, is a great step for just getting a basic distribution out there.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. A little trick I use is just google "PESO." It stands for Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned. You'll find a bunch of charts of little thought-starters of what each of those main categories, the channels that lay inside them. If you just print that out on a piece of paper and try to brainstorm and list all of your accounts throughout and all of your different channel and opportunities you can pull just using that PESO model, I mean, you will find sometimes dozens of places that you can place your ad that you wouldn't have necessarily, if you just thought of YouTube and your website.

Hope Morley: Mm-hmm (affirmative). All right, Guy, what's your first tip, or our second tip?

Guy Bauer: Yeah, tip number two is to have a release day plan and make sure your people are a part of that. Your videos should have almost like a theatrical release or like when home videos come out, they always release on a Tuesday. Tuesday usually is the best day. But be very strategic. We will launch this ad Tuesday at 10:00 AM and the little secret hack is you have your own channels, right, in the PESO model, but you also have employees who have their own social channels. It's been proven, I think, time and time again, that the social networks want people to contribute over companies. They will boost and give more exposure to actual real people rather than companies.

Hope Morley: Especially if it's not a sponsored post.

Guy Bauer: Correct. What you can do is put together a little toolkit for your people that is very foolproof, so give them copy that accompanies the ad, give them the hashtags, the landing page, and just make it very simple so they can copy and paste into their own social, and so now on release day, you have the corporate channels, but you also are using your own people. Of course, it's up to them if they want to do it, but that's a free way to get a ton of exposure, by A, coordinating on a release day, and then B is leveraging your real people.

Hope Morley: At the very least, if you let your team know that you've got this big release coming, at the very least, you can hope for some engagement on social, so they'll come like it or comment, so even if they don't share it onto their own, it's going to boost the video and give you a lot better performance if you have people early on who are getting on that LinkedIn or Facebook and giving it those likes and shares right away.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. LinkedIn even has a feature where you can notify employees. I'm not sure how many people it will notify, but there's a little button, actually.

Hope Morley: Yep.

Guy Bauer: All right. What's tip number three, Hope?

Hope Morley: Tip number three: When you start your video project process, your video ad process, if your plan is that this is an awareness video, budget for paid media from the start. We're not talking necessarily about broadcast TV, but just within social or YouTube advertising, because really, like we've already mentioned, the social networks squash any native posts these days from companies on their networks. They don't want to see it a ton of content from there. But also, there's great targeting opportunities that you have available to you, especially through LinkedIn for B2B and you should really take advantage of that when you've got a great piece of content like a great video ad.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. Don't feel bad to pay. It's a totally valid way of getting exposure and new eyeballs, especially like you said, if it's awareness, that's the whole point is gaining awareness.

Hope Morley: You want new people to watch it, so you're trying to get people who don't necessarily follow your company page on LinkedIn or don't follow you on YouTube and how you reach those people.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. Tip number four is piggybacking off of budget, but when budgeting, use tried and true channels first. Devote more money towards the channels that you have actual data from previous campaigns, or just sponsoring posts, doing smaller stuff, but use this stuff. Put more money where you have the data that shows that something is happening there and put less money towards the new channels that everyone's talking about, the shiny bright ones, the TikToks of the world. I'm not saying not to do it, but just put a little less money there, or percentage of your budget, so that if it doesn't work, it doesn't kill everything. But it could work and then you just reallocate the budget. You could do it virtually live.

Hope Morley: If you've never run a paid media campaign at all, test out the different platforms and see which drive the best results for you, which drive the strongest leads. You can figure out, whether your company has LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, you need to test it out and see to get that historical data. If you've never done it before, try a whole bunch of them, evaluate after a month, two months. Then you can redistribute your budget, as Guy said.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, for us, the data we have is that LinkedIn delivers the highest-quality leads, but it's very expensive, and then Facebook will give you a ton of conversions and traffic, but I find that for B2B, it's pretty low-quality leads. All right.

Hope Morley: Yep, we're onto tip number five. If you're using paid media, create a cut down of your video to run as the ad, like a 15-second cutdown. When you're running paid media, even a 60-second spot is generally too long. You really want to get something that's short and sweet. It gets directly to the point when someone is scrolling. We all see the little sponsored tag on it, so we give it even less of our attention, necessarily, than we might give a post from a trusted source that we already know, so you really need something that's short and direct and exactly to the point.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. We found time and time again how little people care. I feel like I just did a video on this, but use that as creative license, actually. That means be bold right upfront. I think in a previous podcast, we talked about how in our last campaign we noticed there was a drop-off in the first five seconds. That was a little too much and we chopped out the first two seconds of the video, so basically, the punchline, instead of coming in at seven seconds, came in at five seconds or something like that. We saw the view-through go up by 15 to 20% instantaneously. It really does come down to a couple of seconds.

Guy Bauer: The other thing I used to be adverse to, which now I'm turning around and I think is really good, is I used to hate putting logos up top, like as soon as the video starts putting the logo over the video. Now that, I don't know, I don't know what has changed inside me, my age or whatever, but I think it's actually a good idea: Just start with the logo. Might as well. You're paying for it.

Hope Morley: Especially on YouTube. Yeah, especially YouTube, I would say. LinkedIn and other social, because you see the company name right above it, but on YouTube, you're just getting served this video and someone's probably paying less attention to the rest of the context.

Guy Bauer: Well, it's like people say: Don't judge your email campaign's success by click-through. In fact, it's open rate, which is really the thing you want to be paying attention to because it's just a brand impression. You're just keeping them warm on your logo and your name, so even if no one watches your video, the fact that the video starts with the logo is a really, it's a small impression, it's a small little win, so I really liked the idea of starting with the logo. Actually, that gives me an idea. We should do that with our stuff, right? Why not? You're paying for it. Get the logo in there. Okay, what are we on? Tip number six?

Hope Morley: All right, tip six. Yeah.

Guy Bauer: All right. I love this tip, is especially in B2B, you have to have an offer. With almost anything you do, you've got to have an offer. Not saying that that offer needs to be gated, necessarily. The more I step back and read stuff, unless you're like a HubSpot where you're totally, you have brand awareness and brand awareness is not an issue.

Hope Morley: And they don't gate that much.

Guy Bauer: Right. They still do gate. They have the permission to gate because they have the credibility because if HubSpot wrote it, then there's something there. But if your brand is not as well-respected in the content game as HubSpot, potentially don't gate it. But anyway, I digress. Each one of your ads needs to have an offer. That could be a free guide, white paper, calculator, whatever. Think of your ad as not just an ad for your brand, but an ad for the offer. Even if you're working in reverse, meaning you already have your ad done, think of an offer that corresponds with that ad, so if the ad is, if the creative is talking about how great you are at customer support, perhaps come up with an offer that is in the customer support realm, right, that would correlate. When there's a correlation there, when there's cohesion there, people are more apt to click because the ad is almost like an ad for the piece of content, as well as your brand.

Hope Morley: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and really make sure that those are relevant because if you're watching an ad on customer support and you click the link and you just get a general white paper on, I don't know, whatever, a broader topic that relates to your product, you're going to get people dropping off because they were interested and they clicked because they are looking for something specific, so if you don't have a really close thing there, a really close connection, you might have to create a new piece of content to offer. You might have to write a new white paper. That might seem like a lot of work, but if you think about the investment that you just put into this video ad and the money that you might be spending on paid media, anything that you can do to optimize that, it all ends up just being a small piece of the puzzle.

Guy Bauer: All right, Hope. Tip seven.

Hope Morley: Tip seven. I already mentioned, share the video natively across as many platforms as you can. When you do that, take the time to optimize the video for each individual platform, get the proper metadata, put titles, write good descriptions that are good for that platform, don't put hashtags on LinkedIn... Or I'm sorry, don't put hashtag on Facebook. I misspoke because that doesn't work. It looks sloppy if don't know the platform that you're putting content into, so really, it makes the content look clean and optimizing it will allow more people to see it, will allow more people to engage with it the way that they're used to engaging with content on that platform, and it will be better for SEO if you have a really great title and description on YouTube, making sure that you have something that people can find, that you have proper links. It's so important and especially in B2B, we see so many people not optimizing for each platform.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. Free tip. Let's do tip seven A is this seems so obvious, but we have to repeat it is: Say your video is "Globatek Solutions: The Way," whatever, that's... The Way.

Hope Morley: Like the title of the video is "The Way?"

Guy Bauer: "The Way," right. So many people will title their video "The Way" or "Globatek Solutions: The Way." Yes, that's accurate, that's what your video is, but no one is searching that, so I know it's not necessarily good-looking, or a little less than, or counterintuitive is type in what someone would search in YouTube to find your video rather than the title of your video. Yes, it is the title of your video, so a lot of people get confused and they write in "Globatek Solutions: The Way," but really, what you should do is write in the keywords that someone would search for to find that video, so "IT support," "communications," "cybersecurity," whatever.

Hope Morley: You can also put both in the YouTube title. Start with "The Way," put a little vertical line there, and then give a little bit of a keyword, a description of what the video is.

Guy Bauer: Correct. What is that vertical line? What is that called? Do you know? I don't know. It's the one...

Hope Morley: Yeah, it's right under your delete key.

Guy Bauer: Backslash, yeah.

Hope Morley: Yeah.

Guy Bauer: We'll never know. If anyone knows, let us know, send us a thing.

Hope Morley: Please, tell us.

Guy Bauer: Yeah.

Hope Morley: Reach out and let us know what that thing is called.

Guy Bauer: All right, tip number eight is, and this will come out when you do your PESO model in the earned category, but we have found that when you can find folks, and I hate using the word "influencers," so I'll say "people with influence," if you can find people with influence that will organically give your ad love, meaning it fits within what it is the content that they're generating for their audience, you can go to the moon all for free. We've done this time and time again. Again, you can't spam. It's got to be authentic. You've got to really know who these people are and the kind of content that they're generating, so a little trick is if you know you have your release day coming up in a month and you don't even need to have the ad finished for this, right?

Guy Bauer: But if you have a release date coming up in a month, start subscribing to the newsletters of the folks in this sphere, right, when you do your earned brainstorming and you identify blogs or publications, you want to get into, start getting on their newsletters now. Subscribe to their Twitter. Just get a feel for their cadence. A lot of these folks have newsletters and they'll always have some kind of Found on the Internet section or something like that. Potentially, you can reach out and say, "I've got something for your Found on the Internet section." As long as it's good and it's... Or what does it mean?

Hope Morley: Relevant?

Guy Bauer: "Relevant," that's the word. If it's relevant to their message, why wouldn't they post it if it will delight their audience or give their audience information? Find people with intrinsic interest in your ad and identify them early. Before you do Double Dutch jump rope, you always see people. They have to get the rhythm, right?

Hope Morley: Yeah.

Guy Bauer: They have to get the rhythm for a little bit before you jump in. Same thing, subscribing to their newsletter, Twitter, and all that stuff.

Hope Morley: These people, if you've got a weekly newsletter, for example, especially that's something on a really niche topic, they might be a little desperate for content because it's hard to come up with something every week, so they might actually be grateful, too, if they reach out. They might be happy to put something in their newsletter to get something for you.

Guy Bauer: Especially if you're coming in, piggybacking off of tip number six, if you're coming in with an offer, so now you already have a piece of content that you can offer this person with influence. Again, it's very not spammy. You're getting ad juice, right? You're going to get some juice, but you're not coming in as a spammer, you're coming in as a person offering up some content. Make sure you have quantity. Don't put all your eggs in one basket because when we do this, we send out 20 emails, you'll get two responses. You're not going to get... Most people will just ignore you. But it's a great way to get free, and if you can coordinate this on a release day, those algorithms will see it, and then the algorithms itself will then start serving you up without having to pay.

Hope Morley: Yeah, just like going back to getting your employees to like it across the platforms. Anything that you can drive traffic, as soon as that thing drops, it's going to be so important.

Guy Bauer: The Internet more and more is... I mean, LinkedIn is you get 48 hours, that's what I've found on LinkedIn. Same thing with Facebook. Actually, most of them, right? You've got to do it in the first 48. It's almost like a crime.

Hope Morley: Yeah. I mean, I would say YouTube is the only platform that you really have, not an unlimited lifespan, but YouTube is one of the few places that the date you posted is a little irrelevant.

Guy Bauer: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, we've found that.

Hope Morley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Guy Bauer: Great. I love these tips.

Hope Morley: Yes.

Guy Bauer: I can't wait to use them.

Hope Morley: I can't wait for someone to call us up before they're going to make their video ad and have their full PESO model ready to share with us. I'm so excited, so if you're thinking about your next campaign, I know there's so many exciting things to think about when you're making a new video or a new ad for your company, but get this homework done early. You will get so much more juice out of your spot. You're investing a lot of money into this video. A little bit more money, a little bit more work, and you will just get so much more out of it.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. One other is think about PESO: Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned. Paid is only a quarter. I feel like when people think of distribution, they automatically go toward paid. Yes, that's a pretty darn big important, but three-fourths of those categories are not paid.

Hope Morley: Yeah, so really, spend the time to think about where. We did talk a lot about paid and budgeting for that, but spend the time thinking about how you can get more juice out of owned like we talked about in the first tip and shared what can you do to really optimize every little piece of that puzzle.

Hope Morley: Thanks for listening. If you have any other thoughts on distributing B2B video, we'd love to hear them. You can find us across all the social platforms at Umault, or you can always email us at hello@umault.com, that's U-M-A-U-L-T dot com. Thanks for listening.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, and a free case of sugar-free Red Bull to the first person that lets us know what that long vertical line is called on your keyboard.