When is the last time you assessed the quality of your product visual—not just for sharpness or photo color or the like—but the actual strategic value?
Too often B2B marketers fall into the rut of using the same type of product photos and videos with each campaign when even just a few small changes can create much greater engagement.
To spice up your strategy, consider these three tips.
Don’t Limit Yourself to Straight Product Composition—Think Like a Problem Solver. Consider the following example of a packaging supplier that makes retail-ready boxes. A common reason food manufacturers choose one of these products versus another often comes down to ease of use for retailers. So instead of simply having a traditional product photo and describing its retail-ready boxes as “easy to open” and possessing “structural integrity,” the supplier took a far more clever approach: The company uses a video loop on its website to capture the real-time speed with which hands can rip through the quick-release seams on its products to help prospects envision an easy unboxing experience. Elsewhere, an image shows a tall vertical stack of the boxes to provide prospects with visual proof of “stability” and “sturdiness.”
The lesson? By focusing on the pain points of your prospects, you can often gain insights into ways to better “show” how your product is a valuable solution.
Don’t Underestimate the Value of Your Technical Team. Product videos are great, but they only tell one part of your story. During this time of uncertainty, your buyers are looking for guidance. One of the best ways to differentiate from competitors is by leveraging your expertise. A brief Q&A with one of your subject matter experts around a “hot” topic relevant to your industry (e-commerce, remote management or the like) can be a strong way to stand out in the market, as prospects try to determine which suppliers can best serve their needs for the long term, through good times and bad. A few minutes where your technical expert provides some guidance or analysis around a new or common challenge can go a long way toward growing your brand and driving pipeline among those seeking solutions.
Version Your Visuals by Buying Segment When Possible. Do your customers come from different verticals? If so, an easy way to get more attention to your brand is with photos or videos that showcase your relevancy. Take the extra time to showcase your product being used by those from each audience with separate photos or videos. Exclusive content can go a long way to gaining trust among prospects that you are an expert in their area, and not just the market at large.
Just how important is it to take this extra time to create visuals that show your product’s relation to a buyer’s industry? In a recent PMMI Media Group survey of packaging machinery end users, 73 percent stated the winning supplier of its most recent purchase “demonstrated stronger knowledge of applications or projects relevant to my industry.” (Relevance to industry ranked higher than even a supplier’s speed of response!)
.svg)