How to Enable Your Sales Team with Video, Interactive Content, Social Media, and User-Generated Content

I saw the writing on the wall back in 2008 as we evangelized the deployment of owned communities at brands all over the world. I was at a startup called KickApps, which sold a white-label online community software platform. They also had the only drag-and-drop video player widget creation tool of its kind at the time.

It was clear that brands had to adapt media models to thrive in the future and that the Web 2.0 movement had finally brought user-generated content (UGC) to the forefront of the Internet.

Naturally, consumer brands and media companies were the first to adopt the usage of online communities, video, UGC, and social media as a whole. This remained to be the case for the majority of the last two decades before B2B brands started to explore adoption.

Today, the consumerization of the B2B environment has arrived. Both buyers and sellers have been trained by their consumer experiences. These stakeholders expect B2B brands to communicate and do business with them in the same way consumer brands do.

They expect personalized content that leverages rich media like video and audio. B2B brands that operate like media companies are building audiences that create raving fans and ultimately make the sales teams at these companies' lives easier.

The buzzwords these days have included demand creation, community-led growth, audience-led growth, owned audience, and many others. Although the first wave of adoption of these consumer-like marketing experiences within B2B was typically at the top of the funnel, we now must integrate them into our overall sales enablement strategies.

Here are a few ways that product marketers can enable your sales team with video, interactive content, social media, and user-generated content:

Video

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Within video, you have owned or sometimes referred to as on-domain video experiences that live on your company website. You can use video players such as Vidyard, Wistia, and even Vimeo to host and manage these assets. You also have video experiences mostly on YouTube, that have their own network behind them. All of these video experiences are embeddable on your website and within interactive content assets.

Here is a list of externally facing video formats that product marketers can produce and offer to better enable their sales team:
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• Product Demos & Storytelling Videos: Highlight products, features, and use cases. These assets should be segmented by target persona. These videos should be segmented by target persona, and do a great job of speaking to the functionality while storytelling.
• Thought Leadership Videos: Feature employees, customers, community members, or even influencers speaking on popular topics that personas within your ICP would care about.
• Product & Feature “How-To” Videos: Explain how to execute a function and use a feature within your product.
• Customer Story/Testimonial/Case Study Videos: Feature customers or partners explaining how they used your product, the benefits they experienced, and the return on investment that was yielded.
• About Us Videos: Provide an overview of the company's history, its employees, culture, and even values. They can be powerful for building trust within the organization.
• Competitive Comparison Videos: Highlight the advantages of your product versus key competitors. These can feature one or multiple competitors per video. They can also be segmented in a variety of ways such as by vertical, ICP, and persona for example.
• Podcast Videos: These are versatile and can cover a wide range of formats wrapped up into an entertaining podcast episode. For example, they can be used for thought leadership plus feature a customer of yours speaking highly of your product or problem space.
• Technical Integration Videos: Feature a visual way of explaining an integration from both a “how-to” or value proposition perspective.
• Animated Explainer Videos: Feature a visual way of using animation to explain your company, product, value, or other objective. There is often a voiceover narration.
• Personalized Videos: Are used for one-to-one asynchronous communication. They are created by sellers, specifically for prospects and customers.
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Here are a few tools that help you create, host, and share video content:
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• Vidyard is a software company headquartered in Kitchener, Ontario, that creates software to host and analyze video performance.
• Wistia is a video marketing platform for businesses. Start creating, editing, hosting, marketing, and measuring the impact of your videos.
• YouTube is a video-sharing service where users can watch, like, share, comment and upload their own videos.
• Loom is a technology company that provides video communication software for work. Loom’s technology includes screen and camera recording, video editing, transcription, and the ability to share the recorded video link with others.
• Vouch is a technology company that allows you to cut through the noise with video. From screen recordings to testimonials and team updates, Vouch empowers you to create impactful videos at scale.
• Audience Plus allows you to transform your blog into a modern media property that enables marketing teams to build, engage, and monetize an owned audience.
• Animoto is a cloud-based video creation service that produces video from photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows, and customized web-based presentations.
• Castofly empowers software organizations to create and iterate on product demos seamlessly. Stay ahead by showcasing software updates consistently.
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Social Media, Community, and User-Generated Content

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Social media is an excellent source of user-generated content that can be shared with prospects and customers. Sales reps should be trained and empowered to share posts authored by internal employees and others within the ecosystem.

For example, AssetMule serves product marketers and sales teams. This is a great post full of insights and resources that a salesperson at AssetMule could share with their prospects and customers. A share like this would add value to the receiver and help the salesperson further develop relationships.

Your company might be a sponsor of 3rd party communities or have their own community built on platforms like Slack for example. These are also excellent sources of first-party data and content to share with prospects and customers.

SaaS companies like Pocus have done amazing jobs of building an owned community on Slack that generates tons of first-party content, which is repurposed for a variety of value-adding initiatives.

Here are a few tools that help you grow, manage, and analyze UGC content:

• Circle is an all-in-one community engagement platform that allows you to manage your members, discussions, events, courses, and content all in one place, under your own brand.
• Common Room puts you in the driver’s seat of the modern customer journey. Tap into product usage trends, social intent, and community conversations to grow fast.
• Threado is an AI-powered co-pilot built to help provide the best support to your customers and community across your Slack, Discord, and Website.
• Orbit allows you to grow and measure your community across any platform. Use their integrations, API, or Zapier to pull in all your community data for a single view of the community, with reports, alerts, and actions, so you can build relationships, not spreadsheets. Communities.
• Mighty Networks is a SaaS platform for creating your own social network enabling you to build your own network effects.

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Interactive Content Experiences

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As buyer expectations are changing by the minute and the consumerization of B2B is accelerating, interactive content experiences are more critical than ever. Within this movement, we have seen trends such as product-led growth continue to cater to optimizing the buyer experience. As a result, it drives sellers to double down on buyer enablement.

Although static content such as PDFs and PowerPoints have been staples within the salesperson's tool kit, they no longer meet the needs of both buyers and sellers. Buyers want dynamic, hyper-personalized, and easy-to-digest content. They want video, real-time communication, and experiences that make it easy to share with others within asynchronous virtual environments. To top it off, all these assets must speak to each persona within their buying committee.

On the other hand, sellers need flexible, dynamic content creation options that allow them to personalize to the context of their prospects. Generic content is rarely used and can even hurt a deal if the context is not aligned with the ICP (ideal customer profile). Sellers need easy ways to add personalized videos, collaborate with prospects within these content experiences, and easily track what is performing and what is not.

Modern selling teams are cross-functional and need collaborative environments that plug into their GTM stacks. These tools help facilitate the alignment that represents the reality of how sales enablement is executed. Organizations that operate in silos both quantitatively and technologically are often dysfunctional and unsustainable.

Today, software providers are able to further democratize the creation of interactive content experiences thus empowering marketing and sales teams to be more aligned than ever before. Tools like AssetMule, digital sales rooms, and similar solutions also allow sellers to move faster with less dependency on designers.

As you develop or revisit your sales enablement strategy, be sure to fully leverage the power of video, user-generated content from social media and community, and deploying interactive content experiences. Make sure that all of these assets are hyper-personalized and speak directly of the relevancy to the prospect or customer.

The B2B buyer enablement movement has arrived, and we’re just getting started.