Turns out the best way to reach the IT department and C-suite executives online is to put a video on Yelp just before their lunch hour.
Konica Minolta Business Solutions, an office technology and services company, traditionally reached its B2B audience at conferences, through print advertising in industry magazines or by sponsoring events like the PGA golf tour.
But the company recognized the power of video to communicate messages.
“We believe that online video is the future of content marketing,” said Kay Du Fernandez, VP of strategic business development for Konica Minolta. The company staffed up an internal video production team and built a studio in the basement of its New Jersey headquarters.
It wanted to distribute those videos not just to people visiting its site or tuning into a golf tournament, but to the 30,000 people in the United States it identified as potential customers.
It dipped its toe via a monthlong campaign earlier this year with GlassView, which secured the inventory on a cost-per-view basis.
The campaign showed strong performance not just in the places that Konica Minolta expected, like business news sites, but on nonendemic sites, according to GlassView CEO James G. Brooks, whose company optimized the campaign. One of the highest-performing placements was on Yelp just before lunch.
That insight resonated with Fernandez. The content, a testimonial featuring the CIO of Evergreen Packaging, required time to consume. Placement on a restaurant review site caught busy executives during a lean-back moment.
Placements outside of niche business technology sites were also incredibly efficient for the B2B advertiser. Konica Minolta made sure its video ads showed up on widely read but contextually relevant sites like Wired and Forbes, where it didn’t economically make sense to buy print ads.
The campaign posted an 85% video completion rate, and an effective cost per view that went down from 25 cents to 19 cents over the course of the campaign, Fernandez said. The click-through rate of 2.64% and share rate of 1.3% exceeded industry benchmarks.
Paid media reaching potential customers is only one part of Konica Minolta’s video strategy, which is focusing on video’s power to marry emotion with information.
The YouTube video “Dream Printer,” featuring adorable children receiving pictures of them in their dream professions, garnered 2 million views since it posted a year and a half ago.
Like reaching execs on Yelp, the video tried to connect with viewers outside of a cubicle mindset, and reaped higher engagement because of that.
“What was successful with the Dream Printer was that it was more human in its approach,” Fernandez said. “B2B is getting closer to B2C.”
