Originally appeared in Communicate Magazine by Brittany Golob

By 2020, 80% of internet traffic will be video, Richard Dixon, director at Black Sun, says. At the beginning of the year, corporate communications consultancy Black Sun held an event discussing trends in digital and video communications in the B2B setting. This projection, among others, spoke to the rising prevalence of interactive, engaging content.

For B2B brands, the challenge is, as ever, more acute, than for their B2C counterparts. Developing interesting video content when armed with only a few key spokespeople and a potentially confusing product or sector can lead to many pitfalls. The talking head era of corporate video, though, may be on the decline.

Black Sun shared content from distribution company Ferguson and chemical transportation experts Stolt-Nielsen that demonstrated the ways in which that change is occurring. For both, creating one high-end produced film then led to smaller, more versatile bits of content that could be used for different audiences. Dixon says, “With Ferguson, we could map out four or five different videos at the end. We could make out where they would sit and then structure our filming and creative process and messaging. We went through that once, so it makes it much more cost-effective to do that up front.

The inclusion of videos like these on corporate or investor sites leads to a 50% longer dwell time on the site. Video galleries also generate dwell times two or three times longer than on the average page. Even more telling is this: 80% of c-suite executives say they are watching more video this year than they did in 2017.

The future for corporate communications may lie in the moving image. But, for all video campaigns, the most important aspects are the planning, messaging and strategic follow through. “I think it’s important that companies have an overall video strategy,” says Dixon. “You can get caught up in the intricacies of diving straight in, but thinking about it up front make your production process much more effective downstream.”

Read Richard’s further insights and the full Communicate Magazine article here