Gaming the System | Interactive video for B2B Audiences

By James Kean

HerdMSL worked with world-leading payments company, Adyen, to launch an interactive ‘choose- your-own-adventure’ style video campaign.

The aim was to help retailers step into their customer’s shoes and better understand how a variety of payment options fit into the modern day shopping experience to better meet consumer expectations.

Below we explore the use-case for interactive video in brand communications – particularly as it relates to B2B marketing and lead generation.

You are the head of marketing for a B2B brand looking to increase brand awareness and grow your consideration funnel, you choose to…

A) …Continue talking ‘at’ potential customers. You tell them how much they need your services and hope they sign-up to work with you

Or

B) … Show potential customers how much you understand the market’s need for your product, by allowing them to step into their shoes of an end-user and feel the benefits instead of working with you, instead of just hearing about them

If B) continue reading…

Interactivity as the most powerful form of emotive storytelling

If you grew up in the 80s (or 90s like me), this blog’s introduction probably looks familiar.

Like many millennials, my primary school library was enriched with a selection of choose-your-own-adventure novels – much to my delight. Books that allowed the reader to make choices throughout the novel that would affect the outcome of the story.

The narrative would hit a fork in the road, and the reader would be forced to step into the shoes of the protagonist and take responsibility for what happens next.

A strong argument for the strength of video games and choose-your-own-adventure novels as powerful storytelling mediums is that they both offer an interactive way to engage audiences that force a deeper level of immersion than would otherwise be possible with passive viewers or readers.

Books and movies are great at making you feel sad, happy, angry and excited. However, the interactive narratives found in games can be much more effective at making you feel a range of emotions that are uniquely achievable or amplified by a sense of agency or responsibility for the choices taken by the main characters.

In short – when your choices had a role to play in driving a specific outcome, you are much more susceptible to feel powerful involved emotions like guilt or relief, frustration or accomplishment, regret or satisfaction.

For storytellers, this is a powerful tool in the world of emotive storytelling that can generate a great sense of empathy in an audience.

In B2B marketing, we are often trying to demonstrate how a brand, product or service can solve a customer’s pain points. Accessing your audience’s emotions like frustration and satisfaction can be an incredibly powerful way to achieve this for marketers.

Why Emotions Matter in B2B Comms

All successful brands need to demonstrate a good degree of empathy for their audience. In fact, building an understanding of what makes consumers tick and motivates their decisions is at the core of perhaps the most well studied theory in advertising – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

While we often see consumer communications tapping into these motivations, B2B marketers often overlook the human side of their audience.

The better your understanding of an audience’s needs, wants and pain points the better your ability to demonstrate how your services can address those motivations.

This is particularly important when it comes to a B2B company looking to increase awareness and drive more potential customers down the consideration funnel.

Quick fire round: how does this work in practice?

The Case Study: We recently launched an interactive video for payments company Adyen. Follow the link below to see how the unique piece of content allows audience members to step into the shoes of a shopper as they journey from their home couch through to a purchase – highlighting the various payment options and consumer preferences along the way.

https://events.adyen.com/interactive-customer-journey-au

The execution: We scripted, and produced over 25 different pathways for three different markets (Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore) with our production partners, Prodigious, and worked with online video specialist hosting platforms Brightcove and HapYak to launch, host and analyse the interactive videos.

We worked with Adyen to craft a series of digital banner ads, teaser videos and web copy which would direct potential leads to a dedicated landing page where the experience and a research report helped encourage lead generation.

The alternatives: Interactive video is just one tool in the arsenal of marketers looking to tap into emotional storytelling through content. Let’s explore a few more:

• See how we worked with an infrastructure provider to show the benefits of high speed internet to the arts community through a documentary style video.
• See how we used case study videos to promote the benefits of laptops to education in this school and powerful desktop computers to this motion capture studio.
• See how editorial by-lines can use storytelling to allow a cyber-security company to demonstrated the need for the improved proactive cybersecurity by showing what happens when it all goes wrong.

Why Communicators should be at the heard of your Content

As a PR and Communications business at our core, our team is full of storytellers who thrive on building easily understood narratives.

Exploring new mediums and formats for storytelling allows us as communicators to reach audiences with new messages in new ways – as Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message”.

As professional communicators and storytellers, PR-driven content is often story-driven content.

If you are keen to learn more about how story-driven content can help your brand increase brand awareness, purchase consideration and more, reach out to our content specialists here.