9 YouTube B2B Marketing Best Practices to Follow in 2024

Over the past decade, B2B video marketing has increased in popularity, with 86% of B2B companies using videos as a marketing tool. Video marketing helps engagingly explain complex topics and drive conversions through the six levers of growth. Before your competitors take advantage of this open territory, it’s crucial to get your YouTube B2B marketing strategy optimized.

We understand the importance of your time and budget when starting a new marketing project, especially in B2B. That’s why we compiled these nine best practices to help you avoid trial and error trying to optimize your YouTube performance. 

Top 9 YouTube B2B Marketing Best Practices

Video marketing enables you to reach customers who are actively searching for answers to product questions. Becoming a valuable source of information can positively influence your performance in the six levers of growth, leading to increased attributable ROI. The six levers of growth - awareness, acquisition, activation, referral, retention, and revenue - enable your company to quickly identify what is causing friction within your buyer journey.

If you want to test out how your B2B company is currently performing and come back to this article, check out our Growth Grader Tool to measure your current performance. Otherwise, let’s get into the top nine YouTube B2B marketing best practices and start attracting more ideal clients to your business through YouTube.

1. Create Strategic Categories

YouTube is the place for your customers to deep-dive into your content and get to know your business. That’s where YouTube playlists come in handy. 

YouTube playlists are a great way to divide your content into strategic categories that serve each of the six levers of growth. Creating content that serves each lever of growth ensures that you’re addressing your buyers’ journey and creating content that leads to profitable conversions.

When it’s time to create your video content, every video must fit into a specific playlist. By dividing your content into different playlists, you’re ensuring that each of your videos serves a purpose and leads to your business goals.

For your B2B company, your playlists may look like this:

• XYZ Software 101 - Awareness
• How To Solve XYZ Problems/Tutorials - Acquisition
• XYZ Webinars - Activation
• XYZ Software Upgrades - Retention
• Case Studies - Referral
• Product Demos - Revenue

As long as your playlists reflect strategic categories, your content will be helpful for every part of your buyers’ journey, from awareness to revenue.

2. Answer Burning Customer Questions

“Is this valuable to my ideal audience?” is a crucial question to ask when creating YouTube content. Answering common questions through video helps nurture your leads because they get to know your company and your team better. When it comes time to reach out, your leads will feel like they know your company because of the content on your YouTube channel. 

The secret is to address customers’ problems by including yourself in the solution. This might mean getting creative with your video titles. For example, instead of “XYZ Software Solutions For Your Business,” you could try reframing this idea into “How To Solve XYZ in 9 Minutes (Live Tutorial).”

Addressing your customers’ questions will improve your brand awareness, in addition to helping your SEO. Framing your customers’ questions in a searchable way will help your video bump to the top of search results.

3. Utilize Evergreen Strategies

YouTube B2B marketing best practices aren’t vastly different from general YouTube best practices. The main difference is the strategy and reframing needed to attract a B2B audience.

There are evergreen strategies to use on YouTube, no matter the industry, including bright thumbnails, tagging keywords, title optimization, and SEO-optimized descriptions.

Let’s take Neil Patel's YouTube channel as an example:

Neil uses simple graphics, engaging titles, bright colors, and creative phrasing on his YouTube channel. These techniques are a great example of what your B2B company can do to increase your click-through rates, video views, and lead generation. In addition, these evergreen strategies are rarely affected by algorithm changes, so you’re able to utilize these for every video.

4. Keep Your Channel Optimized With New Features

B2B companies make a common mistake by considering YouTube a “set it and forget it” platform. Instead, when a new feature is released on YouTube, it’s beneficial to your company to use it in your B2B video marketing strategy.

When Google releases a new algorithm update, SEO specialists update their blogs and website pages to optimize their content. The same goes for YouTube; once new features are released, it’s crucial to update your video to take advantage of the latest optimization techniques. 

A prime example of this is using end screens. At the end of a YouTube video, you have the option to add in an end screen to recommend another video to your viewer. Utilizing features that YouTube promotes helps improve your click-through rate, impressions, and overall awareness because your content is continuously optimized for the platform. 

5. Foster Community Engagement

This may be an unpopular opinion, but YouTube is a great place to create community engagement. Unfortunately, many companies use YouTube as a “set it and forget it” platform, which leads to YouTube comments going unanswered, video topic requests being unfulfilled, and opportunities are lost.

Engaging your subscribers on YouTube helps create a sense of community. There are many ways to engage your online audience, including creating question prompts, taking polls, doing LIVE Q&As, creating a YouTube membership area, and simply making conversations in your comment section. In addition, when viewers are browsing through your playlists and see that your team is responsive and answers all types of questions, they will feel more comfortable reaching out.

By communicating directly with your subscribers, you’re creating more of a 1-1 relationship while nurturing and leading them to conversions. 

Community engagement, in the context of the six levers of growth, would look like:

• Subscribing (Awareness)
• Registering for a webinar (Acquisition)
• Asking for a demo (Activation)
• Keeping tabs on your channel for new releases (Retention)
• Recommending your channel to friends (Referral)
• Purchasing your services after being educated and nurtured (Revenue)

6. Be Consistent With Your Content Schedule

How many times have you found a company’s YouTube channel and noticed that they have many videos uploaded years ago and nothing since? Most likely, when you see this, that means that the company, unfortunately, lost momentum and their video marketing content strategy wasn’t realistic in the long-term.

Staying consistent with your content is not an easy task. Out of all the YouTube B2B marketing best practices, this is actually one of the biggest roadblocks. Your consistency depends on your ability to estimate content costs accurately and then prove attributable ROI. When you can prove that your YouTube content brings awareness, activating leads, and producing revenue, your channel is seen as an asset and priority. 

Once you have set up your YouTube content to be consistent with the six levers of growth and calculated your budget, the next step is creating a realistic posting schedule. Developing a posting schedule that is reasonable and realistic is the best way to stay consistent with achieving your marketing goals.

Posting once a week for a year is significantly better than posting every day for a month and then going silent for three years. If one video a week is feasible for your team in the short and long-term, then once a week posting schedule it is. Being successful in the B2B YouTube space takes time and patience, but the payoff is worth it. Consistency on YouTube paired with lead awareness, acquisition, and activation significantly impacts your revenue.

7. Value Growth Metrics

Measuring your company’s six levers of growth performance is essential to get a snapshot of how well you’re implementing YouTube B2B marketing best practices.

Some examples of how to put this into practice include measuring:

• Awareness: Subscribers, Video Views, Impressions
• Acquisition: Lead Generation, YouTube-Website Opt-in Conversions
• Activation: Lead Nurture, Enter Sales Pipeline, Webinar Signup
• Revenue: Sales Conversion
• Retention: Subscriber-Customer Stats, Subscriber Retention
• Referral: Overall Like and Share Stats, Inbound “Recommended” video traffic

By dividing up your YouTube analytics into the six levers of growth, you’re able to identify which areas need some work easily. One of the best ways to start measuring your YouTube analytics is with VIDIQ, a Google Chrome extension that helps you measure YouTube performance on your browser.

8. Repurpose Content

The secret to saving time in your content creation process is content repurposing. Taking one piece of content and turning it into long-form content can extend the life of your ideas and even give you new pieces of content in the process.

Let’s use one of our recent articles, 4 B2B Lead Generation Strategies for Business Growth, as an example. Instead of repurposing that one article into one video with the same title, my team could do a video on each of the four ideas. 

In practice, all the information in that one article could be four YouTube videos titled:

• How To Create Content For Each Stage of Your B2B Buyers’ Journey
• On-Page Deliverables VS E-Books: Which One Generates More B2B Sales?
• Why Every B2B Company Needs Email Marketing
• 5 Ways To Bring More Traffic To Your B2B Lead Magnet 

Repurposing content is all about working “smarter, not harder,” and getting creative with your content ideas to save time and money. In addition, this strategy helps with expanding your awareness lever of growth by giving your audience more content to view.

9. Drive Conversions

The success of video marketing is undeniable; 84% of B2B video marketers report that video marketing has helped them generate leads. So what’s their secret?

Pairing your YouTube videos with a solid website content strategy is the secret. Without a conversion funnel set up, your YouTube subscribers have a low chance of becoming customers. The goal is to deliver high-quality, valuable content on your YouTube channel and have your B2B audience enter into your conversion funnel through your website. Setting up your website with relevant blog content, lead magnets, and instantly consumable content helps enhance your overall B2B marketing strategy. 

Developing Video Content That Drives Growth

YouTube can be a tremendously profitable avenue for your business in 2024. But in the B2B world, posting on YouTube without the right strategy ends up costing time and money. Without a comprehensive YouTube strategy following best practices, your videos will get stuck at the awareness phase, no matter how helpful. 

Following YouTube B2B marketing best practices is simple when you include the six levers of growth in your strategy. Now that you see your channel through the lens of the six levers of growth, you will be able to easily assess your channel’s profitability and where to improve.