B2B Online Video Campaign: Texas Instruments
Sometimes companies get caught up in using social media tools and forget about the important things. It is critical to remember that the customer should be the key focus when developing a social media or traditional marketing campaigns. So why the rant on remembering who you customers are? Because when you do the result is successful content.
Enter Texas Instruments, a company that develops analog, digital signal processing, RF and DLP® semiconductor technologies that help customers deliver consumer and industrial electronics products. Who are their customers? For the most part they are engineers. How do you appeal to a highly technical audience?
You could do this:
Yes that was a B2B focused web video and it is actually part of an entire series that Texas Instruments has done. What do you think?
These videos represent the way many engineers may picture situations in their minds. They are identifiable. I personally enjoy these videos, they aren’t going to go “viral” and get a million views but that shouldn’t be the goal. The goal should be engaging current and potential customers. I hope that someone from Texas Instruments will leave a comment to share the success of these videos to date.
Kipp Bodnar is publisher of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Kipp on Twitter @kippbodnar.
Subscribe in your favorite Reader
Thanks for the call out Kipp! I’m Amber Pizano, I run the video program here at Texas Instruments and own the Thank an Engineer campaign.
At the end of March we’d had 176K Conversions: 151K video views and the 25K “further actions” people took from the landing page to other areas on ti.com.
People spend an average of 4.21 minutes on the page. So I’m confident and happy that people are engaged and watching the videos (and more than one).
Amber,
Thanks so much for your quick reply! Great information, congratulations on the success of the campaign.
Amber,Kipp
Good to see that social media effectiveness and creativity go hand in hand. As always, the challenge is to use great content like this (as well as the other more informative videos) and use them to inspire the target audience to add their own content – is this happening? Is that what you mean by conversions or further actions? Well done though on some great content here – you’re an inspiration to others!
John
I really enjoyed the video. I’d like to echo John’s question and understand what the measurable goals are for the campaign.
Sure, I’m happy to share
Appreciate the kudos.
Our objectives were to show design engineers that TI “gets” them and that we appreciate their role in bringing today’s innovations to all of us. We also hoped to build brand loyalty.
Our measurable goals(conversions) were:
- View multiple “thank an engineer” videos
- Forward video link to a peer or friend
- View system block diagrams or other ti.com portal pages
- Share stories regarding engineering innovations on our community forum.
As far as customers creating their own content- we held a video idea contest. People submitted their ideas for our next videos to our community site (community.ti.com) and we had a panel of judges who rated the top 10 ideas and the winners got flip video cameras. We ended up getting about 90 idea submission with very little promotion of the campaign.
Thanks for this timely story, Kip. Great content.
Great piece and congrats to the TI team and Amber. It’s a difficult challenge to interest engineers and make them laugh, nice work.
Kyle
This is definitely an area which is challenging to approach, given the average consumer based audience of the best known video repositories such as youtube, vimeo, metacafe etc… I believe there is an additional key here to correctly tagging and being topical with these tags, ensuring results are attained through search on a stumble upon basis.
From a professional viewpoint I have been researching for a video campaign that one of my clients have shown an interest in and came across an initiative for industrial Rugged Mobile Devices which has taken a humorous slant on a B2B product. They have tapped directly into their customers more imaginative side with tests that they may have thought about but never undertaken, whilst keeping it interesting for the wider audience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh47CFGG2kU
I think that people underestimate how difficult it is to cater for both the stumble upon and targeted audience in the B2B world…