Roger Wigington: Live Now: 5 B2B Brands Winning With Live-Stream Content

Four marketers wearing headphones live-streaming group image

How can B2B brands harness the increasing power of live-streaming content to build audience engagement? Over the course of the pandemic, live-streaming events have catapulted onto our screens and into many new areas of our business lives, and as 2022 looms, there’s no sign that live-stream content usage will dissipate. Quite the opposite appears to be in store, and with good reason, as our CEO Lee Odden outlined earlier this year in “How B2B Brands Can Boost Confidence in Livestream Video, Podcast and Clubhouse Marketing,” exploring how engaging B2B marketing experiences are more vital than ever. How are B2B brands achieving success with live-streaming today? Let’s turn on the cameras and mics and take a look at five global B2B brands that have had success through well-planned and innovative use of live-streaming content.

1 — SAP

With its Better Together, SuccessFactors, and other live-streaming initiatives, global enterprise software firm SAP* has brought digital transformation directly to its customers, partners, and thought leaders. For its Better Together: Customer Conversations series, live-streaming via LinkedIn Live has been utilized to foster communication around the SAP Business Technology Platform, with live-streaming also being tied together with accompanying podcast, blog, and social content. Recent episodes include looks at boosting sustainability and efficiency through digital transformation, sustainable IT for your business and bottom line, and success stories focused on turning customer service into customer experience. For its SuccessFactors’ Rise of HXM series, live-streaming using LinkedIn Live has also been featured, along with human experience management (HXM) content on YouTube, Facebook, and in other non-video digital content formats, with recent episodes bringing in industry subject experts to examine “Take Your Employee Experiences to the Next Level in the New World of Work,” “The 6 Steps to an Empowering Digital Learner Experience,” and “The Rise of HXM: How HR in the Cloud Accelerates Your People-first Strategy.”

2 — Vimeo

Video hosting, sharing, and services platform provider Vimeo has increasingly embraced the B2B landscape during the pandemic, recently launching its Vimeo Events platform with an array of powerful live-streaming features. With its VimeoEvents offering, Vimeo has worked to meet the increasing demands B2B firms have had when it comes to live-streaming, and with a robust feature set including tools to utilize before, during and after live events, there will likely be fascinating use cases in 2022 and beyond as the product matures. Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud recently shared news of the launch on LinkedIn, noting the platform’s ambitious goal of making webinars beautiful and democratizing events for marketers.

3 — Eaton

Global power management company Eaton has successfully utilized live-streaming to highlight a variety of topics, including a forthcoming LinkedIn Live broadcast focused on inclusion and diversity. Recent live-stream content has included episodes on “Enabling a digital mindset: what it is and how to get it,” “From engineering student to vice president, how to build your career,” and “Taking ownership of your career: Women leading the way at Eaton,” each showing how live-stream content can not only inform, but drive conversations and build thought leadership. Eaton’s live-streaming content has included an “Ask the Experts” series, and has also featured interactive social media elements to accompany live-streams, such as LinkedIn polls asking questions relating to upcoming episodes. Zari Venhaus, vice president of corporate marketing communications at Eaton, was featured on our Break Free B2B Marketing series of video and podcast interviews, in “Break Free B2B Series: Zari Venhaus on How to Scoot Your Way to Martech Transformation Through Storytelling,” which you can watch below.

4 — Oracle

With a variety of live-streaming content including Oracle Live and virtual events such as Oracle Database World, Oracle* has used live events to share insight from global thought leaders, also offering content archives for access once a stream has concluded. Recent Oracle Live events have included sessions on “The Future of CRM: Engineering Better Experiences,” “Connect Your Enterprise with AI-Driven Analytics,” and “Build the Future of Business with Oracle Cloud Applications,” among others. Srijana Angdembey, director of social media marketing at Oracle, sat down with our own CEO Lee Odden for a fascinating episode of our Inside B2B Influence show, “Inside Influence 8: Srijana Angdembey from Oracle on How Influence Creates Better B2B Customer Experiences,” including her insight on live-streaming video events and other interactive B2B content.

5 — SAS

Global analytics software firm SAS has increasingly used live-streaming content to help show the impact their products have on people’s lives, and has used the power of streaming to bring stories to life. SAS utilizes its SAS Events live-streaming content to connect with prospects, customers and its own team-members, such as in recent episodes “Be Curious. Be Innovative,” “Moments Matter More Than Ever as CX Goes Hybrid,” and “You Are In The Cloud! From Challenge to Decision,” along with both live and on-demand webinar content. Digital events platform Brightcove highlighted some of the creative ways that SAS has used live-streaming to bring to life what can be a rather intangible product, in its “How SAS Used Video to Show Their Products' Impact on People's Lives.”

Take Two — Live-Stream Content Can Live On

via GIPHY By itself, the type of live-streaming content we’ve seen here from SAP, Vimeo, Eaton, Oracle, and SAS, represents a powerful element for B2B content marketers to use. Don’t let the value of that content exist only during the live-streaming, however, as it has plenty more strength in an entire array of derivative forms. Live-streaming content can go on to lead a much longer life when it’s incorporated into digital assets such as:

Blog articles built on live-stream transcriptions
Round-up posts from multiple live-stream episodes all touching on a single topic
Video content for a variety of social platforms
Audio content for podcast sharing

Learn more about the benefits of repurposing B2B content in our “A Tasty, Strategic Addition to the Content Marketing Table: ‘Repurposed Content Cobbler’,” and “5 Tips for Promoting B2B Content Co-Created with Influencers.” No matter how you stream it, award-winning B2B marketing takes considerable time and effort to craft, which is why many firms choose to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Contact us today to learn how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others. * SAP and Oracle are TopRank Marketing clients.

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