Why Do Most B2B Videos Fail Before Filming Starts?

Most B2B videos are lost before anyone turns a camera on. Not because the footage is bad, but because nobody decided what the video was actually for. Dane Frederiksen of Digital Accomplice walks through step one of the Digital Accomplice Video System: the goal-setting exercise that turns a vague "we should make a video" into a single statement you can hold a project accountable to.

Key Takeaways

Most B2B videos fail before filming because no one defined the business outcome or how success would be measured.
Pick one business goal. Multiple goals create the "Swiss Army knife problem": a tool that does everything and nothing particularly well.
The goal drives every downstream decision: who is in the video, how long it runs, whether it is animated or live action.
Name the video's assignment. Video's advantages are showing and telling, transferring trust to a person, compressing time, and scaling a conversation you cannot have in person.
Define the narrow audience and their funnel stage, then name the specific belief you want the video to change.
Set the measurement before you shoot, and be honest about attribution. Asking people how they heard about you is the gold standard.
Assign an owner to each decision. Group decisions stall creative progress and muddy the outcome.
Finish with trade-offs: write down what this video will not do.

Why do most B2B videos fail before filming starts?

Because the plan was never made. Companies spend real money on production without knowing what business outcome they wanted or how they would measure whether they got it.

"Most B2B videos fail before anyone turns a camera on. Not because the video is bad, but because nobody decided what it was for exactly." — Dane Frederiksen

The Digital Accomplice Video System has two halves: the plan, and the execution. Everything below is step one of the plan, and it happens before a single shot is scheduled. If you want the wider view of what belongs in the plan, start with what a good B2B video strategy looks like.

What is the Swiss Army knife problem in video goals?

It is what happens when a video is asked to do everything at once. A Swiss Army knife is convenient because it holds a dozen tools, but the scissors are tiny, the saw will not take down a limb, and the corkscrew works without ever being as good as a real wine opener.

Videos behave the same way. One business objective means your messaging and your budget point in one direction, which makes the objective far more likely to actually land.

The other metaphor Dane uses is travel. Trying to satisfy every stakeholder is like deciding to go to LA and New York at the same time.

"You can't really do that. You're gonna end up in Kansas." — Dane Frederiksen

Typical B2B video goals worth picking from:

Awareness. You are new, and people do not know you exist or what you do.
Sign-ups. Mid-funnel: emails, opt-ins, downloads.
Conversion. You have leads but they are not converting, so you need longer-form content that gets into how things work and shows proof.
Recruiting. You need more and better candidates.

The rest of this walkthrough uses recruiting as the worked example, based on a video Dane produced for TubeMogul.

How do you decide what a video's assignment is?

Ask what this video will do for you that an ad, a job board, a LinkedIn post, or networking will not. That is the video's assignment, and it is a separate question from the business goal.

Video's real advantages:

Show and tell. Seeing is believing, and you can prove something is real. (Dane's caveat: in the AI era that is less absolute, though sitting with someone through long-form content still tends to reveal what is genuine.)
Transfer trust to a person. Standing up and saying something on camera puts your reputation on the line, and that risk is what makes it credible.
Compress time. A two-minute recruiting video can feel like a week spent getting to know a company. Reading your way to that same feel would take far longer and would not land the same way.
Scale the conversation. Conferences and face-to-face meetings work, but they do not scale. Video is watchable anywhere, around the clock, without you going anywhere.

For the TubeMogul recruiting video, the assignment was speed. The company wanted to hire, and the video's job was to get them there faster. As Dane frames it, the video functions as an accelerant: taking a car to New York instead of walking. Curious where your own video sits today? Start with a free AI Visibility Snapshot.

Who is the audience, and what stage are they in?

Get specific enough that your language changes. If you are recruiting engineers for a B2B SaaS company, you are not talking to "all the B2B people." The video carries engineering messaging that resonates with engineers, in the words engineers use, about the things engineers care about.

That will mean some phrases fly over other viewers' heads. That is the trade. Watering the message down until everyone half-understands it means your core audience gets nothing of value.

Then place them on the funnel:

Awareness. They do not know who you are yet.
Consideration. They know you and are weighing you.
Conversion. In recruiting, that is applying for the job.

In the TubeMogul case, the candidates were at the top: they did not necessarily know what TubeMogul was. So the answer was an introductory video covering who we are, what we do, and why you might want to work here, which then moves them down the funnel.

What belief do you want the video to change?

Name the transformation. What should this audience believe after watching that they did not believe before?

For a recruiting video that might be: we are fast growing, we have the best product in our category, we have the best team, these are people you will genuinely learn from. It could just as easily be benefits or culture. The point is that once you know the belief, you can spend resources changing it on purpose rather than by accident.

How do you measure whether a B2B video worked?

Decide the metric before you shoot. This is, in Dane's view, one of the weakest spots in B2B video: people produce without ever defining success.

In the recruiting example, you know today's application volume. The target becomes a 25% increase in job applicants in Q3. It does not have to be that precise, but the value of a number like that is you would genuinely know whether it happened.

Three things to keep honest:

Leading versus lagging indicators. Know which one you are watching.
Attribution honesty. If the number moves, make sure the video was actually part of why. Build attribution into the plan, not after.
The gold standard. Ask applicants how they found out about your company. That tells you whether the video did work.

There is a fourth question worth asking early: what would make you not do this project at all? If you cannot see a path to success, that is useful to know before the budget is spent.

Who owns which decisions?

Someone specific, per decision. This is jobs-to-be-done applied to a creative project.

"If you're going on a trip, the car has one steering wheel." — Dane Frederiksen

Group decisions stall progress and muddy outcomes on strategic and creative work. If one person wants a spicy meal and another wants a mild one, nobody ends up happy. So assign an owner to each of these:

The goal
How you are going to get there (the assignment)
The audience
Measurement

It can be the same person for all four. What matters is that the decision has a name attached to it.

A thought experiment to keep in your back pocket: what if someone doesn't like the video, but it does achieve its goal? Dane has seen that happen, where someone disliked the music or was not quite happy with a choice, and the video worked anyway. If it worked, it was a success.

What trade-offs should you make before filming?

Write down what you will not do. You are going from San Francisco to New York, which means you are not going to LA. That is a strategic decision, not a failure of ambition. Doing one thing well requires not doing the other things.

What does the finished goal statement look like?

Once all seven pieces are decided, they collapse into a single statement. For the recruiting example:

Our goal is to make a video that makes our company visible and forms the belief that our company is the best job prospect for B2B SaaS engineers. We will measure success by a 25% increase in applicants in Q3, and we will only focus on these parameters to increase the likelihood of success.

That is the output of the exercise. To recap the inputs: the business outcome, the video's assignment, the audience and their funnel stage, the beliefs to change, how you will measure success, who is responsible for what, and what you are not going to do.

Step two of the plan is intelligence: market conditions, competition, what your company has done and can do, and which platforms you will post on, since the rules differ by platform and you need to know that in advance. For a look at how a strategy-first plan played out in production, here is the TubeMogul story.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do most B2B videos fail?

Most B2B videos fail before filming starts because nobody decided what the video was for. Companies spend real money on production without naming the business outcome they wanted or how they would measure success, so there is no way to steer the project or judge it afterward.

How many goals should a B2B video have?

One. Multiple goals create what Dane Frederiksen calls the Swiss Army knife problem: a tool that does many things and none of them particularly well. A single business objective lets you point your messaging and your resources in one direction, which makes that objective far more likely to be achieved.

What are the steps in a video goal-setting exercise?

Seven: define the business outcome, name the video's assignment, identify the audience and their funnel stage, decide the belief you want to change, set how you will measure success, assign ownership of each decision, and write down the trade-offs you are making. The output is a single goal statement.

How do you measure whether a B2B video worked?

Set the metric before you shoot, such as a 25% increase in job applicants in Q3 for a recruiting video. Watch leading versus lagging indicators, be honest about attribution, and build the measurement into the plan. The gold standard is asking people how they found out about your company.

Why does video work better than other channels for some goals?

Video shows and tells so you can prove something is real, transfers trust to a specific person who is putting their reputation on the line, compresses time so a few minutes feels like a week with a company, and scales a conversation you could otherwise only have in person.

Who should own the decisions on a video project?

Assign a named owner to each decision: the goal, the assignment, the audience, and measurement. It can be one person for all four. Group decision-making stalls progress and muddies outcomes on strategic and creative work, because a car only has one steering wheel.

Full Transcript

Most B2B videos fail before anyone turns a camera on. Not because the video is bad, but because nobody decided what it was for exactly. I've watched companies spend good money on making a video without actually really knowing what their goal was or how they were gonna measure success. And I wanna show you my entire planning process so that that doesn't happen to you. So let's, I wanna introduce myself a little bit.

So my name is Dane Frederiksen. I'm a video production expert. I've been doing this for 30 years and I'll just show you a little bit about my background here. So this is me. My company's called Digital Accomplice.

I've been doing this for 30 years. And right now I'm sort of leading the charge of being an expert at the intersection of video and using that for AI visibility. We're talking about GEO, AEO, or whatever else you wanna call it. So this is my website. We help clients in the B2B space grow visibility, trust and pipeline with video.

And so we're, I've been doing this for a long time. This is my LinkedIn profile. This is a little bit of my work history. You can see I started a long time ago at places like National Geographic, Discovery Channel, USAToday. com.

This is before YouTube even existed. And so I've been doing this quite a while. I have a lot of different kinds of clients over the years. We're working with Twitch for a number of years. I work with companies like TubeMogul who got bought by Adobe.

Right now I'm working with IBM on their Cyber Campus Initiative with Amazon Web Services. Just a lot of case studies I can point to over the year, a lot of successes in a lot of different areas. So like traditional B2B, B2B video production, things like Twitch, live streaming. And now I'm getting into this whole GEO video thing. So this is just an example of my own tests, of my own content in video format, answering the buyer questions.

Does video help B2B companies show up in AI overviews? Yes, it does. And look, these four videos that are showing up right here, that's me. So this is kind of one of the things I'm focused on right now. I've been posting about this a lot on LinkedIn.

I also have a newsletter you could subscribe to to get updates about B2B video and strategy. And so that's really one of the things that makes me different. It's not only have I been doing this for 30 years, I think about this a lot. And I've seen a lot of the mistakes. And so I've come up with the system.

This is the digital accomplice video system. Basically it's two parts. There's the plan and all the steps for that. And then there's the execution actually making the video. So what we're gonna talk about today is step one.

Talk about goals in your plan. And so we're gonna get into that. So sit back, buckle up and let's get into it. So when we're talking about goals for a video, really what we're talking about is business goals. What is the business outcome that you're trying to achieve?

Now you might have more than one outcome you're looking for, like primary objectives and then secondary ones. But we wanna be careful we don't fall into what I call the Swiss Army knife problem. And I don't know how much you know about Swiss Army knives. I was a Boy Scout, so I know them quite well. The whole idea is you get a tool that has all these small tools within it.

So it's pretty convenient. But the problem is because it does all these things, it doesn't do any of them particularly well. Look at the scissors, not great. They're pretty tiny, right? And so yeah, you've got a little saw in there.

I think if you're gonna chop a limb down, you want something bigger. And the corkscrew is a good example right here. Yeah, it's got a corkscrew, it works, but not as great as a rabbit. If you drink wine at all, you probably know what that is. It's like the awesomest wine opener I ever used.

So if you have one goal, one business objective you're trying to accomplish, you're gonna be much more likely to actually accomplish that because you can put your messaging and your resources towards doing that well. So what kind of business goals are we talking about here? It might be awareness, like if you're a new company, do people even know you exist? Who are you? What do you do?

It could be something sort of mid-funnel like sign-ups. Maybe you're trying to get emails and people to opt into something on your website, drive downloads. It could be a conversion video. You actually have a lot of leads, but they're not converting, which has been one of my problems recently because I'm in the new space of GEO and video. So maybe you need to do longer form content like I'm doing where you really get into the details about how things work, proof points, stuff like that.

Or maybe you just need more people, you are recruiting and you wanna get better candidates, more candidates. So I thought that would be a good one to focus on today is the recruiting angle because I've got some video I did once for a client that I thought was a good example. So the reason that this is important to get one goal is because the goals drive other decisions, about who's gonna be in the video, how long it's gonna be, whether it's animated or live action, all kinds of things flow from that goal. So if we're looking at a recruiting video, and this is just a frame from the video I did for a company called TubeMogul, they knew that they wanted to do recruiting. So that's great.

We can really focus in on that. We told the story of who they are, what they do, what the company culture is like, what the benefits are like, their values, things like that. I'll just show you a couple of frames from what that looks like. So with a recruitment video focus, you could head in that direction and do everything that's in line with that goal. So one of the metaphors I like to use at this point is, if you had too many goals, the Swiss Army knife problem, it's sort of like trying to decide to go to LA and New York at the same time, right?

You can't really do that. You're gonna end up in Kansas. So if you can just pick one goal, you're much more likely to get there efficiently and more directly. So business outcome we're gonna go for on this one is recruiting, right? The New York option.

So next step, after we've decided on our goal, which is we're trying to recruit, what is the assignment of the video? What is this video gonna do for us that is different than the other things that we could do? Like maybe putting out ads or putting up asking around, putting things on social media that were just tech space, maybe on job sites, networking around, LinkedIn posts, things like that. So why video? You may intuitively know this, but let's kind of get into it.

Video is a great way to show and tell. You can kind of prove that something's real, seeing is believing. Now the caveat here, of course, is we're in AI times right now. So that's not always true, but the rule of thumb I think of is, yeah, you can fool me for a second, but if I spend a lot of time with your video content and I'm watching you walk through long form stuff like this, eventually you can pretty much tell that may be changing real fast and it may not always be true, but I think it's still pretty valuable. So you transfer trust into a person.

So like me getting up here and talking to you, I'm kind of putting my reputation on the line, right? Like if I'm saying things that I can't back up or aren't realistic or whatever, that's putting a little risk into it. So there's a trust building factor. Also, you can compress time. You could do this recruiting video.

It's just a couple of minutes long, but it's almost like you spent all day or a whole week with this company, getting to know them, asking around, how long would that take if it wasn't in video format? You'd have to read a lot of content. It wouldn't quite come across the same way. So it really kind of scales that conversation. If you wanted to go do conferences and meet with people face to face to get clients, well, that's pretty great, but it doesn't quite scale as well as video would.

So that's a good compromise. You could do video content that people can watch around the world 24 seven, and you don't need to go anywhere to do that. So in this case, the reason that we're doing video for recruitment is we think that we're gonna get there faster. We wanna hire some people and we wanna get the word out. This is important.

So in this case, the video is functioning as an accelerant. It's sort of like taking a car to go to New York rather than walking. The other way would just take too long and we don't wanna do that. So in this case, we've got our business outcome. As we're doing recruitment, the video's assignment is to get us there faster.

So now we get into the audience stage. Who are we targeting, right? Well, if we're trying to recruit people for a B2B SaaS company, let's say we're going after B2B SaaS engineers, a very valuable piece of the business. So we're not gonna make a video that's just talking to all the B2B people. It's gonna have some engineering messaging in there, things that are gonna resonate, right?

We wanna resonate with these people. We wanna speak their language, talk to them about the things they care about in a way that makes sense to them, right? And that might mean we're using words that fly over some people's heads over here. It's kind of case by case how you wanna go about doing that, but you wouldn't wanna water it down so much that you're not really saying anything of value to your core audience. So that's why that's so important.

So get clear about your narrow ideal client profile, your ICP, and get better messaging that resonates. So in this case, we're gonna just say that these people are sort of at the beginning of the hiring process. This is the traditional sales funnel. So like step one is sort of the awareness phase. Two is like consideration and three is like where you actually convert them.

So that would be in the recruitment thing, we'd probably be like applying for a job. But if they're not even aware necessarily what TubeMogul is, maybe they wanted to do like an introductory video. Like here's who we are, here's what we do, here's why you might wanna work here. And then they can go into the consideration phase and move down that funnel. So we've identified at this point, business outcome, we're looking for the videos assignment and who we're talking to.

And so now we get to move on to the next stage. So before we get there, I know that this can be overwhelming and it's a lot and you're busy. So if you need help with this, just reach out. This is what I do. This is what me and my team can help with.

I'll put a booking link in the description here. So if that's something you wanna help with, just let me know. So getting onto the next part, beliefs to change. So these engineers that we're talking and talking to and targeting, what do we want them to believe after the video that they don't necessarily know or believe before? So those things in a recruitment video could be something like, oh, we're fast growing.

We have the best product in our category. We've got the best team. Like these people really experience you're gonna learn from. It could be other things like benefits or culture. It's up to you.

The point is we wanna know what transformation the video is supposed to have on these people. And so if you know that, you can spend some resources on doing that. So we've got the business outcome. We've got the assignment that we know who we're talking to and we know sort of what we need to convince them of, the belief to change. So now that we got that, how would we know if we're doing a good job?

This is one of the weakest spots, I think, in video that I see in B2B Land as people do a video without really knowing how we're gonna measure success. So let's just say in this case, right now we know what our application level is for jobs. And after we put this video out there, we're hoping that we're gonna see a 25% increase in job applicants in Q3. So that's a very specific goal. It doesn't necessarily have to be that specific, but just using it for an example, like, wow, you'd really know if that happened, right?

If the number didn't go up, then you know it didn't work. If it did go up, you'd have to think about attribution and make sure that was part of your plan, that the video was the thing contributing to that. I think the gold standard is to ask applicants how they found out about your company and then you could get some sense of, are they watching this video as it helped them? So that would be a great place to be at this point. We know what we're trying to do, why video is the thing to do to get there, who we're talking to and the belief to change, and we know how we would measure success.

So that's great, you know, we're well on our way. You know, we gotta think about leading versus lagging indicators and attribution honesty, which I sort of touched on. And then, you know, what would make us like not do this project might be something to think of too, if we weren't sure of success. So ownership, what we're talking about here is the jobs to be done, who's doing them? The metaphor I like to think of is like, okay, if we had a group of people and someone to go to LA, someone to go to New York, well, someone's gotta make that decision, otherwise you're gonna go all over the place.

So in creative exercises, strategic ones, I think group decisions can stall progress and muddy the outcomes. You know, if you wanted to have one person who was gonna make a spicy meal and someone was gonna make a very mild meal, well, no one's gonna be happy. So if you're going on a trip, the car has one steering wheel. So we'd like to think about assigning roles to different decisions. It can be all one person making all these decisions, but as long as you've identified someone who's making the decision.

A little thought experiment I'd like to throw out at this point is ask the question, what if someone doesn't like the video, but it does achieve its goal? And I've seen this happen before, maybe like someone didn't like the music or they weren't quite happy with it, but if it worked, then it was a success. So just some, it's an idea to keep in your back pocket, it may come up. So let's talk about the different decisions, right? So the ownership of these decisions, one person's responsible for the goal, one person's responsible for how we're gonna get there, one person's responsible for the audience, one person's responsible for measurement.

This can all be one person. It doesn't have to be different people, but I think if you can identify all these roles, you can have a greater chance to success. So moving on, we get to the final stage, the trade-offs. This is about what we won't do. We're gonna go from San Francisco to New York, we're not gonna go to LA, right?

So we've made a strategic decision that we're making trade-offs. In order to do one thing well, we're gonna not do the other things. So in this trade-off, gets us to the point where we can start to make a statement about what this video is, right? At this point, we know our goal is to make a video that makes our company visible and forms the belief that our company is the best job prospect for B2B SaaS engineers, and we'll measure success by a 25% increase in applicants in quarter three. And we're only gonna focus on these parameters to increase the likelihood of success.

So this is, when you put it all together, what a goal setting exercise looks like for video. Just to recap, we go through, business outcome, videos assignment, the audience and the stage they're in, the marketing funnel, any beliefs we want them to change, how we're gonna measure success, who's responsible for what, and what are we not gonna do? So if you've gone through all those things, you should be able to make a statement like this one, and then you can move on to the next step, which is, let's give you a little preview here, intelligence. This'll be the next video I do. This is about the market conditions, competition, what are you doing?

So this is the outline of what we'll be doing next. The market, the competition, what platforms you're gonna post on, which you better know this ahead of time, because the rules are different. And what your company has done is doing, can do, things like that. So I hope this was helpful. Again, if you do want some help with this, I'm happy to help, this is what me and my team do, and I'll put a scheduling link in the description, and just reach out, we'll talk, we'll see if it's a fit, and if not, hopefully these videos can help you find your way.