Videos and Webinars Are the Most Effective B2B Content Formats in France
- catlinpuhkan
- Jul 25
- 5 min read
Notes from BtoB Summit in Paris, France
Jorė Astrauskaitė is a strategist and Partner at We Are Marketing.
She helps B2B companies turn real customer insight intosharp positioning and sales-driven strategies. In a market where most brands communicate vaguely, she works with clients to build a clear, consistent, and distinctive voice.
Sometimes, when planning export strategies, we tend to see French as quite conservative players, clearly having much bigger budgets, but still sticking with traditional B2B marketing stack. Their websites rarely shine, and industry focused media is still an active playground, even if it’s hard to believe someone can be still reading it.
Afterall, their business deals are made during those lengthy lunches filled with wine, so there’s no need for digital. Part of the stereotype might be true, but by attending the BtoB Summit (a conference for French B2B marketing and sales people), I wanted to dig deeper and see what are they really doing there.
Morning in Paris Parc de Princes stadium was already starting on hot notes, ready to get even hotter. Arriving late to BtoB Summit meant standing through first presentations or not even getting into the room. That’s a good trick to make any event look crowded – just have less chairs than the planned number of participants. Well, I had my seat and a notebook ready for tips on French B2B sales and marketing secrets.
The problems we solve are more or less the same. Increasingly longer buying cycles. Larger buyer groups. Should we fight for 5% buyers who are already in the market or nurture the remaining 95%. And then, how? Will AI do this? Content marketing? Another magic CRM tool? Will sales and marketing become better partners, finally?
Plenty of fish in the B2B marketing provider’s pond
Let’s start from the obvious. French B2B ecosystem is huge. You don’t need magic French skills for scanning the content of this slide below, that presents only the most important players in digital B2B marketing scene. There are some international names, especially in the media agencies corner, but the number of local players is huge compared to what we have at the Baltics combined. The argument panel speakers were making? As a B2B brand, you should choose working with B2B-focused service providers, because that’s where all the necessary competences are concentrated.
Expect anything
I’ve attended a presentation on a very creative GTM strategy, that applied some classical guerilla marketing tactics and turned product packaging into the main messenger. Even more, the brand itself was left fully behind, giving all the focus to the brands of their clients. What product? Water from Pyrenées. Why that’s a B2B case? Because they targeted companies that would love to have branded water in sustainable packaging.
Minutes later, on the same stage there was a conversation on AI fueled GTM strategies, when AI helps to identify the best prospects and guides teams all the way through making a deal. The presented tool claims to process billions of external data points and deliver 150–600 market signals per client playbook, tailoring them to specific targeting strategy and giving proactive recommendations for sales-ready opportunities and how those should be approached. Their promise is 63% conversion rate from activated intro to actual customer. Not bad, right?
Now, add a team of marketers, ready to warm up the potential clients even more, from involving them into thought leadership content to sending gifts from lego. Which one would you like to be your competitor? A creative, or an AI driven one? And, what’s the plan if they use both?
Don’t ignore content and its potential
The best big picture into the French market was given by the presenters of Content marketing barometer (conducted by Infopro Digital). 69% of B2B marketers claim to have a content marketing strategy in place and another 22% have it in their plans. So, almost everyone.
Their top priorities are brand strengthening (63%) and lead generation (60%), most often measured by click-through rates (84%), leads (75%), engagement (68%). No magic here.
The most used forms of content? Social media posts (89%), newsletters/emailling (76%) and web articles (69%). Printed forms (like brochures) are standing in a strong forth position with 61%, but video is catching up with 56%. So, as I said above, expect anything from them.
The really interesting numbers were on percieved efficiency of the content forms. Construction companies find infographics as the ultimate form in efficiency. 92% of manufacturers think it’s video. Retail? 92% give their confidence vote for webinars. Telecom and tech have a harder time agreeing, but 79% say it’s web articles that are the best.
In total, video takes first place by efficiency (83%), webinars follow with (79%), infographics take 3rd place with 70%, but are closely followed by whitepapers/ebooks (70%) and all the forms of print (69%).
How do we measure up? Norstat had a similar question in a recent Baltic B2B marketing survey. There, the question was about marketing channels delivering the best ROI. Webinars were left at the very bottom with 7% respondents saying it’s their winner. Looking for options related with content, Linkedin was higher with 26% (so social media posts) and email marketing had 34%. Maybe organic search/ SEO, which had 42% can be connected with quality long form web content, but here I’m doing too much of free style interpretations.
And for me, this is an important difference to reflect upon. Not everyone can invest into expensive AI tools. Not everyone can hire creative consultants who know how B2B marketing works and then have enough courage to follow their advice. But what any B2B marketing team should be able to do, is generate quality content that goes beyond traditional social media posts. The French and other international competitors are spoiling your prospective customers with quality expert content. Some of it is easy to see, some happens behind closed doors.
Preparing for everything
If there’s one opportunity to jump on while getting ready for autumn is refreshing your library of testimonials, case studies and explainers that represent the value your company creates. Turn them into videos, present in a webinar and put together into a downloadable guidebook. Use them for your autumn leadgen campaigns. Measure, analyse, improve, repeat. You know the drill. And this one is worth the investment.
It’s a serious challenge to compete with French companies, just as with many other international competitors, who have stronger country-brands, higher budgets and bigger teams. But aren’t we living at the times, where we have all the opportunities to do just that, successfully? I always see hunger and enthusiasm as the main competitive advantage of Lithuanian businesses, heading towards export markets. What if we add some smart B2B marketing to help sales perform even better?
