The Ultimate Countdown: 10 Best B2B Video Marketing Examples of 2015

Every year around this time, we highlight some of the best video marketing examples over the past year in an attempt to provide inspiration to B2B marketers as the new year rolls in.

The truth is, we all need a little bit of inspiration. Especially in the video world. Mainly because the use of video is proving to be more and more crucial to marketing success. In fact, marketers using video are growing revenue 49% faster than those who aren’t and 74% of B2B marketers say video content converts better than any other medium.

So crack open a fresh page in your 2016 planner and take notes from the best.

10. Best Use of a Customer Story

Squarespace’s ‘Building a Website with Jeff Bridges’

Straight-up interviews with your customers captured on camera is one way to go about telling your customers’ stories. Or you could follow the route of Squarespace, who told the story of Jeff Bridges’ sleeping tapes in a raw and oh-so-captivating way.

9. Best Sales and Marketing Alignment Video

Zuora’s ‘Talk to Your Doctor’

When you watch this video, you’ll most likely recognize the format. But Zuora’s application of a popular commercial turned customer story not only helped their marketing team share important stories with their sales team but also broke down the barriers to sales’ adoption of video for their own tactics. Win-win, I’d say!

This video won a 2015 Video Marketing Award! Learn more and see other winners here.

8. Best Use of Humor in B2B

FedEx’s ‘Growing Business’

There’s in-your-face humor and then there’s FedEx’s subtle humor. We love that this video communicates the value the company can provide to a growing business with a touch of straight-faced humor at the end. And by playing with their own special effects, no less!

7. Best Big Bang Video on a Small Budget

Salesforce’s ‘Professional Edition’

This product demo helped buyers self-serve, freeing up Account Executive’s time as a result. Plus, it was a serious budgeted production by only one person at Salesforce using Keynote, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro C and a USB mic with a 15” Macbook Pro Retina display.

The results say it all, though: in the first two quarters of 2015, the video influenced almost $1 million in sales.

This video won a 2015 Video Marketing Award! Learn more and see other winners here.

6. Best Feature Demo

Volvo’s ‘Look Who’s Driving’

This is the second year in a row that Volvo has taken this category (last year with ‘Epic Split’). What can I say, when the value of your product can be shown on camera, show it on camera! Demonstration beats description every time!

5. Best Educational Video

TD Ameritrade’s ‘RIA Journey to Independence’

TD Ameritrade’s Journey to Independence campaign set up an online, self-serve mentorship program. New RIAs (registered investment advisors) can learn from successful RIAs who have gone before them. It’s a great example of how video is the next best thing to being there in person.

This was the campaign’s intro video, you can see the rest of the campaign here.

4. Best Video Series

Intel’s ‘Jim Parsons and the Intel Innovation Adventure’

Oh Jim Parsons … aka Sheldon! How we love you.

Not only is this video a great example of utilizing a TV personality that so many know and love, but also a great example of building a consistent series off of one main character. (Keep watching after the first video, below, to see others in the series.)

3. Best Use of Video in Integrated Marketing Campaign

Gainsight’s ‘Blank Space’

Gainsight created this video for their PULSE conference, where they hired, not only an acapella group, but a T-Swift impersonator to sing this song at the event, too. That’s a strong (and unusual!) integration.

This video won a 2015 Video Marketing Award! Learn more and see other winners here.

2. Best Play on Pop Culture

SIRIS’ ‘Pancakes’

We all know Gordon Ramsay. This video is an amazing example of utilizing a strong pop culture figure and mixing in a little humor and ‘resourcefulness’! While we can all tell that their may have been a few different scenes blended together to create this final video, this particular recipe will certainly pique your interest!

1. Best B2B Storytelling

Schneider Electric’s ‘Llama Superstar’

“Tell the story so your audience can relate” is a best practice we’ve heard over and over. But Schneider Electric took it one step further to beef up the story to an inspirational (and slightly absurd) level!

And that’s a wrap on the past year in exemplary video marketing. Want more?! Check out 2014’s top video marketing examples, too.

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The Guide to More Pipeline with Personalized Video

To succeed in marketing, you need to be able to reel your audience in. Bring them close and capture their attention. If you can’t do that, how will you ever get to the point of convincing them to buy your offering? You can’t teach your dog, Ralph, to shake a paw if you can’t even get him to come in from the backyard (not that we’re comparing dogs and prospects here).

No, capturing his attention comes first. And the same goes for your prospects.

Then comes the opportunity to build strong relationships, connect, and ultimately convince buyers on the value of your product or service. Without these steps, there are no quality leads to pass to sales, and there’s certainly no significant marketing-driven pipeline.

But capturing attention is hard. I mean, like going-for-a-run-in-a-snowstorm-after-the-biggest-turkey-dinner-ever, hard. With over 85 business emails hitting your prospects’ inboxes every day, how can you possibly reach into the overflowing pot and come out with a solid business relationship … or hey, even an email click-through?

1:1 communication that brings your prospect directly into your story, that’s how. With video personalized for every single one of your prospects.

How do you do that? Good question! And one that stemmed the development of “Kickin’ Butt and Taking Names: How B2B Marketers Can Drive More Pipeline with Personalized Video”; so you can learn how to connect on an individual level to grab attention, engage, and ultimately drive more pipeline from the marketing activities you work so hard on.

Give this guide on driving more pipeline with personalized video a read to:

• Uncover the root causes of attention scarcity
• Explore individualization, 2016’s content revolution
• See a live personalized video campaign and its results
• Discover 5 ideas for your own personalized video campaign

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5 Exceptionally Important Tips for Sales Engineers Creating Pre-Recorded Demo Videos

It’s no secret – B2B buyers are more enabled and empowered than ever before.

But they’re also a little shy….

Before a potential customer reaches out to your team, they have combed through your content, read your blogs, watched your videos, and consumed as much information about your product or service as possible.

In short, they have been avoiding talking to you for as long as they could.

They want to avoid the sales pitch, and… you kind of have to sympathize with them. Being techno-savvy researchers of the 21^st century, your potential customer is comparing your solution to 5-7 competitors. The thought of talking to each one of these sales-hungry companies on the phone is a little daunting – so they’ll avoid it at all cost.

In fact, if they are talking to you, it might be because you have tucked away some crucial information – such as pricing or a product demo – behind your walled sales garden.

It’s time to do your customer, and yourself, a favor. It’s time to set free the demo, and let it live within the liberating winds of the cloud.

A carefully crafted demo video can speed up the sales cycle, save your sales engineering team hours, and help weed out unqualified leads – inevitably giving your sales pipeline better velocity and improved accuracy.

Most importantly, it’ll give your customers even more reasons to feel empowered, and therefore make you their number one choice.

Now… how do we get started? Check out these 5 steps to building a great product demo.

 1. Research the Purpose, and the Audience of Your Demo Video

Before you whip out your dictation tools and start writing down your go-to demo catchphrases, ask yourself the following questions:

• Where in the marketing funnel is this going to exist?
• Which role are we targeting?
• How long should it be? (More importantly…how short should it be?)
• How technical should it be?

Recorded demos should be much shorter than live demos. They should have a clear purpose, a quicker pace, and show only what is necessary.

For example, if the purpose of the video is to educate c-level decision makers, you might want to keep the video to a 2-3 minute highlight reel correlating features to value propositions.

Similarly, if the purpose is to educate your key target users to help qualify them for a more meaningful conversation, then you might want a 5-7 minute video that goes a little deeper in terms of functionality and usability.

Or, you might be building video content designed to support Proof-of-Concepts – which will be as long as they need to be to explain necessary configurations or deployments.

In any case, you will want to err on the short side. Live demos can often stretch to 20, 30, or even 40 minutes long. It’s better to send your potential customers 4 highly targeted 5 minute videos, as opposed to one 20 minute video that casts a wide, and ineffective net.

Before you write your script or record – you will need to decide who you are targeting for your content to be truly effective.

2. Pre-Plan Modularizing the Demo for Personalization

Now that you know “why” and “what” your video is showing, you’ll want to ask yourself the following question:

Where can this video be personalized for our different verticals and target markets?

More often then not, your technology or services will be utilized across different industries. And ideally, when you conduct live demonstrations you are “speaking the lingo,” and, “throwing down the jargon,” so that your prospects know that you truly “get them.”

Before you begin writing your script, carefully plan to include some simple edits that will allow you to make multiple versions of the same video – which all, magically, seem crafted specifically for a single industry.

This could include:

• Book-ending the demo with a few slides that communicate key value propositions related to that industry.
• In select areas, editing the voiceover track to include industry terms.
• In select areas, swapping video screen captures with elements (like integrations) that target a key target market.

Alternatively, you could also build a “Choose Your Own Adventure” demo so that this personalized path is delivered organically, on demand.

When using a “Choose Your Own Adventure” approach, you can allow viewers to build their own pathway through the content directly within the video. Or, you could use one of these editing methods to create personalized demo videos for different target markets.

This will save you time in the long run, and also tell your customers that you are thinking intently about their needs.

3. Create a Shot List and Script

In live demos, it’s a cardinal sin to read off a script. In recorded demos, a script is going to be your new best friend.

During live demos, the subtle screw-ups of a human add an authentic experience that is inadvertently persuasive. Conversely, during recorded demos, a speaker’s weird word choices and fumbled phrasings are annoyingly awkward.

When a video is recorded, there is a higher expectation from the viewer that the delivery be without fault. A script will ensure that.

More importantly, a script paired with a shot list will make sure that you don’t skip over any key features.

Writing a script is a little upfront investment that is actually going to save you time in the long run. If you can – record one of your better live demos, listen to it while taking notes, and break down your demo into a shot list and associated talk tracks.

Then, practice the script aloud to remove clunky sentences and unnecessary words.

Below is a snippet of a sample shot list and script to give you an idea of what this might look like.

4. Record Audio and Screen Separately

Everything you have been planning has been leading up to this moment. Are you ready to shine? It’s time for a little voice acting.

As mentioned, recorded demos lack the interactivity of a live delivery. For that reason, you will want the audio for your demo to have some energy, be clearly articulated, and dance without missing a beat.

Unfortunately, it’s really f***ing hard to run a demo while reading off a script with enthusiasm. Not to mention the awkward pauses as you click through to the next feature you are demoing.

Fortunately, through the magic of video editing this problem is easily solved.

Start with the audio first.

Tune your microphone settings and pull your script up on your monitor. Practice test recording a few sentences so you have an idea of your tone and pace.

Then begin, and don’t stop recording until you’re done. If you stumble, just pause, return to the last sentence, and continue speaking without stopping the recording.

With some practice reading off a script, a 3-minute video shouldn’t take you longer than 10 minutes to record. Afterwards, just edit out the screw-ups and you’ll have yourself one-half of a demo.

Then, the screen capture.

Pull out your shot list, and take spaced out captures of the listed features and actions. Just make sure you take into the consideration the length of the associated talk track while recording. Otherwise you may end up with not enough video for your audio track.

5. Add a Little Production Value

“The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.” – George Lucas

Live demos are notorious for having absolute s*** video and audio quality due to latencies in screen-sharing tools.

Since you are recording your demo, ask your finance department for a little spare change to purchase a decent microphone.

Good sound on a demo video is often an overlooked feature but bad sound can make your demo video unwatchable. Investing in a mic will help improve the completion rate of the video, and therefore make your customer better educated.

Also, don’t be afraid to add some music to the background of your video. Just make sure it’s not too loud so that it drowns out the narration.

There are a butt-load of sites out there that offer inexpensive music tracks that would be sufficient for mid-funnel demo videos, Bedtracks is a great example. The music can lighten the mood to the video, add some humor, and make the whole experience of watching a recorded product demo far less bland.

In addition, adding the music actually has a very functional effect.

If you have edited your audio narration down from one recorded track, you may inevitably have some awkward clicks, pops, or volume mistakes throughout the recording. The music will cover these up, like the final glaze on a holiday turkey, so that the final product is as smooth and tasty to consume.

There you have it – 5 steps to a recorded product demo that will keep your prospects engaged and educate them on your product or service. Plus, you’ve freed up tons of time for your sales engineering team to tackle other revenue-generating tasks!

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Want to learn more about using video to optimize the sales process? Check out our on-demand webinar “How to Use Video in the Sales Process to Close More Deals”!

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The Struggle of Holiday Classics: A Vidyard Story

Holiday classics are classics for a reason. The original ‘holiday classic’ definition dates back to the early 1900’s and states that in order to qualify as a holiday classic, every person must have watched the film a minimum of 73.6 times, every person must be able to recite the script while icing an upside down cake, and every person must sing the soundtrack in their sleep while also changing the sheets … in their sleep.

True story.

Really, everyone loves a good holiday classic. But they’ve also been done over and over … and over. And in marketing – when we’re all looking for ways to touch the hearts of our customers, stand out, and be noticed – we can sometimes abuse them.

But hey! We’re all on the hook for crafting brilliant, original content around the holidays – we get it! No seriously, we were swingin’ for hours trying to come up with an original holiday video! Check it out:

Happy Holidays from the Team at Vidyard!

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If You’re Going to Reach Consumers with Video, Do So Quickly

The verdict is in, and the analytics are clear: if you’re selling products and services to modern customers, no tool has a bigger impact on sales than video. Marketing pros know it, too: video is the medium with the best ROI. But…what kind of video? How long should it be?

Death by Longevity

Cool fact: a video loses 90% of its audience after 100 seconds of elapsed time. Cool fact #2: There’s a science to fast-storytelling. The science goes like this:

• don’t wait longer than 0:03 seconds to surface a product benefit.
• And then don’t wait longer than 0:09 to surface your second product benefit, or to tell a joke, or light something on fire.
• If your viewers are still with you after those first 2 milestones, you’ll likely keep them until about 1 minute.

But making videos that entertain and educate can be an uphill battle. One reason for this is that ads encroach on consumers’ media experience so much – on their Twitter feed, Facebook timeline, and so on – that consumers have even less patience than they once did for marketing messages. They often want to escape them, not listen to them.

And the ‘inundation’ problem holds true for marketing executives, too – over 80% of C-level execs reported watching more online video today than they did a year ago, while 75% say they watch work-related videos at least weekly.  

Back Off, Bud

So what do you do about viewers’ loving video but hating the hard sell? Simple – remember the following adage: “The less you sell, the more you sell.” Consumers at the point of purchase will buy if they see a helpful, neutral, editorially-toned marketing message; and they will run away if you get aggressive. Got a great product and want to shout about it from rooftops? Great — just stay up on that rooftop when you’re shouting. The further down the sales funnel you go, the more whispering you should do. Another way to put it: the closer you get to the point of sale, the less a customer likes prodding. So, ‘tell them, don’t sell them’.

Death by Shopping List

Tempted to jam 17 ideas into a single minute by listing all of your product’s benefits fast, like an auctioneer? Don’t do it. Customers want “proof” behind your claims, more than the claims themselves. Listing a number of benefits one after the other is simply failing to prove these claims one after the other. A single truthful claim, well backed-up by clear evidence, boosts consumers’ confidence and spurs their tendency to make a purchase. In summary, confusion never sold a product.

Now What?

Now that you know about best practices, you face video’s toughest challenge: how to get started. Here’s a simple roadmap.

1. Make sure your video is about 1 subject — not 2 or 3. You’ll generate better viewer attention and retention.
2. Keep it simple. Have you decided there are 3 or 4 or even 10 key concepts to communicate? No problem – break those 3 or 4 or even 10 concepts into 3 or 4 or even 10 videos, of 1 minute or less.
3. Keep it short. Is your video 9 minutes long? Trust me: viewers will miss 8/9ths of it. They’ve clicked off and have gone out to pick up the kids, walk the dog, and rearrange their sock drawer.
4. Maximize the chances your viewers keep watching after Video #1. Just add a call to action near the end of that 1 minute to drive them to the next one.

Cool Tip: If a viewer knows how much time they’ll need to invest in a video, they’ll watch longer. So, visually place total running time somewhere in the description under the video thumbnail or still image. Your text might be something like this: “This video explains the Affordable Care Act in 1 minute and 9 seconds.”

Next Steps

OK, you’re sold. You want to get started. Excellent. Go (quickly) to hire a writer. If you’re starting with almost no budget, the most important video resource you can spend money on is a scriptwriter. Why? Because they’re experts at writing text that makes sense when it ends up on screen. Remember, the hardest part of making a short video is making a short video good. By the time you say, ‘Hi, my name is Jim, and I’m here to tell you all about our amazing widget,’ you’ve just spent 10 seconds of your precious 60. A good writer, like a good teacher, can get to the point fast; and communicate a hugely complex subject in a way that builds confidence. For proof, stand in front of a mirror and try to explain why your listener should buy your Smart TV (or insurance product or fleet management software) …in 1 minute.  

Why O, Why O, Why-O? Video Just Keeps Getting Stronger

The stakes literally couldn’t be higher when it comes to creating video content. Consumer video consumption will equate to 4 times the Internet traffic of web browsing and email this year. Yes, if you added up all web browsing and email, video viewing will eclipse that data usage by 400%. And B2B companies are joining the trend in droves, almost 90% are planning to use video in their content marketing over the next year. Video is, and will be, everywhere. Time to capture your B2C and B2B viewers with honesty and humor; boost their confidence, and close the deal.

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5 Signs ABM Is a Smart Addition to Your Marketing Strategy

For the past decade, B2B marketing has mostly been exemplified by lead generation. Vendors use social media, SEO, and marketing automation to draw traffic to their site, capture contact info, and nurture contacts into qualified leads.

With the right nurture process and a stellar sales team, you can get a lot of return from “traditional” lead generation. But it has its weaknesses. Most notably, lead generation focuses on marketing to individual leads, which doesn’t always account for the complexity and scale of an enterprise purchase — often made by a diverse team of stakeholders after months of deliberation. According to CEB, the average B2B purchase now requires 5.4 signatures.  

Why Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing, or ABM, helps marketers compensate for this complexity by directing message and medium at buying groups within named companies, rather than individual leads. Let’s say you’re an HR software vendor, for example. Instead of trying to draw interest from anonymous hiring managers and COOs, you could name companies that are a good fit for your product (because of size, industry, etc.) and specifically target those companies.

By starting with named companies and delivering ads and content to groups of decision influencers at those companies, you cut out the whole process of discovery and capture, which can significantly shorten the sales cycle.  

The idea of dedicating resources to specific accounts is by no means a new concept, but the nature of those resources is changing in a way that makes ABM accessible and affordable. The new league of ABM platforms give marketers the ability to target accounts by IP address, opportunity size, or sales stage and track engagement at a much more granular level.

Software vendors like Demandbase provide ABM analytics to help marketers
see which accounts are interacting with digital content.

It hasn’t taken long for ABM to prove its weight in gold. A SiriusDecisions report from this year found that 92 percent of companies recognize the value of account-based marketing, even if they haven’t used it. As ABM finds its place in the industry, you’ll need to answer the obvious question: Is it right for your business?

Here are five key indicators to help you decide. If you identify with any or all of these statements, ABM is probably a good fit for your marketing strategy.

1. You Have a Highly-Skilled, Well-Resourced Marketing Team

One of the most evident barriers to ABM is a skills gap. Roughly 47 percent of B2B companies feel they lack the skills and support to succeed at account-based marketing. So if you’re already there — if your team has a good handle on which companies to pursue, how to create the right messaging, and how to implement new technology — you’re about nine steps ahead of the competition.

Maybe your lead generation efforts are performing as expected, but aren’t exactly taking anyone’s breath away. ABM is a great way to step up your game and create some bigger revenue opportunities for sales. Just make sure you have a system in place for tracking these accounts through the sales development process.

2. Your Product Sales Are Driven by Buying Groups

The executive lead who single-handedly approves large purchase decisions is every marketer and salesperson’s dream. But in many cases, decisions are made by larger buying groups, which means they will take longer and require a different kind of support. Where focusing on the person can sometimes backfire  (drawing more attention to disparate objectives), account-based marketing focuses on inspiring consensus within diverse buying committees.

Of course, this will depend on the nature of your product/service offering and the size of the companies to which you market. If your product is a simple web app for time tracking, you can and should go after individual decision-makers. If it’s an enterprise resource planning solution, on the other hand, you’ll need to get buy-in from executives, IT managers, financial consultants, and even middle managers.  

3. You’re Struggling to Maintain Lead Volume

In a sense, the success of traditional lead generation depends on your ability to keep a steady flow of leads running through your sales pipeline. Generally, that means you need to bring in a high volume of top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) leads, nurture them, and zero in on the most qualified.

If you’re having a hard time pulling in volume at the top, it’ll be nearly impossible to reach economy of scale with your lead generation. If you’re a smaller business, expanding your reach may not be an option yet. But then, maybe it’s a myth that you need to attract hundreds of thousands of prospects just to convert a few. Why not start with the few and concentrate on nurturing and expanding those relationships? That’s ABM.  

Some analysts even say this new approach calls for an upside-down funnel (i.e., a pyramid), where specific accounts are the target audience and advocacy is the desired end result, instead of the typical lead to purchase path.

Credit: FlipMyFunnel

4. Your Sights are Set on Specific Prospects

Whose business do you want?

If your answer is “mid-market organizations in the banking and financial service industry,” your best approach is probably to generate leads in that industry and follow up with the most promising ones. But if your answer includes the names of specific companies, you might be a good candidate for ABM.

From an outbound perspective, that means retargeting named companies by IP address and tailoring content to the right decision influencers. From an inbound perspective, it means tracking engagement metrics at the account level — e.g., page views, downloads, video views from Company X).  Having a holistic view of how multiple stakeholders from one company engage with your content helps you improve their experience and generate revenue faster.

5. You Want to Sell Beyond the Sale

In the age of revenue marketing, it’s easy to develop a kind of tunnel vision for sales. All of your efforts start to revolve around pitching products and services, incentivizing buy-in, and converting leads into deals. These are all important functions of marketing, but they aren’t the complete picture.

There’s an entire relationship that begins immediately after the buying transaction, and if you manage it properly, you can turn a positive customer experience into loyalty and advocacy, which means cross-selling, up-selling, and referrals … which means more revenue. Maximizing your relationship with specific accounts through ABM is one of the best ways to turn loyal customers into effective advocates.  

Account-based marketing may seem complicated, but technology aside, it’s a matter of priorities. If you want to drive revenue, you can either rake in as many leads as possible (the shotgun approach), or you can focus your efforts on the most valuable accounts (the dart gun approach). That means naming them, engaging them, measuring results, and maximizing value through loyalty and advocacy.

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Your Sales Team Has A Video Problem

People buy from people: a core sales principal that is getting more difficult each year.

Best-in-class sales teams understand the importance of connecting emotionally with customers. However, today’s customers are leveraging the vast information of the internet to research, compare and review solutions without any sales assistance. Which means sales teams’ profound skills in connecting with customers, and using emotional connection to influence are greatly diminished in today’s world. We have less time to make an impact.

Further, as customers’ day-to-day behaviors have changed, the human brain remains the same as they were thousands of years ago: evaluating friend-or-foe exactly like New World explorers or African tribesman of days past. Anyone we interact with is deeply analyzed on physicality, tonality, and verbiage in a matter of seconds.

Our sales teams are increasingly in situations where they have a minimal amount of time to make emotional customer connections. A further challenge is today’s efficient sales teams transacting more telephone-based sales, reducing our customers’ interpretation of us to simply tonality and verbiage.

Physical presence is the anchor tenant of our brain’s interpersonal analysis, representing 55% of our observations, even when there is no physical stimulus. When we speak to someone on the phone, we attempt to determine what they look like, their age, and the details of their location. In the absence of physical cues, our brain will narrow its focus to tonality to help extrapolate hints about physicality. As a result, we teach our sales teams things like “enthusiasm sells” or “the customer can hear you smile over the phone”. Selling over the phone inherently limits our ability to create the deepest possible emotional connection.

Until now.

Video is the next best thing to being with a customer in person. Best-in-class sales teams create competitive advantage by establishing physical interactivity, via video assets, in remote sales situation.

Top Ways to Use Video in Sales

Here are some of the best ways we have seen great sales teams use video:

• Customer Testimonials – Portray smart people who trust your product or service with strong, in-person customer testimonials.
• Company Culture Videos – Convey your strong culture through interviews with executives and employees.
• Seller Videos – Introduce yourself, your approach and your beliefs to every new client.
• Video Proposals – Bring physical connection and trust to your proposals by delivering the executive summary in video format.
• Product or Services Demos – Include your sales people, or product experts, in online video tours.

Plus, top sales teams are tapping into the unique power of video: if you know what they are watching, you know what they are thinking. Today’s sales people are tracking content, like email opens or whitepaper downloads, and trying to guess what it means. With video, you can track second-by-second what your customer watches, or re-watches, or when they lose interest. There is no better insight into your customers’ thoughts and feelings than what they choose to watch.

How Video Supports the Sales Organization

Let’s take a look at how video can play a pivotal role in supporting a high performance sales organization.

Sales Development

• Increased Prospecting Conversion: video helps your emails stand out from inbox clutter
• High Quality Lead Conversion: Video highlights the customers who are truly interested, helping refine the message to qualify the opportunity

Sales Reps

• Improved Pipeline Management: Video can help AEs prioritize the best deals based on amount of video consumed at a given account
• Faster Closes: Video can help get at the truth of how interested a prospect is, where their interest lies, and focus on the topics that the customer cares about

Technical Pre-Sales

• Increase Pre-Sales Productivity: Sales Engineers can record a collection of micro demos that can be combined to create a custom demo experience tailored to an account
• Grow Bigger Deals: SEs can focus their time and resources on helping close deals and creating bigger deals – where they add the most value (vs. giving top of funnel demos)

Managers

• Lower Cost of Sale: Video can be used by AEs for early stage demos – eliminating the need to pull an SE in until a later time, speeding up the deal
• Increased Sales Effectiveness: Creating on-demand training assets helps arm new and veteran reps with the latest in competitive, product or sales best practices

Your marketing team is likely on their way with video since 90% of marketers say video is becoming more important to strategies and 74% of marketers agree that video converts better than other mediums. It’s time for sales to play a role in video operations.

In many organizations, sales teams are thinking about video as a tool, not a strategy. Video is seen as ‘a marketing problem’, however sales needs to be very vocal, and involved in video creation, distribution and analytics operations or they’ll miss out on massive benefits that video provides sales.

Sales teams that deploy video as a strategy will powerfully adapt to the reality of today’s fast-moving and remote customer, and outperform those teams that continue to sell without the emotion, efficiency, or deep customer insight that video delivers.

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Tracking Video Music Trends: How to Stay Current

Finding captivating, relevant and creative new music for your video is challenging. On the one hand, the information age has brilliantly streamlined music discovery.  Information technology has made new sounds and music accessible in ways like never before. Unfortunately, the ability to follow trends and stay ahead of the curve is still agonizingly difficult.

We get the struggle. Here are some tools that will help you to keep abreast of current sounds from today’s most creative music makers.

1. Hire a Music Supervisor – Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Consult with an expert and let them curate music for you! It’s the job of a music supervisor to stay current with the latest trends in music. With a detailed brief, a music supervisor will be able to mine the depths of their catalog to pinpoint the track with the highest emotional impact for your project. This service is complimentary when using the Bedtracks library!

It’s important to remember that without connecting to your audience on a subconscious emotional level there is no platform to deliver your message. Music is the packaging that helps your customers feel good and connected to the message you want to convey.  Had Apple used poor packing and design for their product, it may not have had the impact that it does today.

2. Demographics – Knowing your audience is essential!

Who is your target audience? Are they listening to current music or are their tastes rooted in the past? Is your goal to make the next critically claimed indie romance film or the next viral half-time commercial?  Getting inside the listening preferences of your audience can take your marketing and creative campaign to new heights.

For instance, a demographic in their 30s or 40s won’t necessarily be plugged into today’s newest top 40 sounds. Just because it’s popular doesn’t make it the right fit. Choose music for your brand that is relevant to your audience even if it’s several years in the past. Researching and knowing whether you’ve made the right choice can be daunting, but there are tools available to help you make the right decision. This brings me to my next point…

3. Next Big Sound

NYC based company ‘Next Big Sound’ launched in 2009 and they currently lead the charge in analytics tracking of artists all over the planet. NBS uses data to tell you how an artist’s music will resonate with your target audience.  If you’re seeking a band with a fresh track for your production be sure to do some foraging on NBS.  Get some data to back up your hunch before you lock it down to video.

4. Music Blogs – A hub of information.

Blogs have been around for Internet ages, but regardless of time, blogs are still a linchpin for discovering emerging artists. Blog writers are tastemakers. They hear and generate buzz on social media platforms. Here are some of our favorite blogs for finding new music:

• Neon Gold Records
• Said the Gramophone
• Birp!

5. SoundCloud – The YouTube of new music.

Want to be the one giving bloggers something to blog about? SoundCloud is a place you should look for raw, undiscovered talent. When you need to pair your project with that sound no one has, the search filters and tags on Soundcloud make it super user-friendly when discovering new music. Think of what’s trending on Soundcloud as being six months ahead of pop radio.

6. Greater Goods Co.

Heard the perfect track by that independent artist on that trendy music blog? Our friends at Greater Goods have their thumb firmly planted on the most happening music of the times. Check out their site to get an idea of the music being placed most commonly in today’s television and advertisements.  They’ll be happy to license music to you from their stellar roster of artists.

Don’t have a $100,000 music budget? Then come see us at Bedtracks. We’ll help you find a track in our library or custom-make the most relatable music for your project, on time and on budget.

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Forrester Claims Marketing Content Not Relevant for Sales Teams, Customers

“If ‘mobile-first’ is the new rallying cry for digital design, then ‘sales-first’ should be the mantra by which marketing delivers and distributes content.” – Laura Ramos, Forrester Analyst

Research released by Forrester this month found some shocking information about sales’ use of marketing content. And there’s really no easy way to put it: sales isn’t really using the content that B2B marketers create. In fact, 90% of content goes unused because it’s irrelevant, out-of-date, difficult to customize, or hard to find (click here to tweet this stat!). Chris McLaren, VP of Marketing at Aimia, explained that his sales team has challenges even finding the right pieces of content and knowing which ones are applicable to their prospects.

In addition, a lot of the content created for sales teams are top- to mid-funnel resources. This content often focuses on features and functions but most buyers in today’s day and age have already discovered this information on their own in earlier stages of their buying journey. As a result, 62% of executives and technical buyers find the content they’re receiving useless (click to tweet this stat!). Yep, useless.

But content is a crucial tool to help move prospect conversations along. Without relevant, easy-to-find, and easy-to-use content, large enterprises are wasting millions of dollars producing content that neither sales nor customers find relevant (click here to tweet this stat!).

Getting to the Root of the Problem

Fundamentally, the problem lies in the lack of understanding from marketers in how the sales team operates. And understandably so … they’re not walking in sales’ shoes day in and day out. But while sales focuses on the individual, marketing markets to segments; and while sales is more inbound, marketing is more outbound.

And this needs to change.

At least it does if we want to create more effective content to help our sales team have relevant conversations and therefore close more business.

Laura Ramos, author of Make Sales Conversations an Integral Part of Your Content Marketing Plans, says B2B marketers need to involve sales in their content development and delivery in three ways:

1. Invest in content delivery systems and training to turn sales into content experts
2. Make it straightforward for sales to get the content they need, when they need it
3. Track what sales uses (and doesn’t)

Dive into Forrester’s latest research report and learn about:

• The dichotomy between current marketing content and sales’ needs
• The sales-focused tactics successful B2B marketers are practising
• Empowering sales to use quality marketing content in prospect conversations

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The Dirty Truth Behind 60-Second Videos

For some reason, almost every video pro I talk to today is obsessed with video length.

You put together a script over 60-seconds and they go into cardiac arrest.

The problem is everyone “knows” that attention spans are short and “people just won’t watch anything longer than 60-seconds”. In some ways they’re right.  Attention spans are shorter than ever (shorter than a goldfish by Time Magazine’s showing).

But talk is cheap.  Let’s see what the data has to say about it…

A Real-World Look: GoPro Short vs. Long Videos

To start the process I looked up some of 2015’s top videos ads (Reel SEO has a great tally they run).  GoPro is known for consistently pumping out high views.

So which does better for them — short or long?

“Owl Dance-Off” was closest to 60 seconds, but still a whopping 2.4 million views away from “Streets of Japan”.It’s easy to spot the winners.

The question is, why would longer videos get more views?

It’s a matter of breadth vs. depth.

Your best viewers (the ones that are going to convert into leads or sales) want more detailed content. 

A GoPro viewer doesn’t just want to see a short stunt clip… they want to drop into the experience as much as possible.

It’s the same for your viewers.  They want to be immersed in exciting results or a cool new process.  It’s the same logic behind Neil Patel’s blog Why 3,000+ Word Posts Get More Traffic.

60-seconds is about 150-200 words.  After your intro you’re looking at just 100-150 words.  Can you really say something of meaning that quickly?

Probably not.

But Isn’t a 60-Second Video More Shareable?!

In our deepest, darkest dreams we all want a video to go viral.  

It’s easy to picture.  Your CMO approves the video, you post it on your blog and POW!  You wake up the next morning to the blissful sound of blazing hot servers getting overloaded with traffic.

So what length of video will get you there best?

ReelSEO did an analysis of the top video lengths to boost sharing.  What they found was a little surprising…

The average length of the Top 10 most shared videos was 4 minutes and 11 seconds long.

Whoa.  That’s a lot more than 60-seconds.

But here’s a classic counterexample: we all see vines or 30-second cat videos that experience massive organic growth.  

But before I go any further on raging view counts … stop and ask yourself an important question: is your salary based off views or sales?

In order for your company to generate revenue you need more than a view.  You need movement down the funnel. How much revenue would be generated by a one-hit wonder, 60-second cat video?  Probably not much.

How much further down the funnel will said cat video get your prospects?

Usually, not very far.  

So not only is shareability increased with longer videos, contribution to revenue can increase too.

But let’s play devil’s advocate for a second.

Even If A Shorter Video Gives You Higher Engagement, Will It Give You Higher Conversions?

When it comes down to brass tacks, nobody really cares about engagement.  

Engagement is a secondary metric that you use in the hope it’s pointing you in the right direction.

The metric you really care about is probably something like:

• Direct sales
• Leads generated (which will turn into opportunities and then sales)
• Brand awareness (which will drive sales via online or offline channels)

We use engagement especially in situations where it’s tough to attribute sales to a single video or even campaign (e.g. it’s tough to attribute a sales spike to Coke’s Super Bowl commercial).

But that can mean linking two metrics that don’t tell the same story, which is a lesson I learned the hard way.

One of our clients, Peak 10 Publishing had us produce two videos for them.  In this case the length was pretty close to the mysterious 60 second mark, but engagement stats were miles apart.

The engagement for video B was more than 20% higher than video A’s.  

The interesting part is how it affected sales…  

Which do you think had higher sales?

Even though video A had lower engagement, its sales blew video B out of the water.  There was a difference of more than $10 million in revenue!

I’m not sure.  But I know if you asked me which video was more successful it’s an easy answer.Why wasn’t engagement a good predictor of revenue?  

If The Best Length Isn’t 60-Seconds, What Is It?

The short answer is, it depends.

For a video that moves your viewers further down your funnel I like to start at 4-minutes.

WARNING: your engagement will probably go down compared to shorter videos.  

Someone who was mildly curious will leave your video outraged that you would dare produce a video longer than 30-seconds.

But they were never going to generate revenue for you anyway.

It’s much more important to give your ideal viewers the content they’re thirsting for.

So instead of shooting for a short, end-all, be-all video, aim for interesting and attention-keeping not just attention-grabbing.

The #1 Problem Every Video Has To Solve Isn’t Short Attention Spans…

The real problem is boring content.  How is that the same people who won’t sit still for your four-minute video will binge-watch a 12-episode Daredevil series on Netflix?  

That might seem like an apples-to-oranges comparison, but stick with me.

The real issue isn’t videos are too long, it’s that they’re too boring.  Instead of sacrificing quality content to make the content ‘bite sized’, sacrifice popular opinion to make your video great.

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7 Video Marketing Best Practices Worth Fighting For

Video is more compelling than text-based content. It engages minds and beautifies stories.

It boosts email click-through rates and on-page conversions. But let’s face it, building a strong video marketing strategy and integrating it with the rest of your marketing activities is no easy feat.

So how can you make the most of it?

By checking out these 7 best practices for creating a top-notch video marketing strategy that doesn’t just engage minds but captures leads and convinces buyers. Want to learn more about a certain best practice? Check out the corresponding resources for a deeper dive.

1. Plan your goals before pressing record

How can you aim for success when you don’t even know what success looks like? Before getting swept away by the fun thunderstorm stunt you’re trying in your next shoot, sit down for a minute and lay out your top goals for the video. Is it intended to generate brand awareness? Or is it a lead generation campaign? What feeling are you trying to elicit? What do you hope viewers’ next steps will be? Nailing these goals ahead of time will ensure you get the biggest impact once you hit publish.

Dive Deeper: How Real Marketers Plan Video Projects (Video)

2. Align videos to the funnel

You wouldn’t write a whitepaper or e-book targeted at the whole funnel so why would you plan a video aimed to do the same? The truth is that different videos perform differently throughout the funnel. Some types of videos specialize in gaining viewer interest and engagement, like explainer-style videos; while others help to educate viewers who are further through the funnel, like webinars or product demos.

Mapping your video content to your buyer journey is a crucial component to a successful video marketing strategy, hands down.

Dive Deeper: Aligning your Video Strategy to the Buyer Journey

3. Always think of the story

We are biologically hard-wired to love a good story. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be a page-turning, edge-of-the-seat type of story. The fact of the matter is that our brains have an easier time processing stories than say, random bullet points or straight facts. So always ask yourself “what’s the story here?” whenever you’re creating a video (yes, even a talking head or product demo video), and it’ll definitely gain the attention of your audience and better yet … retain it.

Dive Deeper: Storytelling Advice and Resources for Marketers

4. Reach beyond brand awareness

Video called. It wanted me to tell you that it’s tired of being dumped in brand awareness campaigns over and over. Did you know that landing pages with video see 80% more conversions than those without? Or that videos can capture leads within the players themselves? Since many marketers are finding video to be the most engaging content medium, why not get it to do some of the heavy lifting for you?

Dive Deeper: Video Marketing How-To – Using Video for Lead Generation

5. Remember that shorter is better

Have you heard? We have short attention spans. Yeah, you’ve heard. The average attention span has decreased from 12 to 8 seconds in the last 15 years alone. Hence why shorter is better. Generally speaking, the lower you are in the funnel the longer your videos can be, but top of funnel videos should be under 90 seconds.

Dive Deeper: The Optimal Length for B2B Videos Throughout the Funnel

6. Measure more than view counts

Sure YouTube fame and ‘viral videos’ are something to be proud of. But seasoned video marketers are measuring more than just view counts. They’re looking at metrics that show how engaged their audience is – through attention span data – and what pipeline contributions their videos are offering. And those marketers that track these advanced metrics see more than 2x the ROI.

Dive Deeper: The Principles of Video Analytics

7. Plug in to your marketing tech stack

Video wasn’t meant to stand on its own, segregated from the rest of your marketing activities. There’s a lot to be gained by integrating video into your marketing automation or CRM platform, but only 15% of marketers are realizing these benefits. Just think, you could join that 15% and track who’s viewed which videos, how long they watched for, and even see parts they re-watched! These are valuable insights that will help you score and qualifying your lead pool.

Dive Deeper: Adding Video Viewing Data to your Marketing Automation Platform

Lattice, a company providing industry-leading predictive analytics, has mastered these video marketing best practices. Join them to learn how they’re using video to strengthen social, email, and pipeline.

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Improve Your Content’s Performance by Improving Your Content Experience

Content marketers are always trying to figure out ways to make their content better. We spend hours tweaking headlines, experimenting with content length, and trying to come up with mind-blowing content ideas, all in the hope that we can snag our audience’s attention, one more time.

While it’s important to zero-in on each individual content asset and think about how it can be improved, the fact of the matter is that your poor content performance might not be your content’s fault.

Imagine you’re drinking a piña colada. It’s the exact same delicious piña colada, but you’re enjoying it in two different scenarios.

Scenario 1: You’re sipping the piña colada in your backyard. You can see your un-mown lawn, hear cars zooming down the street, and know that Wilson could peek over the fence at any moment.

Scenario 2: You’re sipping the piña colada on a beach. You smell the salty sea breeze, hear nothing but the sound of waves and are bothered by nothing but your own peaceful thoughts… ahhh.

I’m going to take a wild guess that the second scenario sounds far more appealing than the first.  Context is everything, and can have more impact than you might think. You’re probably far more likely to order more piña coladas on the beach than in your own backyard, or in a wet basement, or in any other unpleasant and unoptimized experience.

The same rule applies to content marketing: Your content is only as effective as the experience in which it lives.

Your content will be much more effective if it lives in an experience that’s designed to generate engagement, leads, or whatever your content marketing goals might be. With the average blog post taking three hours to create and costing $900 to produce, you can’t afford to let it sit unused — you need to put it in an environment that propels your audience down the funnel.

Aside from great, meaningful content, here are some elements you need to consider when building a content experience that’s designed to help your audience consume more of your content.

Ensure your experience is responsive

You probably already understand the importance of optimizing your content for mobile devices. If not, know that over 50% of content consumption happens on smartphones and tablets, so it’s time to acknowledge the fact that one size doesn’t fit all.

Whenever someone switches devices to consume your content, it causes a potential leak in your content experience. Plug the leaks by making sure your audience is able to consume your content — watch it, read it, share it, and enjoy it — regardless of device, time of day, or any other external factors.

How do you identify these leaks? Consider all points of entry into your content experience, and cater to them so content consumption is easy, fast and intuitive for the end-user.

Don’t play hide and seek with your content

Your blog or resource center (wherever you’re hosting the bulk of your content) should be set up like a grocery store, where everything is strategically organized, and there are signs indicating where particular items can be found.

Or, think of it this way: you wouldn’t want to walk into a grocery store and find all of the items piled in a gigantic heap on the floor, right? The same concept can be applied to your content experience. Organize your content strategically, and make it easy to find.

You can improve your content’s discoverability by:

• Using a content recommendation engine like BrightInfo
• Including internal links
• Enabling a search bar

When tackling content organization, consider the way in which people go about seeking content — they seek solutions, not types of content.

It might make sense for you to keep all of your videos and infographics sorted together in your menu, but you’re not the one you’re creating content for. It makes much more sense to organize your content by topic as opposed to type, and structure your blog or resource center menu accordingly.

Include relevant and contextual calls-to-action

Again, you don’t need me to tell you that CTAs are crucial for content marketing, especially where lead generation is concerned. Not just any CTAs will yield the response you’re looking for, however — CTAs will only work if they’re a contextual part of your content experience.

As such, your CTAs will be far more effective if they’re providing a relevant next step. For instance, if someone is reading a blog post entitled “10 Advanced Email Marketing Tips”, it makes no sense to present a CTA to download an eBook called “Email Marketing for Beginners”.

Or, if we’re working with the piña colada example from above, a more relevant CTA would probably say, “Click here to get caught in the rain.”

In all seriousness, if your CTAs aren’t a contextual part of the experience, they’ll most likely be ignored. At Uberflip, we tested a CTA for an eBook on Content Marketing metrics in two different streams of content — one containing a random assortment of eBooks, and one containing other related content marketing resources. The CTA converted at 14.9% in the eBook stream, and at 34.5% in the content marketing stream.

Context is everything.

Give your great content the great experience it deserves

Marketers are pouring a lot of time and resources into creating great content, but great content can only go so far. Putting your content in a well-optimized content experience can improve your content’s discoverability, increase your conversion rates, and improve your content marketing ROI.

Don’t limit your content’s potential. Focus on your content experience, and watch your content performance soar!

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How to Give Better Feedback to a Video Team

Isn’t it the best feeling when your team or company is behind a really strong marketing video? Maybe it has your audience reaching for the tissue, or laughing out loud, or learning things that are going to change how they live or do business.

Sometimes, though, at the start or during a video project it can feel like a challenge to make sure your video comes off as well as you hoped. You could just sit back, hope for the best, and look for the heaviest desk to hide under in case the project goes into the crapper. Or, you can try giving constructive feedback that will help make your project shine.

How do you give feedback to a video agency or in-house team without stepping on toes? How do you talk about what is working or not if you aren’t a video expert yourself?

Here are a few tips to help you navigate your way through a video project, from inception to through to completed awesomeness.

Provide clear details/expectations/a brief before starting

It’s pretty hard to give useful feedback if you haven’t agreed upon anything to begin with. Before you start producing a creative project, you need to provide the video team of a clear outline on what you’re looking for: What are the goals of the video? What is the message? What actions are you trying to evoke? At what level of the funnel is this video targeted for? Who is the audience? How will it be shared and where will the video live? How will it interact with supporting or other marketing content? What type of video are you looking for? Talking head? Animation? Do you want actors, or simply need statistics and text to appear on screen?

The clearer you are on what you expect from the project, the more likely it will be that the final product is in line with what you want. And when these expectations are set out from the start, feedback and revisions are quicker and easier. Just remember that it’s unlikely you’ll get a Hollywood blockbuster, even from the best of the best video teams – B2B (and even B2C marketing) just can’t always be blow-your-socks-off exciting. You want to create the best content possible, but hold on to realistic expectations.

Agree upon deadlines and the number of revisions permitted

As you and the video team plan the video together, don’t forget to keep deadlines in mind. This will keep a project on track, but you can also apply deadlines to revisions themselves. Video teams, whether in-house or an agency, are typically very busy. They need to schedule and manage a number of projects at once, so often don’t have the time or resources to reshoot the same video a thousand times.

Give feedback at different stages of the video production in a timely manner so the next stage of the project isn’t delayed. Video teams may provide a limit on the number of revisions you can request, to help keep a project on track and on time. Also keep in mind that submitting a major revision to a project two days before the final video is to be released won’t do you, the team, or your project any favours, and will only cause grumbles or increased fees.

Communicate throughout every stage of the project

You know how you can manage expectations, deadlines, and results throughout a video project? You know what I’m going to say: communication!

Every video team will have their own processes, but often they can look a little something like this: an outline of the video is presented, followed by a scripted, followed by a storyboard, and then followed by graphics or a video shoot. You can be included throughout the process to provide clarity or give feedback at each stage to help make sure that the final product is in line with what you were looking for, instead of being surprised with a final product that doesn’t do what you need it to.

If you have this opportunity to play a key role throughout, then take it (or make it): it keeps schedule and budget on track (so countless revisions aren’t made), and makes the whole process simpler, maybe even resulting in you working with the same video team for a future project.

Take a look at this video that we did in-house. It was the opening act during Space Camp, the Video Marketing Summit. It played after everyone took their seats, and welcomed them to the event. As it was being created, Blake, our Creative Director, looped me in when considering voiceover talent – we both wanted to make sure whoever read the script could portray the message and create the sense of inspiration that we were looking for, including tone, correct emphasis, pauses, and more. It took a few auditions to find the right talent that we felt confident moving forward with. It was an important part of the process, and it helped make sure the experience of the video was as powerful as other experiences of the event. (Don’t mind the big letterboxing – the video was designed for a massively long event venue screen)

Trust them (you chose them for a reason)

This may sound counter-intuitive to the above tip, but it really isn’t. It’s important to be on the same page, but some teams or agencies will want to create a project without asking your feedback on every single piece of it – imagine if someone presented you with a gasket or a bolt or a belt for a car, and asked you if you liked how the final vehicle was coming along. Sometimes the whole is much more powerful than the sum of the parts.

If this is how the process might work for your video production, hopefully you’ve come to this agreement before going ahead with the project to alleviate any difficulties. If a video team doesn’t want you on set or doesn’t want to change an actor’s wardrobe from blue to brown, just remember, if you are working with them, it’s because you trusted that they could do their job well.

This trust is also important to keep in mind even if you are able to give feedback at every stage: let your team provide feedback on your feedback: maybe the joke you want added into the script is only funny if you’re an employee of your company, but the audience won’t get it. Or maybe there’s a reason why a certain shot needs to be from that angle. Let them show you why you trusted them in the first place.

For example, when the Space Camp introduction video was created, I questioned if a voiceover was the way to go, rather than just playing music with the words on screen. But Blake, with his expansive video expertise, knew that the experience of the video would be different on a computer screen (how I was seeing it) versus how the audience would see it when they walk into a bustling venue. The audience needed the voice to speak to them and draw their attention to the video, since it played in place of someone coming on stage to “open” the event. It worked well, and that’s just one of the many ways a video expert can provide expertise worth trusting.

Be fair about giving feedback

You might think you’re being fair by letting everyone on your team give their two cents on a video to the video team, but what you may be doing is, well, being annoying. Whoopsie.

So how do you avoid annoying the video team? A few things: Collect a master document of feedback from whoever is involved on your side. This way you can figure out which feedback makes the most sense, and delete any contradictory advice. No one wants to have to try to go up a chain of command to figure out if a logo should appear at the beginning or at the end of a video. Sort it out, decide who will have the final say with feedback, and then send it on over to the video team.

Think about specifics when providing feedback. Don’t just say “Hey, you know that guy that walks from left to right in the background of that one shot? Can he go from right to left?” There may be 3 people in the video who do that! Provide time stamps with your feedback so the video team can quickly identify what you’re referring to.

If you don’t like something (or if you do!) tell the team why. Provide specifics on how a video is or isn’t meeting the project’s goals, while keeping subjective opinions to a minimum; it will only help to keep the final product strong and impactful.

There you have it. Video projects can be tons of fun and the end results are amazing to watch. If you communicate constructively throughout, you’ll be sure to get a final product that will impress (and convert!) audiences. Do you have advice on how to provide feedback throughout a video project? Let us know!

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Video Marketing How-To: Add Video to Your Email Campaigns

Welcome to another episode of Video Marketing How-To! This week we want to talk about how to add video to your email campaigns effectively.

Now, we’re going to share how we use email in video – it may seem a bit different from what you expect when you hear video in email, but bear with us. It’ll make sense, and you’ll see a lot more value from it.

First off, is understanding why we don’t embed video directly into an email. If you include embedded video, most email browsers won’t necessarily display it properly. It will work sometimes, but it’s definitely a gamble. Here’s how we get around that:

First, make sure your video is on a landing page – whether it’s a stand-alone sharing page or YouTube link, or as part of a larger campaign. This gives you something to link to.

Next, take a screenshot of the splash screen of your video, play button and all. Since almost all email browsers load images these days, this is the easiest way to guarantee your video will have a visual impression when someone opens your email.

Now, add the screenshot to an email, and link directly to the landing page. Be sure to mention video in your subject line – it increases open rates by up to 13 percent!

When your audience receives your email, they’ll see a big visual screenshot of your video, and when they click on it they’ll be taken directly to a page where they can immediately consume your video content. It’s as seamless as you can make it, and it works – consistently, our most clicked links in our email campaigns are the video screenshots.

Using a landing page has two big benefits – one, it’s much more trackable than simply embedding a video, and two, you can include as many calls-to-action on the landing page as you want. It’s win-win!

We hope you find today’s tip adds more value to your video marketing! Tune in in a few weeks for another episode of Video Marketing How-To!

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Vidyard Gains Momentum Among Marketo Users

More than 100 customers now using Vidyard’s integration into Marketo to track video engagement data and turn viewers into customers

KITCHENER, Ontario – December 2, 2015 – Vidyard, the leading video marketing and analytics platform, today announced it has surpassed the milestone of 100 businesses using Vidyard’s integration into the Marketo engagement marketing platform. With this integration, customers such as Altium, Elsevier, Gainsight, Insight, PatientKeeper, Sharp, TalentWise, Taulia, and Zuora are generating more leads, improving customer insights, and driving more revenue.

“We’re proud to hit this milestone of 100 unique customers fully utilizing Vidyard’s integration with the Marketo platform to generate more revenue,” said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard. “These customers are already using video analytics to boost conversion rates and generate more pipeline, while new technologies like personalized video and live streaming – both fully integrated with Marketo – offer new ways to attract, engage, qualify and convert buyers faster than ever.”

Video content is proven to be the most effective content type for engaging audiences and helping convert prospects into customers. And while the majority of marketers are increasing their investments in video marketing, most lack the tools to understand who’s watching what and how each asset is contributing to pipeline and closed revenue. Companies that combine Vidyard with Marketo are able to identify viewers across their digital properties and use second-by-second video engagement data to generate new leads, qualify prospects more quickly and equip sales teams with critical context that can help them close more deals.

“The video marketing tools and data made available by Vidyard provide added value to Marketo customers, from planning and orchestration of marketing activities to delivering personalized video experiences at scale,” said Lou Pelosi, senior director of LaunchPoint, Marketo’s ecosystem of partner marketing solutions. “Vidyard is a highly engaged LaunchPoint partner, and we’re thrilled to see so many Marketo customers utilizing their solutions.”

Customer accomplishments as a result of the Vidyard-Marketo integration include:

Altium

Altium makes the tools engineers need to design the electronics we all encounter countless times throughout our daily lives. By incorporating all the tools engineers and PCB designers need into a single, stress-free user interface, Altium Designer dramatically increases design successes, while reducing overall design times. Altium uses video content at all stages of communication to nurture leads and train existing customers.
“We use videos to nurture leads and in turn score those leads accordingly based on how engaged they are with our videos,” said Iryna Zhuravel, marketing automation & analytics manager at Altium. “Videos have helped us to effectively communicate with and nurture leads, and Vidyard for Marketo has made it easier for us to serve these videos and helped us understand how well our video content is performing so we can be constantly improving how we communicate with our customers.”

Gainsight

Gainsight helps companies manage customer relationships to make sure they are successful and satisfied. Gainsight recognized that people were consuming more and more video and made it an integral part of the company’s content strategy. They rely on Vidyard for rich data on who watches their video content, when and for how long.

Vidyard helps Gainsight overcome one of the biggest challenges facing modern marketers – how to interpret a buyer’s intent based on consumption of content. Gainsight collects video engagement data in Marketo and scores leads based on video views, webinar attendance, registration for email and other signals. They also compare how much someone has consumed to how much content Gainsight has produced to determine whether the marketing team is providing useful material.

“There are a lot of signals coming from buyers today, making it hard to know whether they are truly interested in becoming customers,” said Mike Manheimer, director of marketing at Gainsight. “The video viewing data from Vidyard gives us more insight into the prospect’s intent than we get from other content, and combining that information with other insights in Marketo enables us to better prioritize our leads and give our audience a richer experience.”

Insight

Insight is a Fortune 500-ranked provider of hardware, software, cloud and service solutions with customers around the world.

“With greater focus on video as part of our digital marketing strategy, Vidyard gives us the analytics and flexibility we need,” said Bruce Petillo, director of marketing at Insight. “The ease to implement script on our pages and being able to add YouTube videos to the Vidyard templates allow for a seamless look and feel. Through the integration between Marketo and Vidyard, we identify leads who are watching our videos and further target them with more relevant information.”

Taulia

Taulia, a financial technology company, helps large organizations strengthen supplier relationships and add millions to their bottom line by paying invoices more quickly. Among a variety of other channels, video is a major driver of Taulia’s overall marketing mix. In the last year, Taulia’s video marketing program influenced more than $125 million in customer pipeline. Taulia tracks click-through rates and qualified views in Marketo and triggers automated follow-ups based on video engagement.

Using audience engagement data in combination with Vidyard’s Marketo integration, Taulia gets better customer insight, scores leads more effectively and follows up with more relevant content, leading to more than 500 new qualified leads from their recorded webinars alone in 2015.

“The combination of Marketo and Vidyard gives Taulia amazing insights into our audience and allows us to market more contextually, ultimately increasing the impact of our message,” said Bhaji Illuminati, director of marketing at Taulia. “Connecting our core solution providers has enabled Taulia to merge the art and science of marketing to get bigger and better results.”

Already the first video platform to offer comprehensive integrations with a variety of marketing and sales technologies, Vidyard recently launched Personalized Video as well as integrated video live streaming for B2B and B2C businesses. Companies such as Lenovo, Honeywell, LinkedIn, Cision, BMC Software, and Citibank rely on Vidyard for their video marketing and analytics needs.

About Vidyard

Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry’s leading video marketing platform that helps marketers drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data, turning views into sales.

About Marketo

Marketo provides the leading marketing software and solutions designed to help marketers master the art and science of digital marketing. Through a unique combination of innovation and expertise, Marketo is focused solely on helping marketers keep pace in an ever-changing digital world. Spanning today’s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, Marketo’s Engagement Marketing Platform powers a set of breakthrough marketing automation and marketing management applications to help marketers tackle all aspects of digital marketing from the planning and orchestration of marketing activities to the delivery of personalized interactions that can be optimized in real-time. Marketo’s applications are known for their ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing Nation®, a thriving network of more than 550 third-party solutions through our LaunchPoint® ecosystem and over 50,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA with offices in Atlanta, Portland, Ore., Europe, Australia, and Japan, Marketo serves as a strategic marketing partner to approximately 4,300 large enterprises and fast-growing small companies across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.marketo.com.

Media Contact:

Brad Hem
Phone: (281) 543-0669
press@vidyard.com

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