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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Aligning your Video Strategy to the Buyer Journey

Travelling as much as I do for work can be tough on my family. They usually don’t take too much interest in my trips.

But last month, as I was packing to leave for San Francisco they asked what the trip was about. I told them I was speaking at an event called Space Camp. My wife stopped and said, “what?” My daughter said “Cool! But Daddy, you are not an astronaut, you just sit at your desk all day.”.

I said to her, “I know Sweety, but when you think about it – astronauts and marketers have a lot in common.”. She was pretty excited and cried out “really, like what?!”. “Well, when we were young we both dreamed of going to outer space. They just stayed in school a lot longer.” So then I turned it into a lesson on the importance of school. Thanks Vidyard.

But really, there are similarities. Both marketers and astronauts are testers, explorers, and data scientists. We are both hoping for a response. For B2B marketers, especially, we’re both on a long complex journey, but we are not afraid to take bold steps.

Video is a perfect medium throughout a long, complex buying process

We know that today’s buyer journey is long, complex and involves a lot of consumption of marketing-created content through digital channels. Which makes video the perfect medium for engaging buyers. Why?

• We’ve been conditioned for visual communication ever since, well, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon
• Technology now enables strategic and inexpensive video projects
• Video allows us to connect with buyers on a rational and an emotional level
• Marketers have become better at tuning it to every buyer stage

It’s this last point that I focused most of my presentation on.

Which video for which stage?

While video shouldn’t be the only content type you create to engage buyers, the flexibility of the medium enables you to meet the different objectives and evaluation requirements of prospects as they progress through the buyer journey.

Above the Funnel

“Culture content” videos that are engaging and often humorous are a great way to engage prospects and create awareness of your brand. These should be short 1 to 1.5 minute videos and are often live action. A great example is Schneider-Electric’s video “Llama Superstar”:

Top of the Funnel

“Explainer videos” are a perfect way to reflect the business pains of your target audience, showing them that you have a keen understanding of their industry or role. Animated videos, whiteboard videos, and live action are typical formats. A good example is the video, Pressure, which Demand Spring created for Qlik.

Integrating viewership data captured in Vidyard into your lead scoring and lead nurturing programs in Marketing Automation will help you prioritize and progress your hot leads faster.

Middle of the Funnel 

Detailed product videos, like those created by Cisco, are great ways to showcase functionality in the evaluation stages of the buyer journey.

About Us videos are great for introducing your company to the extended buying team.

Also consider sales enablement videos in this stage – like Cisco’s fantastic video-based internal enablement program.

Bottom of the Funnel

Video is for closers. Vidyard’s own testimonial videos are great tools to drive credibility and late stage conversion.

After the Funnel

Don’t stop at the point of sale. Customer on-boarding videos and training videos ensure customer success, loyalty, and retention.

A new way to think about your video strategy

Many organizations are now investing in buyer journey analysis and are starting to align their messaging and broader marketing execution tactics to the buyer journey. Despite this new approach, even organizations that are using video in the most progressive and pervasive manner are new to considering their video marketing strategy in the context of the buyer journey. We think there is a tremendous opportunity for video marketing strategists to make phenomenal gains in turning viewers into leads with this approach. One small step for video marketers, one giant leap for revenue marketing.

The post Aligning your Video Strategy to the Buyer Journey appeared first on Vidyard.

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