The Movies That Give Us the Heebie-Jeebies

To say Halloween is our favorite time of the year would be an understatement. Between the massive influx of tiny candy bars, to the costumes, to the big party we throw, Vidyard takes the haunting season pretty seriously.

One thing we can’t live without this time of year is scary movies. And if you ask enough people, you’ll start to realize there’s one common denominator of every scary movie fan — the one that really gives them the heebie-jeebies. You know that movie. No matter how many times you watch it, there’s still always that scene that makes you jump.

So, in honor of Halloween, we sat down with our costumed coworkers on Friday and ask them about what movies really give them the creeps:

So now comes the big question! What’s your favourite scary movie? And what scene really gets under your skin? Tell us in the comments!

Happy Halloween from the Vidyard Family!

 

The post The Movies That Give Us the Heebie-Jeebies appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/movies-give-us-heebie-jeebies/

Vidyard Named a Leader for Online Video Platforms for Sales and Marketing by Independent Research Firm

Report finds “more firms see video as a way to address their top challenges of using engaging content to connect with customers and prospects”

KITCHENER, Ontario – October 31, 2016 – Vidyard, the video platform for business, has been named a leader in Online Video Platforms for Sales and Marketing by independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc. The recognition comes as part of The Forrester Wave™: Online Video Platforms For Sales And Marketing, Q4 2016, which analyzed the most significant providers in the space.

Vidyard achieved the highest score for current offerings among all participants in the report, landing highest possible score for 23 of the 39 criteria, including administration, syndication and distribution features, sales enablement workflows, enterprise application integrations, reporting and analytics, global support and security. Vidyard was the only vendor to receive the highest possible scores in the player features; marketing and lead generation tools; and targeting, personalization and discovery criteria.

“Vidyard has a clear vision of video’s future that resonates with its customers and Forrester alike,” wrote analyst Nick Barber in The Forrester Wave™: Online Video Platforms For Sales And Marketing, Q4 2016. “It understands how important user-generated content (UGC) will be for brands and businesses, and it plans to roll out further support for UGC and analysis of it. Its roadmap follows up in-video personalization with support for real-time rendering of dynamically personalized video content, which will increase viewer engagement.”

The Forrester Wave methodology included a rigorous process of vendor surveys, scenario-based product demos, executive strategy briefings and customer reference calls to validate each vendor’s products and qualifications. Forrester analyzed nine vendors’ video platforms across 39 criteria.

“I believe that this research shows that video has become a core component of modern marketing and sales with businesses looking for more advanced distribution, personalization, interactivity and analytics to help them turn viewers into customers,” said Michael Litt, Vidyard CEO and co-founder. “In my view, Forrester’s work proves there’s been a massive shift in the video technology market beyond publishing and advertising. Now the conversation is about how to use video to better connect, engage and convert customers and support the entire buying journey even after the deal closes.”

In addition to analyzing vendor offerings, Forrester noted the rise of online video and its growing importance for business. “The sales-and-marketing-focused OVP market is growing because more firms see video as a way to address their top challenges of using engaging content to connect with customers and prospects,” according to the report. U.S. adults spend nearly two hours a day consuming video, more than any other online activity, and online video has become a must-have for businesses. Video conveys emotion much better than the written word, and the human brain processes it 60,000 times faster than text, according to the report.

Businesses that want to capitalize on video need to harness their own video channels and can’t simply rely on YouTube for distribution, largely because it lacks the rich analytics and integrations that come with platforms such as Vidyard. Integrations with CRM and marketing automation platforms enable marketing and sales teams to easily create and share videos with customers, track their true engagement in the content and measure its impact on revenue.

“Vidyard is an excellent fit for companies that want more than just a video repository but want to deploy and measure videos with specific integrations into CRM systems and MAPs,” Barber wrote.

To view The Forrester Wave: Online Video Platforms For Sales And Marketing, Q4 2016 in its entirety, visit here: www.vidyard.com/resources/forrester-wave-online-video-platforms-sales-marketing

About Vidyard

Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the video intelligence platform that helps businesses drive more revenue through the use of online video. Going beyond video hosting and management, Vidyard helps businesses drive greater engagement in their video content, track the viewing activities of each individual viewer, and turn those views into action. Global leaders such as Honeywell, McKesson, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD Ameritrade, Citibank, MongoDB and Sharp rely on Vidyard to power their video content strategies and turn viewer into customers.

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

The post Vidyard Named a Leader for Online Video Platforms for Sales and Marketing by Independent Research Firm appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/press-releases/vidyard-named-leader-online-video-platforms-sales-marketing-independent-research-firm/

Meet the Team, Video Style: Josh Dunton

Meet the Team is our monthly chance to introduce you to the fabulous, quirky, talented people that work at Vidyard, using our favorite medium — video! For this episode, we caught up with Josh Dunton, Talent Acquisition Lead here at Vidyard. Learn where you can find the best all-day breakfast in Kitchener, and what Josh wanted to be when he grew up by watching the video:

What Didn’t Make the Cut

Josh has more to say than just talking about his twin brother, so here’s what didn’t make the cut:

What brought you to Vidyard?

I came to Vidyard because I was really excited about the challenge. The team wanted to grow very quickly, and that’s something I could get behind. Also every person I met during the process was really passionate about working here, and that passion really inspired me and fired me up, and made me want to be part of the team.

What’s your favorite video on the internet right now?

My favorite video on the internet right now is the NFL bad lip reading. It’s an old one, but every time I watch it I can’t help but laugh out loud. It’s just so funny what they think of to do as the lip reading.

What do you do in your free time?

Right now I spend a lot of my free time with my infant son — he needs a lot of attention these days, but when he’s asleep I like to play video games a lot. Specifically Madden … all the time. Anything football, I’m into!

Want to order your own “Hungry Mel”?

Mel’s Diner is a Kitchener institution and boasts two locations. You can find their breakfast menu here. I would also go with the Hungry Mel. That just sounds delicious.

The post Meet the Team, Video Style: Josh Dunton appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/meet-team-video-style-josh-dunton/

Halloween Video Ideas So Good They’ll Getcha (and Your Customers!)

Boo! It’s time for some scare-tactics for 2016!

This post has been updated for Halloween 2016! Why? Because, like those black and orange wrapped toffee candies kids are bound to get in your candy haul every year, this post never goes stale. These Halloween video ideas are still perfect for 2016, and I’ve added some new, awesome ideas that you won’t even have to get dressed up to get! So let’s get right to the goods…

Halloween is coming quickly, and the creepy/crazy/awesome holiday is a perfect opportunity to have some fun entertaining your leads and customers.It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that if they’re entertained, they’re more likely to remember you and engage with your brand. That win is better (okay, almost better) than free candy.

Mmmm…caaaaandy….

Oops…I mean…I digress.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Our brand is too serious to have some off-the-wall Halloween video”, or maybe you’re thinking, “It’s just Halloween, you can’t do anything worth the effort that will have any real impact.” Maybe, you’re just plum (or pumpkin) out of fresh ideas.

Well, Halloween is one of those rare times when brands can be silly, scary, creepy…or whatever. Halloween lets you be whatever you want to be. Your video doesn’t have to be boring, and it certainly can have an impact on your audience. Here are some ideas for a memorable Halloween 2016 video:

It’s spooky what video can do for your whole business in 2016

At Vidyard, we STRONGLY believe that video can achieve amazing results for your whole business (and we’ll get Dracula to bite anyone who says otherwise!) There is a plethora of Halloween video ideas for marketing (for some of the best ones, see below). But video isn’t just for marketing! Imagine the effect you could have on your audience if you used video for sales, internal communications and training, and even customer service and support. Like what? The possibilities are endless, but here are a few ideas to get your fresh, juicy brains going:

• Sales can try sending fun videos telling leads they will stalk or hunt them until they call them back or answer emails. (Just keep it light and jokey, and don’t get too scary – we don’t want any restraining orders!) Sales videos can even be as simple as a screen capture video (like through ViewedIt) showing the sales rep’s face and screen – but the rep could be in costume! It’s a great chance for reps to show their personality and have some fun with prospects and leads, and could help encourage call-backs – wouldn’t you want to speak to an angel or a devil or Babe Ruth or Jamie Lannister?
• What about video for internal communications? Get your employee audience engaged by creating a fun culture video about everyone’s halloween costumes, and let your employees rate the best one!
• Internal training teams can have their own fun with a Halloween video: how awesome would it be to get a notice that you have to watch a “mandatory training video” on how to survive a zombie apocalypse? It prepares your employees for the inevitable while also helping them feel more connected to their personal, relatable and fun company.
• In support or customer service? Imagine how freaked out you could make your customers if you told them you were “killing” some aspect of the product that everyone loves? Maybe your customers could have a chance to “save” your product by signing in or taking some other action within a certain time frame. Or, if you need to refresh any part of your product – you can kill one aspect that needs improvement or has bugs, and bring the product back (in a sort of Frankenstein way, bigger and better).

Video gives your whole business the power to really engage, excite, spook, and connect with your audience. So encourage different teams in your company to get involved – it’ll be a real treat!

Personalized creepiness for each viewer

You know what video viewers eat up faster than a bowl of candy? A personalized experience. Any day of the year, customers want to feel like they’re recognized and understood as the unique person they are, not marketed to as part of a mass group or list.

So give them what they’re ravenous for on Halloween: with a personalized video, you could add right into the video unique details about that specific viewer, like their name or company logo for example. Your customers would be blown away! Put a creepy spin on it (think: “We’re watching you, Blake”, or “You’re next, Katie!”, etc., etc….imagine the possibilities!), and your customers will be freaked out…and even more engaged, watching a story that includes them all the way to the end.

Are you wondering, “Holy crap, I could do something like that for my video?! HOW???!” I’m not just playing a trick on you…discover personalized video for yourself and you’ll be amazed!

Choose your own spooky adventure

Go even further with your Halloween story by allowing your audience to interact with you and determine how the story progresses. How can you do that? Through multiple players and calls-to-action. Here’s how:

The viewer watches your initial video, which ends with a CTA containing several options (that are actually links). Ask them brand, product, campaign, or story-relevant questions, and provide clickable options that each link to their own video player (What should the character do next? Where should he go? What should he buy/eat/wear/build etc?). When an option is clicked, the linked player plays in the same frame on the page. Then the new player can its own CTA options that link to even more players, giving the viewer a real “choose your own adventure” experience. Who wouldn’t keep watching a video like that? It’s the perfect way to get past audiences’ ridiculously short attention spans.

Share a product or service message

Your awesome, entertaining, or spooky Halloween video doesn’t have to live outside your brand or relevant messaging. There may be a ghoulish slant to your everyday marketing – in the telecommunications industry? Pretty much every horror movie includes a phone that doesn’t work or a phone that rings off the hook with a freaky voice on the other end. In the software industry? What if a computer was doing something all on its own? That might be exciting and intense for viewers who then learn that it isn’t actually a ghost doing it, it’s just your awesome software that’s programmed to do the work itself. You get the idea.

Check out this video from IKEA that shows how simple and effective this can be.

Or LG’s video that shows how realistic their screens are.

But sometimes it’s fun to just…have fun

Sometimes a special day calls for a light-hearted fun video that acts simply as (very) top-of-funnel, brand awareness content. Audiences love to get inside, behind-the-scenes looks into an organization; it humanizes a brand and can help your viewers relate to you. These types of videos are often shared as well, and while view counts don’t matter in the greater scheme of converting leads to customers, getting your name out there never hurts!

You can create a haunted video that doesn’t necessarily include product messaging, like the one Vidyard released for Halloween last year:

Keep it even simpler, if you want. Film your halloween office party, for example. Videos don’t have to be a big production. After all, Jimmy Kimmel’s audience videos weren’t exactly Hollywood material, but they were a great success for the late night show!

What ideas are you excited to try for your Halloween video? Let us know!

The post Halloween Video Ideas So Good They’ll Getcha (and Your Customers!) appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/halloween-video-ideas-hauntingly-good/

Get These B2B Video Secrets – Before They Self-Destruct!

Just before the first big tech bubble burst in the early 2000s, my co-founder, Bill Wittenberg of Humongous Media, started a different business, one that had an unintended side-effect: whenever he described his new enterprise, it made everybody laugh. To be fair, sometimes they’d frown. Or shake their head. Or kick him out of their office.

“Seriously,” he’d say to stone-faced bankers and dubious retailers as the door swung shut behind him: “People will want to watch video on the Internet! I swear, they’ll even buy things on the Internet. It’s going to happen!”

Just 15 years later – and after my partner sold his business to Yahoo for more than $150 million — any B2B marketer knows that marketing without video is like milk without chocolate. Consider the lowly email. As a digital vehicle, B2B marketers throw a party when the engagement needle rises 5%. But according to Forrester Research, adding a video to an email marketing campaign lifts click-through rates 200-300%.

Or the humble tweet – yes, it can be 140 characters of crushing, Kardashianesque meringue. But it can also move a ton of product, if there’s video involved. In a recent Amazon @deals promotion, one electronics manufacturer added a video to their previously text-only tweet, and unit sales of the promoted product shot up 297%. In three days.

In fact, here’s what’s new: strategically speaking, whether it’s B2C promotion or B2B outreach, video has become the great marketing lever-arm — the preferred medium of consumption for all consumers, whether you’re buying a bar of soap for your kids, or software-as-a-service for your 100,000 employees. According to Forbes Magazine, after viewing a video, 65% of executives visit a marketer’s website, and almost 40% call a vendor.

So if the value of video is so clear to so many, why do some marketers still resist creating it? Simple: video can be hard to make. It can be time-consuming to develop. It can be really expensive. And that’s before you hire your ad agency. But after making over 3000 eCommerce, employee-training, change-management, and B2B education videos for marketers as diverse as Laddawn Packaging and Comcast Communications, I’ve learned a number of cool, even vital rules that I’ll share with you so you can maximize the chances of your video success.

1. Just because it’s Amazon doesn’t mean it’s Amazon

While many B2B marketers imagine that they’ll only reach their customers through effective CRM management or travel-heavy sales campaigns, they don’t realize that lots of B2B sales are made…on Amazon. Yes, just as thousands of general contractors now regularly drive to the B2C retail giant Home Depot to pick up needed business tools and supplies (hello big box, goodbye Fred’s Plumbing Supply), Amazon now sells directly to businesses. So what does that have to do with video? It turns out Amazon’s search engine has begun to weigh marketers’ product Detail pages more heavily if the page has a video on it. In other words, if your business customer’s search terms call for your page, and you don’t offer them something to watch, you could find yourself on page 9 (or 30) of the search results.

Conclusion: lots of your enterprise-sized B2B customers go to traditional, B2C eCommerce channels, social media timelines, and custom-content news sites, and when they get there, they want to watch a video.

2. Tone matters

One of the most important variables in the marketing equation is ‘tone.’ Specifically, most customers believe a company is telling the truth when it makes marketing claims. But the closer you get to the point of purchase, the less a customer wants to hear your sales message. They just want a little help. They want to understand what your offering. Remember: business customers come to eCommerce sites or a company’s product site because of effective marketing. They just don’t want to see more marketing when they get there. So if they want a video but they don’t want you to market to them, what do you say in the video? Facts, expressed quickly. B2B customers crave good information, in under 1 minute. They don’t want more claims. They want a video that offers proof. The key: gradually shift your tone from ‘sell’ to ‘tell’ the closer you (and your customer) gets to the point of sale.

3. Time matters

Time is of the essence. Why? Surprise: most B2B customers… are at work. They don’t believe they have even one extra minute. Video marketing has to be brief. Fact: by 1 minute and 20 seconds into your marketing video, you’ll have lost about 80% of your audience. By 1 minute and 40 seconds, you’ll have lost 90% of them. If you do create a marketing video, here is what we always tell our customers: “Brevity is the soul of commerce.” If you keep your video under 1:00, you’re more likely to get your entire message to your viewer. Be bold, be brave, and be brief – remove all but the most important marketing points, and you’ll keep your customer around for the sale.

4. Technique matters

OK, so you know you have to be quick about it, but how quick? Very: there are 3 critical video-abandonment points where customers are more likely to leave your otherwise excellent marketing video – at 0:03 seconds, 0:09 seconds and at 0:59 seconds. So what do you do to keep them with you, and watching? Offer them something – a product benefit, a surprise, a fact – at those key moments.

5. Buying is a journey, not an act

There are powerful, proven, repeatable techniques – some expressed above – that almost always guide a company’s customers to a purchase decision. But almost no customer goes from interest to purchase in a single moment. So any video marketing you create has to reflect where in the sales funnel your video will be seen. Will your message be consumed at the top of the sales funnel? Have fun. Sell key benefits. Attract interest. Salve customer pain points. But above all, keep it short (around 15 seconds). As your customer works their way closer to you and farther down the sales funnel, take a little more time – maybe 40 seconds. But just as you take more time, take fewer liberties – sell less. Tell more. Explain. Guide your customer through a buyer’s journey by offering them something, not asking them for something.

6. Repetition is OK.

7. Repetition is OK.

Our clients have found that their story has to be repeated — across multiple digital venues — to gain real market awareness and sales lift. The reason: customers get hazy quickly about terms and claims. The more technical or complex your product is, the more true that becomes. So you have to simplify and demystify in multiple places, on multiple platforms. To be sure, there has been a rise in category acceptance around the idea of technical products or features, but there has also been a swell of jargon associated with those claims. Problem: jargon is the enemy. Glaze is nice on a cupcake, but not in the eyes of your customer. So repeat the simple, simplified truth of your benefit across multiple platforms, all at once… Seriously. Repeat it. Across multiple platforms. Again and again. Repeatedly.

8. Science seems sexy, but it’s not

To manufacturers, jargon is tempting — legal departments find jargon reassuringly specific. Marketing departments believe jargon equals authenticity. But especially when the message is in a video, we’ve found the opposite: scientific jargon intimidates. It reinforces customers’ belief that they don’t know enough to be educated customers. So they back away — wondering if they really know enough to make a smart purchase. If your marketing video is successful, it’s often (in part) because it reassures your customer of their competence, not of yours.

Solution: Customers need the product story told simply, repeatedly, and without jargon. (Wait. Did I already say that? Good!) One reason for the repetition: if you sell a technical or complex product (software, cars, really good paper cups), you’re making a value proposition that’s often literally microscopic. Your microchip is faster. Your software is more efficient. Your car uses less gas. Well, guess what: your customer can’t see any of that. And with that literal lack of visibility comes a subtle disbelief in your brand’s claims. The opposite is true, too — if a brand repeats the simple, practical reasons for their claim and they use a video to (literally) magnify a product benefit, customers will flock to that simple story, and to that product.

The short of it all: Selling happens when a story gets told well, fast

Explanation and education are the new gold standards for marketing. And many B2B customers now want their learning delivered in video form, because video is on their time, it’s on their device, and it’s where they are. So make a video. Help your customer. Train your employees. Give everybody confidence. And whatever you do, make it snappy.

Okay, these rules won’t actually self-destruct, but they will help you outsmart and outperform other B2B marketers who aren’t in the know! Want more useful video marketing insights, tips and tricks? Come to Viewtopia, the Video Marketing Summit! Humongous Media will be there, and we hope you will be, too.

The post Get These B2B Video Secrets – Before They Self-Destruct! appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/get-b2b-video-secrets-self-destruct/

3 Lessons on How to Use Data to Improve Your Marketing Campaigns

We all need to start somewhere, and we all make mistakes on our journeys to becoming great marketers. But rather than cry over spilt milk (or that email you sent to the wrong list … don’t worry, we’ve all done it), what you learn from it is far more important.

I myself am far from an expert, but I do know what it’s like to feel lost when you’re trying to interpret dozens of metrics from a single marketing campaign. So I’ve short-listed some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the hopes that this won’t just be an awkward confessional post, and you’ll be able to learn from my experiences, too.

Lesson 1: Don’t just track vanity metrics.

Just like you wouldn’t look at view count to measure the success of a video (we know you’re better than that), you shouldn’t use inquiries, or initial campaign responses, as the only measure of success for your marketing campaign. If you track those initial inquiries further down the funnel then you get to the more meaningful metrics, like if the leads converted into opportunities for your sales team or if they generated any pipeline.

For instance, if we were to look at view counts alone, then this webinar we co-presented with Jay Baer would be our star performer and we’d be tempted go full throttle to create more webinars like it. But if we look more carefully at the data, while it is definitely a fact that many people watched the webinar, those people actually converted into opportunities at a lower rate than most other webinars we’ve done. While this webinar appears to be fantastic to engage people who are new to video for the first time, it not our strongest asset for nurturing and converting existing users. So instead of just pumping out introductory webinars that appear at first glance to be great lead gen activities, we have to make sure to balance those with webinars that also nurture and convert viewers who are further down the funnel.

Lesson 2: Wait to see the true results of your campaigns before making decisions.

If you’re using a CRM like Salesforce it’s incredibly helpful to set up dashboards or reports so you can monitor campaign progress from the moment you set it up. But be aware that you might not see the true results of the campaign until weeks, or even months, after. Why? Because sometimes it can take time for leads to make their way through the funnel and have the appropriate conversations with sales so they can convert into pipeline. So while it may appear a campaign isn’t effective at generating pipeline immediately, if you wait for those leads to trickle down it will demonstrate its true value over time (especially so for evergreen campaigns that you can continue to promote, like webinars and eBooks). Just be patient, which I realize is infinitely easier than it sounds when you’re trying to demonstrate the ROI on your campaigns!

Speaking of dashboards reports, they’re also invaluable to not only review campaign performance within your team, but also with other teams you work closely with. Reviewing the data together is a great way to find out what’s working and what’s not, but getting qualitative data like anecdotes from other teams that sometimes don’t translate into data are also equally as important. I’ve always found that sales is a goldmine of information, and conversations like “We had some great conversations with these people. Maybe we should target more prospects in the toilet industry” can result in you committing to a Squatty Potty event later in the year (link is SFW!).

Lesson 3: Don’t discount your failures.

If you’ve tracked the metrics further down the funnel and given it time to see the true results of your campaign and things still aren’t shaking out, please, please, please don’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater. You could have a fantastic idea or piece of content on your hands that just needs a bit of love and tweaking to get it right.

For instance, let’s say your sales webinar didn’t perform well. You could try breaking it up into a short demo series, or promoting it on-demand so viewers can watch it at any time, or making it interactive to allow viewers to submit their questions to get a discussion going. You can even try something as simple as hosting the next one first thing in the morning or over lunch rather than in the afternoon.

Or let’s say your new product video has a 60% drop-off rate in the first 10 seconds. No sweat. Try cropping out the fluff at the beginning, like any intros, re-record it and get to the good stuff faster, or add interactive annotations to keep people engaged.

The ways you could improve your campaigns are almost endless. By evolving and testing new ideas against the baseline, you could spin even some of your worst campaign nightmares into marketing grand slams.

Do you have any gems of wisdom you can share about how you use your data? Or want to share your biggest marketing mishap? Let me know in the comments below!

The post 3 Lessons on How to Use Data to Improve Your Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/3-lessons-on-how-to-use-data-to-improve-your-marketing-campaigns/

Welcome to Viewtopia: Vidyard Announces Speakers for 2016 Video Marketing Summit

YouTube and Vine star Zach King, Forrester analysts Nick Barber and Laura Ramos, Solarwinds video director René Lego join top voices in video, marketing, content and customer success

KITCHENER, Ontario – October 19, 2016 – Vidyard today announced the speaker lineup for Viewtopia 2016, the industry’s largest annual video marketing summit being held in San Francisco Nov. 9-10.

YouTube and Vine personality Zach King headlines an impressive speakers list featuring industry analysts, video experts, marketing innovators and other business leaders. Video continues to be one of the fastest growing and most effective areas of modern digital marketing. Viewtopia attendees will hear from innovative marketing leaders about how video is helping drive results at their companies and will learn practical techniques to launch and advance their own video marketing programs, as well as how to use the power of video in other areas of the business to boost audience engagement and improve results.

“Online video is changing the way businesses connect and communicate with modern buyers,” said Michael Litt, co-founder and CEO of Vidyard. “Viewtopia is where we explore the latest trends in digital content and storytelling, and the expanding role that video is playing throughout the customer lifecycle. It’s a perfect opportunity for marketers, sales leaders and business executives to discover what’s really working and to gain practical advice on how to use video in a more strategic way to deliver real results.”

Zach King started his journey in film at the age of 7 when his parents put him in charge of shooting home videos at a wedding. Since that moment, he’s had the film bug in his blood. As a freshman in film school, he started his YouTube channel where he started posting his film projects, such as Jedi Kittens, which quickly went viral generating millions of views. In September 2013, he opened a Vine account and challenged himself to create one Vine video a day for one month. Three years later, he was awarded the 2016 Shorty Award for Best Vine Artist, and he is now heralded as the king of Vine magic and one of the most popular content creators on social media.

Forrester Research analyst Laura Ramos is a leading expert in business-to-business marketing with hands-on senior management experience in corporate, industry and product marketing; demand management; and social media. She helps Forrester’s B2B marketing clients plan, build and deliver marketing programs that combine traditional and digital approaches that lead with business issues, create thought leadership and fuel their company’s topline growth.

Her colleague Nick Barber specializes in video technologies, including live and on-demand video within the enterprise and for customer experiences. His research centers on how companies can use online video platforms for sales and marketing operations and how they can enhance their business using video collaboration and video conferencing. Prior to joining Forrester, Barber was the director of online video at IDG News Service, where he was a technology news journalist serving IDG’s global network of websites. He helped build IDG’s global video presence from both a content and technology perspective, and he produced thousands of videos on a range of enterprise and consumer topics.

René Lego is an award-winning, Emmy-nominated producer, director and videographer who currently leads video production and media strategy at Solarwinds, a leading global provider of IT monitoring and management tools. During the past six years at SolarWinds, Lego’s video team has flourished into a multi-faceted internal video production, creative and media team with over 1,500 videos released. She is the executive producer of SolarWinds Lab, a monthly customer livestream talk series, and has helped develop and expand THWACKcamp, SolarWinds’ annual online virtual thought leadership and training event, now in its fifth year.

A marketing and sales industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience, Tim Riesterer has dedicated his career to improving the conversations marketers and salespeople have with prospects and customers. His books “Customer Message Management,” “Conversations that Win the Complex Sale” and “Three Value Conversations” focus on improving market-ready messages and tools that marketers and salespeople can use to win more deals.

To see the full list of speakers and topics, learn more about the event or register, visit the Viewtopia website: https://www.vidyard.com/viewtopia/. Registration is $499 for the full 2-day event.

Viewtopia will also be the site for the 2016 Video Marketing Awards (VMAs) to recognize organizations and individual marketers using video content and video analytics to drive revenue and boost marketing results. Winners in each category will be recognized at the event and will have an opportunity to share their story with other attendees. To see the full list of categories, visit https://www.vidyard.com/press-releases/vidyard-announces-2016-video-marketing-awards/.

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About Vidyard

Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the video intelligence platform that helps businesses drive more revenue through the use of online video. Going beyond video hosting and management, Vidyard helps businesses drive greater engagement in their video content, track the viewing activities of each individual viewer, and turn those views into action. Global leaders such as Honeywell, McKesson, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD Ameritrade, Citibank, MongoDB and Sharp rely on Vidyard to power their video content strategies and turn viewer into customers.

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

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A Shortish History of Online Video

In the years following World War II, a strange and exciting new technology emerged. Moving pictures … in your living room.

Showing eager audiences moving pictures was nothing new — people had been watching nickelodeons since the 1800s, and theatres were showing silent films and “talkies” well into the dawn of the 21st century. But, save for the wealthy owners of home theaters, one had to go out to experience these. Moving pictures were group activities, while sitting around the fire listening to the radio was the mainstay of the modern home.

Television changed that. Many wrote TV off as a fad, but soon, nearly every home in North America had a television: rabbit-ears pointed in all directions, picking up everything from news broadcasts to sporting events. By the 1950s, presidential addresses were delivered over television, and wide-eyed children watched incredible footage of the moon landing, beamed back from the furthest any human being had ever gone in our galactic front door. Moving pictures became personal.

Color TV was introduced in the 1960s, and as VHS tapes were born in the late 1970s, TV became an on-demand medium. No longer did you have to wait for your favorite show to come on, you could record it, and watch it later. No longer did you have to wait for a station to play your favorite movie, you could pick it up and watch it at your leisure, commercial-free. On-demand television was an exciting idea as early as the 1970s. And it’s no surprise that when the internet rolled around in about the same time frame, it would take less than 30 years for video to become one of the primary, and most exciting uses of this new communications network.

And that, is what we want to talk about today. We believe in the power of online video, but where did online video begin? What were some of the key milestones that got us to where we are now — a world where Facebook’s CEO believes video will be as big as mobile phones in how we communicate, and Cisco conservatively estimates that up to 80% of the internet’s traffic will be video by 2020. Funnily enough, it all began with a pot of coffee.

The Trojan Room: Laziness Breeds Innovation

While details are foggy on what the very first video was to be streamed over the internet, few people mince words over the first real “live” video stream. In 1991, in the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge in England sat a lonely coffee machine. Disappointed engineers from all over the building would traverse the hallowed halls to find the coffee pot empty, and would trudge back to their offices and labs empty handed. To help alleviate this great stress, a camera was set up across from the coffee pot, beaming its status to any computer in the building.

By 1993, web browsers had attained the ability to display images, and the camera was connected to the internet as an image that could be refreshed ‘live’ to make it easier to transmit its status. As the world wide web grew, so did the popularity of the webcam, with people checking in from all over the globe to see the status of Cambridge’s coffee pot. One could argue that in addition to being the first live video streamed daily on the internet, it was also the first viral video. The coffee pot pre-dates Google, so to find it, you had to either know where to look, or have someone tell you.

Broadcasting a coffee pot online to save engineers a walk down the hall may seem like a small feat, but this humble beginning is the first step towards the video-driven world we live in today. And as technology evolved, so did its capabilities. In 1993, a top-of-the-line modem would have transmitted and received data at 14.4k per second, which works out to downloading a 1mb image in 9 minutes and 42 seconds. Streaming a Netflix movie, at a whopping 1.5gb per film, would take 242 hours and 23 minutes, or just under 21 days. On-demand digital video wasn’t quite ready for prime-time yet, but the seeds were planted. All it needed was technology, and mainstream interest, to catch up.

Enter: Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law and Online Video

Moore’s Law is the observation that, as technology advances, the number of transistors in a dense circuit doubles every two years. Sometimes this is the result of progress, sometimes Moore’s Law is seen as a target that must be reached so we reach it. A self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will.

While there’s no direct relation of Moore’s Law to internet speed, one could look at the rate at which we have increased our internet communications capacity in a similar light. Whether it’s advancement in technologies through natural experimentation, or simply the desire to meet the demand of ever-increasing complex online processes, our internet speed and bandwidth has continued to rise year-after-year, and with it, our ability to do amazing things online has risen too.

The late 1990s saw the rise of broadband internet, and the increasing complexity and creative possibility of internet browsers to display more exciting media. GIFs began to emerge as a popular moving image format, and some of the earliest viral ‘videos’ — adding audio to a page with moving gifs, and looping them at the same rate — began to emerge too. While not the proudest moment in internet history, few will struggle to remember the Hamster Dance, sent out via countless emails from well-meaning relatives, and spawning everything from techno remixes to awful day-time television dance parties. Like it or not, the Hamster Dance was one of the first viral videos. And a new technology emerged that would change everything once again.

The Short But Exciting Rise of Flash

Flash Video, Developed by Macromedia in the late 1990s, was officially added as part of Adobe’s Flash Player 6 in 2002, and ushered in a new wave of online video. In addition to allowing media companies to display short video online and in a format that was easy for browsers to display, Flash was also an easy platform to build animations, and would enable thousands of would-be cartoonists to bring their visions to life. Animations like the infamous Badgers video arrived in 2003, and were widely shared privately before Flash-focused websites like Newgrounds opened up to user-generated content. The now famous Numa Numa video, uploaded as a flash video, would attain an unheard of 2 million views in its first three months online.

In addition to battling for bandwidth space against Napster and a host of new file-sharing platforms, online video finally had the technology, and the required bandwidth to become a mainstream phenomenon. News networks used Flash to share their segments online, sports teams shared highlights on their websites, and humor sites like eBaum’s World and AlbinoBlackSheep became popular destinations to watch and create flash animations.

With so much video scattered across the web, watching the content was no longer an issue for those that could afford the internet connection required to enjoy it. But finding video content was still a challenge. Until Valentine’s Day, 2005.

Why You Were the Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2006

By 2005, nearly 30% of all households in the United States had “high speed” internet — using cable or DSL to access a much higher download and bandwidth rate than had been offered by telephone modems. This dramatic increase in available internet speed, coupled with digital cameras (and video cameras) becoming more commonplace, was creating an interesting intersection of opportunity.

There was a lot of video content floating around. And people had the technology to watch it at home, or at work. But where did you put it?

On February 14th, 2005, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, three alumni of PayPal, launched YouTube as a place for people to share their online videos, and search for other people’s videos. The first video uploaded to the site was commemorating Karim’s trip to the zoo.

Anyone could create an account, upload their content, and start building their “channel”. And people did. In less than a year, YouTube was serving 100 million videos online per day, and was accounting for 60% of all internet traffic.

Remember that intersection of opportunity I mentioned earlier? YouTube found it.

Much like television was made for people, but largely paid for by advertising, the internet was beginning to emerge as an ad-defined space as well. Banner ads and spam emails were nothing new in 2006, but truly innovative brands were looking for new ways to connect with users in a way that didn’t annoy them, but got them excited. A medium that was drawing people in every day to watch content was still an open playing field.

Nike saw an opportunity in 2005, and uploaded a three minute clip of soccer star Ronaldinho quietly trying on some new cleats, and showing off his incredible shooting accuracy (watch for it at 1:40!):

It’s grainy, shaky, and has no background music or other editing. But it was the first video to break 1 million views on YouTube the first time it was uploaded, and it ushered in the concept of viral videos on YouTube. Brands had taken notice of this new anything-goes online video platform, and Nike could proudly wave the flag that they had been the first to find real success with it. Connecting with users had gone from a television battleground to an online one.

In 2006, after breaking nearly every possible milestone in online video (and setting up a few new ones for others to break along the way) YouTube was acquired by Google for a whopping $1.65 billion. The partnership only fuelled YouTube’s growth, adding advertising features to generate revenue, and bringing so much attention to the platform that in 2008 some experts feared YouTube would collapse the entire internet infrastructure by simply being too big for it to handle.

By the end of 2006, YouTube was part of a larger collection of online applications that focused on user-generated content, and community building. MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, and a host of other collaborative sites led to Time Magazine publishing the controversial Person of the Year as simply “You”, representing the people who used these tools every day to redefine the web. YouTube’s role in this was center-stage, as the cover featured a monitor showing a mirror, with the conspicuous scrubber bar on the bottom of the popular online video platform:

2007 saw Facebook, at the time a powerfully emerging social network, begin to include video as an uploadable media typel to compete with YouTube. Few could predict how powerful Facebook would turn out to be, and how much this pivotal moment would affect its future success.

As with any medium, YouTube celebrities also began to emerge, with the popular Fred being the first channel to reach 1 million subscribers in 2009. For the sake of your eardrums, I will refrain from posting any of Fred’s clips as part of this article, but I will remind you that the internet is sometimes as inexplicable as it is incredible.

Streaming Video is the New Norm

While YouTube was busy collecting user generated content (and deleting slyly uploaded copyrighted material) another startup had been brewing since 1997, and would shake up online video just as much in a short time.

Started in 1997 as a way of renting DVDs by mail, Netflix launched its streaming media service in 2007, less than a year after YouTube was acquired by Google. While YouTube had worked with publishers to show some copyrighted material online through a pay-per-view model, Netflix built its model on offering big budget movies on-demand for a monthly fee. By 2013, less than 6 years later, Netflix would add television shows to its roster of streaming media, and would become the biggest source of downstream traffic on the internet, taking in a whopping 32.3%. With House of Cards debuting the same year, Netflix again broke records by launching its own high-budget programming to compete with the very network TV providers it had long used as its main source of content.

YouTube and Netflix showed the power of small companies to change the way we consume media, but big corporations weren’t entirely in the stone-age either. Hulu launched in 2007 as a television-focused competitor to Netflix’s streaming service, and led by a consortium of companies, including Disney, Fox, and Comcast. While it launched after Netflix, it remains a popular competitor to this day.

Much like Nike was the first company to truly take advantage of YouTube as a marketing channel, other large companies began to see the power of online video, and a new challenge to network television was emerging. Long thought of as the ‘holy grail’ of commercial marketing, the Super Bowl was taken by storm in 2011, as Volkswagen posted their now-famous “The Force” commercial to YouTube four days before the big game:

By Super Bowl Sunday, the ad had received over 8 million views, and would go on to become one of the most shared Super Bowl commercials of all time. While these online views can’t match the number of eyes on the ad during the Super Bowl broadcast, it showed brands that spending money creating ads for the Super Bowl could have the added bonus of making your company an internet superstar. Within a few years, nearly every brand was taking advantage of this, especially Budweiser.

The early 2010s would prove to be pivotal in the rise of streaming video, as bandwidth continued to improve, and live video became far more accessible. YouTube launched live streaming in 2011, and even the International Olympics Committee, an organization steeped in the revenue it receives selling broadcast rights to its events, chose to live stream portions of the Olympics from London in 2012. Brands like Apple and Salesforce began live streaming their event keynotes in 2013, opening up the door for countless online viewers to experience up-to-the-minute news from their favorite brands live, and share in the experience.

Live streaming, and streaming video was here to stay. So where do we go from here?

The Future Will Not Be Televised, But It Will Be Advertised

The rise in online video has been meteoric within the last decade, but few realize the costs of hosting and delivering all of this video. Consumer internet may be relatively inexpensive depending on where you live, but for brands hosting and serving millions of videos — like YouTube and Facebook — bandwidth costs are definitely a concern. Much like cable television was supported by commercials and sponsored broadcasts, online video has slowly become one of the most powerful, and lucrative advertising tools.

Facebook launched video ads in 2014, and America watched over 20 billion video ads in 2013 alone. Brands began to move commercial content from television to the web, and content like Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches and Geico’s Hump Day ads were viral sensations in the years they were published. Some brands have eschewed even creating their own content, looking to users for inspiration. GoPro’s video of a fireman saving a kitten has been viewed millions of times, and much like most of their YouTube content, was not originally produced by their team.

Even presidents began to take advantage of the popularity of online video, with Obama appearing on the popular Zach Galifianakis web series Between Two Ferns to promote Healthcare.gov. The site saw a huge increase in traffic as a result of his appearance, and was lauded as a successful way of communicating a controversial — but potentially life-saving — topic to a younger audience.

The early 2010s also saw the dawn of what many consider to be the real future of online video: mobile.

Vine, launched by Twitter in 2013, quickly became a widely popular video-only social network. Popular picture-only social network Instagram added video only a few months later. Brands immediately leapt on this opportunity to show short-form video content to their audiences, and even older brands like GE leapt on the trend, launching their Vine account a mere one day after the network was started.

By now, it had been less than a decade since Nike took home the trophy as the first video to reach a million views on YouTube and online video was no longer a fun niche market for brands big and small; it was a must-have.

The Sky is the Limit

So what is the future of online video? For one, it’s volume. Mark Zuckerberg, whose company, Facebook, went from being a small dorm-room project to the largest social network in history, predicts that video will look like as big of a shift in the way we communicate as mobile has been. And, as I mentioned earlier, Cisco is already predicting that by 2020, at least 80% of internet traffic will be video.

100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day. That’s 11,415 days of video content. So, if everyone is doing it, how do brands stand out?

First, brands are embracing new technologies as fast as engineers can create them. In 2015, YouTube launched 360 video, and Facebook followed suit. Brands as big as National Geographic, and as small as college football teams are using 360 video to give viewers an immersive experience with their content. Whether you’re helicoptering over a volcano, or running onto the field with Stanford at the Rose Bowl, the experience is unlike anything we’ve seen before in online video.

As people begin to expect video content from brands, innovative companies are also adding interactivity to their videos. Honda took a chance in promoting their Civic R with The Other Side, allowing viewers to flip back and forth between the family friendly version of their car, and the darker, more mysterious story that lurked beneath.

As video has matured as a marketing asset, many marketers are also looking to take video off YouTube and start seeing real results with it. Video platforms (like Vidyard – selfish plug) have emerged to help brands complement their YouTube strategy with more in-depth viewer analytics and lead generation elements. While there is always a place for branded content on YouTube, businesses that want more from their video – and to have more control over what plays before and after it – are increasingly moving content to their own websites, and keeping it there.

Personalization has also become the cornerstone of modern marketing, and brands are following suit with their video content. A recent personalized video campaign from Lenovo saw an almost 5x increase in clicks compared to their usual campaigns. And that was to a list of dead leads. If seeing their first and last name in a video is enough to drive prospects to click through and engage, I suspect we’ll see far more companies using this technology to stand out.

At the end of the day, online video is quickly replacing network television as one of the biggest sources of media attention. Streaming services like Netflix, user generated content sites like YouTube, and social networks like Facebook are making video accessible, searchable, and using complex algorithms to supply viewers with the exact content they know they will enjoy. Whether we spend the rest of our lives glued to a screen remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: brands know how much time we spend watching content, and smart ones are taking advantage of online video as it grows.

Now, after all of this, I still don’t have a good way of knowing whether or not the coffee pot in our own kitchen is empty most of the time, but perhaps I can look at one of the latest innovations — inexpensive, video-enabled drones that I can control with my phone — to solve that.

After all, when it comes to online video, the sky truly is the limit.

The post A Shortish History of Online Video appeared first on Vidyard.

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4 Video Marketing Strategies to Help You Get Better Results Right Now

Whether you’re just dipping your toes into video marketing, or maybe you have hundred and hundreds of amazing videos on your YouTube page, or even better, in a video marketing platform. Either way, your priority isn’t video views, it’s about bringing in results to impress your leaders, generate leads, build pipeline and help close deals. Yes, you really can do all of that with video! If you’re feeling a little panicked or not in-the-know, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Did you know that a lot of companies aren’t using video at their full potential? Each day businesses are missing out new leads, and new customers using video. The thing is, businesses all over the world believe in the power of video, but don’t quite understand how to translate video content into tangible results their executives will appreciate. The good news is: you don’t have to be one of them! Here are four strategies to help you drive real business results with your video marketing.

1. Map video content to your buyer journey and buyer personas

If you want to build video content that serves a purpose, it’s important to define what stages of your buyer journey are lacking in content. For instance, if you’re noticing a lot of prospects show a lot of interest and then become disengaged right before they would buy, an informative video at the bottom of the funnel, like a demo or tutorial on how to use your product, could be the solution. Mapping your content to the buyer journey is key to making sure you’re providing all the information your prospects (at any stage!) would want from you.

Same idea goes for your buyer personas. If you’re just starting out with video, it’s strongly recommended you allocate your production budget to the personas most likely to drive revenue and pipeline. Build videos for the decision-makers first (but don’t forget to build out videos for the rest of your audience, too, since they will help you generate leads as well)!

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Learn more about how to use video to get amazing business results at Viewtopia 2016

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2. Align Marketing and Sales for efficiency and stronger results

If you plan on making marketing videos, it’s important to keep the end goal in mind and collaborate with the people in your organization who are front and center with prospects. Typically your sales team knows more about your customers than anyone else in the company, and they’ll have some amazing ideas on how you can communicate value in your videos. If the video is later in the buyer journey, consider making a video that can be used by marketing and sales teams, for example a customer testimonial video that can live on your website, and also be sent by a sales rep to a qualified lead. Sharing is caring, and you’ll notice that videos serving multiple departments will perform much better than those that serve a singular goal. You will be able to generate leads from them and also be able to prove the impact of your video content on closed deals. Results like that are really impressive!

 3. Optimize your video content and social channels

Did you know that only 19% of businesses are properly optimizing their videos by A/B split testing their video splash screen (the thumbnail image) to select the most click-worthy image, “gating” their videos by asking for viewers’ emails, and adding strategic calls-to-action to drive conversion along a content journey. Optimizing your content is fundamental to making sure your video marketing strategies are a success. Your videos should never fade to black and leave your audience questioning “Now what?” These optimization techniques can help you achieve higher click-through rates, generate more leads, and nurture leads more effectively.

Don’t forget to optimize your social channels, too. Having your videos on a social channel such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube are an amazing opportunity to build awareness, but are these videos funneling back into your website content? All social media platforms have the ability to build clickable calls-to-action. It’s important to use these at their full potential and direct your prospects to the most relevant content at the time when they want it the most. Don’t forget about SEO either! Make sure you search your keywords, and insert them into your descriptions so you increase the likelihood of video discovery.

 4. Integrate video into your marketing technology

As we know as modern marketers, it’s important to know exactly how our campaigns are performing. The best way to build a return on investment for your video or content performance is by integrating your video marketing platform with your marketing automation platform (MAP), and customer relationship management software.

Once you do that, you’ll be able to discover exactly how your audience is responding to your videos, like what each person is watching, re-watching, or skipping. This behavior indicates their interest in you, and when it’s integrated with your MAP, you can lead-score these viewers to discover who isn’t interested, who needs to be nurtured (and with what content), and who you should follow up with immediately. The entire process, from an initial view, to a qualified lead, to a closed sale, can be tracked and monitored by connecting platforms such as Vidyard, Marketo, and Salesforce.

Want to learn more about these four strategies and get even more actionable insights? Come to Viewtopia, the Video Marketing Summit, to get benchmark research, and tangible advice on how to achieve amazing things with video!

The post 4 Video Marketing Strategies to Help You Get Better Results Right Now appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/4-video-marketing-strategies-to-help-you-get-better-results-right-now/

Video Marketing How-To: Creating Transparent Overlays for Videos

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Video Marketing How-To! Today I want to quickly show you how to create transparent overlays for your videos, like name keys, company logos, or any other static imagery you want to include in your video.

First, I take a screenshot of the scene I’m going to use the overlay on. This helps me understand where the overlay will fit into the larger scene.

Then I import that into my image editing tool. I use a cheap but powerful program called Pixelmator, but you can use Photoshop, GIMP, or any other image editing tool that allows you to create PNG images with transparent backgrounds.

I create my image as a layer, line it up where I want it to sit, and get rid of all the other layers so I have just the image and a transparent background. I export this as a transparent PNG.

From here, I add it as a media item to iMovie, and add it to the scene I want. iMovie will automatically apply the Ken Burns effect, so you’ll just need to remove this, and select Crop to Fill instead. If you’ve got the aspect ratio set up properly, then final touches will just be a matter of setting how long you want the image to run for, and clicking play.

And that’s it! There are many ways to create transparent overlays for your videos, but that’s just how I do it. It’s fast, and it makes use of the software products I already have. I hope you found this tip useful, and learn how we make fun transitions for your videos like the ones we use in our Meet the Team series!

The post Video Marketing How-To: Creating Transparent Overlays for Videos appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/video-marketing-creating-transparent-overlays-videos/

The Greatest Prospecting Campaign I’ve Ever Run

Mullets, rock ‘n roll, and bank robberies. No … this isn’t a Quentin Tarantino movie (though that sounds kind of awesome), this is the story behind the greatest prospecting campaign I’ve ever run.

For those that don’t know me, I’m Ryan O’Hara. I helped start the business development team at Dyn, one of the worldwide leaders in Internet Performance … yeah the guys that have raised over $90 Million in funding, and one of the fastest growing startups in New Hampshire.

Today I work for a software company called LeadIQ that helps make it really easy for sales teams to find lead data off the web, and get it into Salesforce.

But enough of the preamble. Let’s get to the meat of why you’re here: to read about why my prospecting campaign at Dyn was the best I’ve ever run.

When Cold Emails Just Don’t Work…

It was December of 2011, and I was working as a Business Development guy. You know the drill. I was sending cold emails, cold calling, trying to bring in opportunities for the sales team.

But bringing in new business is super tough, especially in December, during the dreaded Out Of Office Storm of 2011.  If you work in prospecting or sales, you know!

With that being said, management at Dyn knew I wanted to do some sort of pipedream, bats***, outside the box prospecting campaign, and they gave me the thumbs up to spend my time in December experimenting. And so it began.

Experiment with New Attention-Grabbing Methods

I went to every sales rep at the time. Back then, I think there were seven, and I asked them, “If you could have one account, who would it be?”

(Keep in mind this was before the account-based selling was the rage with the kids!)

The reps came back with one account each. The accounts were:

1. CareerBuilder.com
2. Hulu
3. Posterous
4. Funny or Die
5. Living Social
6. Expedia

*Note: One sales rep on the team never got back to me. Too bad for them.

This campaign was designed to solve one simple problem:

How do we get a small tech company in New Hampshire to start a relationship with all these companies?

Use Personalized Video Content

We used personalized content for each of the target accounts. This is an example of the incredible content we made for prospects:

If you want to learn about more of the process we used to get five of six of the companies to respond, join me on the upcoming webinar on October 20th at 8am PT/11am ET with Vidyard: How to Use Video to Wrap up 83% of Your Deals Before Year End.

We’re going to talk about the content creation, the plan, how we came up with it, how we assembled the team, how we promoted it, and how you can easily do this same thing to bring in more opportunities for your pipeline.

You don’t have to be Wes Anderson or Martin Scorcese to make videos to win customers over. You just need your brain, a little bit of time, and a little creativity.

The post The Greatest Prospecting Campaign I’ve Ever Run appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/greatest-prospecting-campaign-ever/

Why You Should Be Using Video to Strengthen Employee Engagement and Loyalty

Where do the most engaged, loyal employees come from?

Every company wants them. But where do engaged, passionate employees come from? Does HR hire them? Or does your company ‘make’ them? It has to be a combination of both, because as a company grows, it gets harder to find candidates who are super-hyped to make sure your company sells the most hornswaggles and snarfblatts than your competitors.

So if your company can ‘make’ engaged and loyal employees, how does it happen? If you offer catered lunches and foosball tables? Perks are nice, but employees need more than that to feel truly engaged. That’s why many people probably just count the minutes and shuffle papers around until they go home. In fact, one recent report even stated that 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. That’s about one in eight!

While it’s not the easiest thing to make employees feel engaged, it can be done if an organization is committed to its employees beyond a superficial level. And it should be done.

As long as they show up and do their work, why do you really need highly engaged employees?

Take it from Richard Branson, one of the most successful business people with a truly engaged workforce:

“What’s your business’s competitive advantage? I’m not talking about top secret, proprietary information – and neither am I thinking about award-winning products. No matter your industry, your employees are your company’s real competitive advantage. They’re the ones making the magic happen – so long as their needs are being met.”

It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But it’s a challenge to create an engaging environment and build brand loyalty with your employees, so why bother? Well, if you’re in a communications role, engagement, and even helping employees become advocates, is probably an important part of your work. You know already know that just putting business communications out there and hoping people pay attention just isn’t enough anymore.

What kinds of rewards can companies reap from engaged employees?

You need to make sure your employees feel connected to you because of the incredible gains that come along with elevated engagement: It’s a fact that highly engaged employees are willing (and do) work much harder (one study saw a 12% in productivity from happy employees), they even go above and beyond their duties (with 25% higher job performance ratings in one study), call in sick less, stay at your company much longer, and advocate for you to their networks. Your organization, in turn, sees better job candidates and higher profits (one research report found companies with highly engaged employees outperform their peers by 147%!). Engaged employees really can drive success in all areas of your business, including talent acquisition, sales, and customer and public relations.

Convinced yet? If you weren’t already, think about it this way: one resource noted that unhappy employees cost US companies roughly $450 to $550 billion annually. Gulp. So if you’re in an employee communications or related role, you can prove your value and the return on investment in your team by strengthening your employees’ relationship with your organization.

So how do you go about turning an ordinary workforce into a loyal employees?

Sir Branson’s awesome advice continues:

“Luckily, understanding [employees’] needs is pretty straightforward: they want to feel that they belong and are important, that your organisation cares about them, and ultimately, that they have a grip on their lives.”

If you chat with any coworkers in marketing, this might sound quite similar to what your customers want from you. Consumers buy from those they like, and those who are the most relatable and human. It isn’t just about specific product features, but about something much deeper. They want to feel like you care about them, and they want to feel in control of their own decisions, like choosing you versus being forced to buy from you.

That’s a good reason why 87% of online marketers use video: it’s a powerful medium. It’s incredibly engaging and relatable. It helps your audience feel like you’re there with them because it’s the next best thing to being there in person. So if you want a highly engaged workforce, treat your employees the way you would treat your honored customers: meet and exceed their needs by giving them an incredible experience. Video is an exceptional way to do that.

If you aren’t using video in your internal communications strategy, here are 5 reasons why you need to start right now:

Reason #1: It’s the medium your workforce wants.

You know as well as anyone how busy your employees are. It seems like work life is getting more and more hectic, and people are relying so much on multi-tasking to get things done. One survey found that 92% of people multitask during meetings, and 41% do it often or all the time. If employees are barely paying attention in meetings, they probably feel like they don’t have time or desire to stop and pay attention to things outside their own job function, and that often includes reading company communications. Which is not a great thing – they can be missing some imperative, informative, or even simply fun content that will help them feel more connected and engaged with the company.

Video, on the other hand, engages audiences like no other medium. It offers a visual and audial experience, and demands attention, keeping viewers’ interest. If you offer video, you are providing access to content at any time and on any device, which millennials, for example, have proven they require – this demographic touches their smartphones 43 times per day, and 30% admit to touching more than four devices over the course of 24 hours. They want interactive content, and video provides that through calls-to-action and interactive elements like surveys baked right inside the video. Video is the medium that offers a unique, fast, distraction-free experience, and it always proves its worth: did you know that audiences spend 88% more time on sites with video? Imagine what video could do on your intranet!

Reason #2: Video is relatable, honest, and memorable.

When you create email communications, post to your Intranet, include information in collaboration channels, or other channels, you’re probably using some text format. And in doing so, you’re leaving out a fundamental aspect of human interaction and communication: body language and tone. Words can carry meaning, but tone can shift that meaning, and body language can determine whether your audience believes in you or questions your motivations.

That’s why video is relatable. When you see and hear people on camera, you make instant, even subconscious decisions and reactions, which can work perfectly in a communicator’s favour because the ambiguity that might occur through text is no longer present. If someone is sharing an exciting message or offering hope during a difficult situation, video offers an honesty and transparency that isn’t nearly as powerful in other mediums because though video, that person on screen is talking to you in ways that they can’t through text. This honesty helps build trust with your employees, strengthening their emotional connection and loyalty to the company.

Reason #3: Employees can hear messages straight from the horse’s (or CEO’s) mouth.

Imagine this: learning about who your company is, and why it does what it does, through a website or email or sent down the ranks until it finally reaches you. Not very motivating or inspiring, right? Even worse, when you don’t hear messages directly from the ‘horse’s mouth’, information may be misconstrued or missing. But that can be the very real situation for companies that don’t use video in their communications. Would you believe it if I told you that just 41% of employees in the United States know what their company stands for and what makes the brand different from competitors? It’s true.

When employees can get information straight from the source in an honest and relatable way, it’s easier for them to understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. One poll found that over 70% of employees felt more engaged in companies where company goals, objectives, and individual and company performance were clearly communicated.  Which supports what Richard Branson said: employees need to feel valued. They get that fulfillment by understanding that their work is contributing in a real way to the company’s own mission. That fulfillment at work leads to employees feeling proud about what they spend their days and years doing. This pride, in turn, leads to a stronger bond with the organization, a deep sense of engagement, and a willingness to advocate for the brand.

Communicators know that it’s a typical request from employees to have more direct and frequent contact with their leadership. They want transparency over secretive handling of the business. Video is perfect for providing it because the mutual honesty and connection between a leader and employee can’t be as effective through another medium – blog posts can be ghost written, and emails sent from an executive assistant. Video proves to your employees that leadership genuinely cares about them (which is exactly what they need to feel engaged!) because that leader took the time from their schedule to get on camera and speak directly and openly, on what feels like a on a one-on-one basis, to employees.

Reason 4: Video makes it easier for employees to advocate for your brand.

When employees feel valued and connected to their business, they want to talk about it to their family, friends, and team members. But sharing a web page or blog post or press release isn’t nearly as exciting as sharing video content. That’s why videos are shared 1,200% more times than links and text combined. So why not help you employees express their love of video and desire to share this engaging medium? When employees share video content, they can strengthen the relationship between your company and its current employees, as well as its future employees and customers, more quickly and easily than a brand itself can do – in fact, brand messages that are shared by employees are re-shared 24 times more frequently than those that are distributed by the brand. These re-shares aren’t meaningless; they can drive real results because, these days, an employee advocate is now trusted twice as much as a CEO.

Don’t worry – if you’re thinking that a lot of your content is confidential, you can lock down video content and limit it to certain audiences, like just your employees. That way, employees can access the best company-created content, but only content that is safe for external eyes and ears.

Reason 5: You can easily and accurately gauge employee response to your communications content so you can give them more of what they want.

If you’re using a powerful video platform, you can get analytics on your communications videos that tell you exactly how your employees are responding to your content. Find out information on your video content like how long people watched, where they dropped off, or if they rewatched or skipped any parts. You can even learn about what videos specific viewers are watching, and how engaged they are with the content.

How does this data drive employee engagement? Well, how do you measure the effectiveness of your communications now? You can’t tell if employees are reading your whole email communications or Intranet pages – only that they opened or landed on the content. And employee surveys are useful, but can be too infrequent to get real-time feedback. But with video data, you have the power to learn what content you should keep creating, what messages need refinement, and what isn’t working. When your content so effectively mirrors the interests of your employees, they will feel like you truly understand and value them.

How have you used video – or how are you considering using it – to engage your employees?

The post Why You Should Be Using Video to Strengthen Employee Engagement and Loyalty appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/why-you-should-be-using-video-to-strengthen-employee-engagement-and-loyalty/

Taking a Journalistic Approach to Content Marketing: Wise Words from Kristy Sharrow

Who do you think is the hardest group of people to sell to? And we’re not talking trying to sell laptops to Luddites. Picture the last person any sales person wants to get on the phone with. If you guessed other salespeople, you’d probably be right.

Marketing to sales people isn’t any easier — let alone marketing to their bosses. But that’s the kind of challenge that makes Kristy Sharrow tick. And it’s what has made LevelEleven so successful, in the midst of thousands of sales technologies hitting the market in the last 5 years.

LevelEleven is a simple-to-use sales activity management system for Salesforce that helps sales leaders see personalized scorecards for their sales people, and motivate their sales team with challenges to build a culture of performance. As the Director of Marketing, Sharrow is in charge of building pipeline and driving sales, and she proves that you don’t have to be a salesperson to have a big impact.

“I started at LevelEleven around three and a half years ago,” said Sharrow in our interview, “I was a reporter before I joined the team and I was looking for new assignments to take on. I saw an ad from LevelEleven looking for a freelance writer, so I figured I would talk to the CEO.” The offer turned out to be exactly what she was looking for, and Sharrow eventually moved from freelance to part-time, and from part-time to full-time Director of Marketing.

To help us understand what it takes to sell to salespeople (and market to their leadership) we sat down with Sharrow over Google Hangouts to hear how she succeeds in making LevelEleven stand out. Here’s what she had to say:

What are the challenges of marketing to sales leadership?

The greatest challenge now is that there are so many other sales technologies out there. There’s a stat from VentureBeat — and I hope I’m quoting this correctly — that 50% of the sales technologies that exist were launched in the last 5 years. So there’s a lot of noise out there for sales leaders, and it can be difficult to stand out. For us, we have a very clear ROI, and an instant ROI that comes with using LevelEleven and we focus on communicating that. That helps us stand out, prove that we’re a must-have, and separate ourselves from the noise.

How do you plan your episodic content?

We were thinking about how we could help our sales leadership team separate some of the things they were looking at, because obviously they have a seemingly infinite number of sales technologies to choose from. So we had this idea that we would get profiles of sales stack technology vendors — either solutions or services — anything that would help the modern sales stack. We asked the same questions of every one of the companies we chose to feature, edited them down so that we made sure you could read each one in under two minutes, and then launched them right away so once per week.

Does LevelEleven sponsor all the events featured on your blog?

The short answer is, you’d read more posts than we sponsor! In general, our content strategy is to serve up content to our audience, customers and prospects in the VP of Sales persona, and sometimes the most relevant content is an event that happened recently. So we’ll take a journalistic approach, and cover events that we’re attending or if we’re not sponsoring them but it’s a critical event for the industry, then we’ll interview people who were there or people who planned the event. We feel it’s important to help our readers to stay in the loop with industry trends, news and things like that. But we do sponsor quite a few events. A handful of Salesforce events, including Dreamforce, one or two industry conferences, and our own events.

What do you look for in the events you sponsor?

First and foremost, if we’ve been to this event in the past, it would be any ROI we’ve seen. We’re very metric-oriented here, so that’s number one. Beyond that, we’re looking at audience, and that can be pretty challenging for us. We’re looking for sales leadership, but our product is embedded in Salesforce so we’re selling only to Salesforce users. Often times, unless it’s a Salesforce event, a lot of conference teams don’t have CRM data, so that can be a little challenging. But, we’re trying to get estimated data on that, the roles of the people there, and the size of the companies. Other than that, we’ll look at agenda and layout; you can have an awesome conference with a crowd that’s perfect for us, but if there’s no reason for anyone to go into the sponsorship area then it might not make sense.

What is your favorite campaign that you have run?

This is really difficult! Since we’ve been talking about video, the first one that comes to mind is our conference follow-up videos. The very first time we did this was the Salesforce world tour, and my first event with the company just over three years ago. I remember sitting there in the keynote looking around at everyone and thinking “how in the heck are we going to follow up with these people in a way that they actually pay attention to?” So I started to try and brainstorm as the keynote was about to start, and I got this idea that I got really excited about, which was to create a follow up video that we would email to them. The video was kind of cheesy, and really fun to make.

It was our team members that were at the show, acting like they were speaking to one person. So if we talked to you there, we were saying “thank you for stopping by, we miss you a lot already!” and then each person spoke about how much they missed you. It was just this goofy little thing, and the quality was crappy as we were just testing it out. But we sent it out, and the first indicator of success was that people were actually taking the time to write us from the email to say thank you, or tell us it was a cute video. Ultimately, we still do this today, and open rates are around 55%, which for a situation where you’re facing off against so many other emails at the same time, is pretty strong for us. And click rates are always above average compared to our other emails, which again, when you’re going against those other emails for first-touch prospects, it’s exciting to see those kind of metrics!

Any resources you can share with our audience that make you a better marketer?

The two biggest ones for me externally are HubSpot, and their Academy webinars in particular. The Inbound Certification especially. As soon as someone comes into this team, they’re taking the Inbound Certification test on the Marketing side. That is extremely valuable and has helped us build up a lot of our strategy at LevelEleven. I also love the KissMetrics blog for more of the scientific side of marketing. Those are the two main ones.

The other thing I think about constantly and I have to remind myself to spend more time with is our internal sales team. They are the absolute best resource. Sitting in on their meetings, meeting with customer success, even getting on the phone with customers, are critical, critical resources and it’s easy to forget about them when you’re in the day-to-day, marketing project mode.

The post Taking a Journalistic Approach to Content Marketing: Wise Words from Kristy Sharrow appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/taking-journalistic-approach-content-marketing-wise-words-kristy-sharrow/