Watch This Video: Are You Too Busy to Learn If You Have Prediabetes?

Is it just me, or are we in the Age of Convenience? Everything is at our fingertips: information, food, entertainment. I mean, Netflix. Do I need to say more? We don’t even need to put in the effort to search for shows we want, or even change channels anymore. Which is great, since our hands are too full with whatever deliciousness we’re binge-eating on the couch at the moment.

So commercials have to work HARD to break through my self-induced haze. Mostly, they fail. This one, though…Well, just watch it for yourself.

The video was created by the Ad Council, a non-profit organization that creates and runs campaigns for other non-profit and US government agencies. The Ad Council works with advertising and creative agencies, who craft the ads pro bono. Their goal is to inspire dialogue, engagement, and action around significant (and non-partisan) public issues, creating a “measurable difference in society”.

Why is this video awesome?

Of course video marketing does have a subjective quality to it – what speaks to me won’t necessarily speak to someone else of a different demographic, or someone who has a different sense of humor, or who isn’t interested in similar topics. But there are a few interesting aspects of this video that I think help it achieve its goals:

It doesn’t sell anything.

Say what? Why is this good for video marketing? Don’t companies want to push their products on people? Well, one of the things I love about this campaign is it doesn’t push anything that viewers need to buy. If you’re like me, you don’t love commercials interrupting your shows, shouting at you to buy this and buy that, and shoving products you don’t necessarily need down your throat. But I do love ads that pique my curiosity, teach me something, and make me want to learn more (but leaving it up to me to decide if I do want to learn more).

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This tactic makes me think viewers are similar to puppies or teenagers – if you demand they do something, they won’t, even if they were sort of interested. But if you engage them and let them decide for themselves, they’ll follow through and take action. Another great example of this tactic is the “Who Am I?” campaign for Ontario tourism. If you haven’t seen it, check it out:

Ontario itself wasn’t mentioned in the ads – it was up to the viewer to want to play along and learn more, which I think was a great and innovative way to engage and entice viewers, rather than demanding, “Hey, take a trip in Ontario, wouldya?”  

You might think this strategy wouldn’t work for your company or product because maybe you want something more direct. But just think of the possibilities – this approach could be just the first part in a series that entices people and then informs and sells them.

It’s unusually funny.

Video marketers know that if you want great engagement on your videos, you probably want your video to be either A) emotional, or B) funny. A lot of commercials directed at your health take a morose angle – think of all the commercials you see for prescription drugs. I’m likely to instantly tune out, even if I had the affliction, because the ads are too depressing (the emotional tactic gone wrong!) or too cheesy, filled with people struggling to get out of bed or watching their loved ones through a window.

Humorous videos about your health, now those get attention. Who doesn’t remember one of the first Viagra commercials with the guy who hopped and skipped and cartwheeled his way to work after a good night?

Much more engaging than a commercial showing a sad and rejected husband and wife, right? This prediabetes commercial could have been a real disengaging downer, but the actor is amusing and the script is well-written and even light-hearted for a serious topic, helping to get – and keep – the audience’s attention.

It engages a broader demographic.

When you think of prediabetes, what demographic do you think of? Older people who struggle to maintain a healthy weight? The thing about a lot of commercials directed at your health is, unless you already know you’re suffering from the problem, you may not be listening or think it applies to you.

This is why this video works so well. It doesn’t show the ‘sufferer’ so that we can envision anyone, including ourselves, in that role. It poses a question (“Do I have prediabetes?”), making us curious about the answer, rather than “You have prediabetes, here’s what you can do about it”. It engages people who may not have initially thought the message was meant for them.

Right off the bat, the ad talks right to us. It relates to us, makes us feel understood (we’re all busy, and we’re all likely sitting on a couch watching the ad) and pulls us into the conversation, so we’re more willing to see ourselves as part of the intended demographic, and engage in the message. This is a perfect example of relating to your viewers and leading them along a story instead of trying to yell for their attention.

It does the work for you.

A lot of commercials fall more into the top of the marketing funnel – you aren’t necessarily getting into the nitty gritty of your product or service, but just trying to create awareness, excitement, and interest, and trying to connect with people amongst a very broad demographic of viewers. Knowing that viewers are busy, bored, and just waiting for their show to come back, it’s just too hard to relate to them, snag their interest, and then actually educate them in a short period of time, right?  

This video proves otherwise. The great thing about it is that it calls out viewers’ own pain points – they’re busy, just watching a show, they may not feel your message will be relevant to them, and they just don’t care about ads. So this video does the work for us, educating us in the simplest and quickest of ways – it poses a few yes-or-no and easy-to-answer questions so that after a mere minute, we’re much more educated about our own likelihood that we’re at risk for prediabetes. We don’t have to lift a finger, get a pen and paper, visit a website, remember stats, or really do anything but follow along. That’s how to engage even the most disengaged and uninterested! Talk about impressive.

It doesn’t shame you…

Like I’ve been saying throughout this post, this video is great at speaking our language, saying what we’re thinking, and relating to us. We’re busy! We’re tired! We want our show back! We don’t want to do work and find out about our health!

This is a similar approach to what a lot of fitness clubs do – people don’t want to feel alone in their struggles. The other day I heard a radio ad from a gym talking about how their club is a welcoming place for people of all fitness levels to come in, work out, get the help they need, and not feel judged – because not many people would rush to the gym or feel comfortable if they’re surrounded by winners of fitness competitions.

This prediabetes ad works the same way – if we’re inundated with facts and checklists and made to feel ashamed about how we treat our bodies, we may be more likely to bury our heads in the sand rather than face the music and change our behavior. Did you know that about 25% of people even lie to their doctors about the status of their health? People don’t want to admit when they aren’t doing what they know they should do. This video acknowledges that general feeling, and helps us feel like we aren’t alone, it’s okay, and it’s going to help us along.

…Until it does shame you.

You’re not alone, and it’s okay to sit on the couch and binge-watch shows and not pay attention to your health. Buuuut only to a point. The video hooks you on its relatability, but it still needs to close you and make you take action. There’s where the final little bit of shame comes in to help close the deal: now that you’ve gotten the quick and easy education and you know where your health stands, you can’t bury your head in the sand anymore. The “doctor” has to be blunt and tell you like it is because you’re busy, but now it’s up to you to take the next step and visit the website. The ad has done most of the work for you already, so the least you can do is “just go to the site”!

So what do you think? Did this ad make you take the quick quiz? Did it make you want to learn more, or help ease your fears about your health?

What video marketing have you seen recently that you think worked really well? Have you checked your dongle yet or enjoyed the Ford barking lot?

The post Watch This Video: Are You Too Busy to Learn If You Have Prediabetes? appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/watch-video-risk-great-video-marketing/

Key Video Benchmarks from Demand Metric’s 2016 Report

It’s really difficult to plan a journey if you don’t know your destination. Getting in the car and driving until you find something cool is a great way to spend an afternoon in your late teens, but the same concept is difficult to apply to your video marketing. It’s easy to produce video — but without knowing what you want to get out of it, and most importantly, the metrics for success, you may find your efforts aren’t producing the results you want.

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The State of Video Marketing 2016

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But how do you find the right data to set goals? Video marketing stats are hard to come by, and are usually outdated. That’s why we’re excited to present the 3rd Annual State of Video Marketing Report, the latest Benchmark Report from Demand Metric, sponsored by Vidyard. From the rise of personalized video to key trends in the ROI of video marketing, this report has all the data you need to understand the state of video marketing, and see how other marketers are using video analytics, measuring ROI, and more!

Digging Into the Video Marketing Data

Demand Metric looked at every facet of the video marketing spectrum to help you understand not only how marketers are using video, but where they’re finding success. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find:

• Over 90% of marketers said video marketing was becoming more important
• Video is most commonly used on websites and social media, and explainer videos are the top used asset
• Over 60% of marketers are increasing their video marketing budgets
• For marketers personalizing their content marketing, over half are personalizing video
• Marketers that measure video success regularly end up budgeting more for video 

These high-level takeaways are great, but to see the full story you need to download the full benchmark report!

The post Key Video Benchmarks from Demand Metric’s 2016 Report appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/key-video-benchmarks-demand-metric-2016/

Study: Video Marketing Most Effective When Measured with Advanced Analytics

Organizations embracing video as part of account-based marketing and personalization strategies

Video expanding beyond marketing departments

KITCHENER, Ontario – November 29, 2016 – Video remains the hottest and most effective form of marketing content, but many marketers are missing out on returns because they aren’t adequately measuring video performance, according to a new survey from Demand Metric.

For the third consecutive year, Demand Metric partnered with Vidyard, the video platform for business, to produce “The State of Video Marketing Benchmark Study Report” with the goal of understanding how video performs as a content type. It also investigates new trends around video personalization and use of video with account-based marketing strategy, as well as examining video’s spread beyond marketing departments.

The return on investment of video marketing has remained consistent over the last three years that Demand Metric has asked about it. Nearly half of participants report ROI is improving but a quarter say they don’t know what the returns are. Determining the ROI of video is a direct result of tracking metrics on video performance. Respondents who use advanced analytics are twice as likely to say their ROI is better and more likely to increase their video budgets year over year. Just 14% use advanced analytics, and that percentage has been constant for each year of the study.

“The use of advanced metrics has become imperative for organizations that produce higher volumes of videos annually, as these metrics enable optimizing performance and understanding the true ROI of their investment,” the report said.

Viewing data is important for ROI because it also gives marketers insights about their audience and where they are in the buying journey. Integrating viewing data with marketing automation and CRM systems leads to deeper understanding of a viewer’s interest in making a purchase, but those integrations continue to lag. Just 13% of respondents reported they have integrated their data and are taking advantage of it.

Other key findings:

• More than 90% of the study’s participants said video marketing content is becoming more important, a consistent three-year trend.
• More than half of participants produce 11 or more videos per year. Large companies produce the most videos.
• The average number of participants saying that conversion performance for video has stayed the same or gotten better is 96%, which is consistent with previous years.
• The use of advanced analytics remains at 14 percent, unchanged from previous years.
• Using video to support account-based marketing is just emerging with fewer than 10% using it.
• Nearly half of respondents said they use internal staff and resources to produce videos, up from 38% a year ago.
• 50% said they plan to use a third-party video hosting or video marketing platform vs. YouTube or Vimeo, up from 38% last year.

“While many brands continue to chase the viral video hype, this report makes it clear that videos don’t need to go viral to be successful,” said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, which sponsored the survey. “In fact, it’s becoming clear that personalized, targeted videos used throughout the sales funnel are more engaging and more effective at turning viewers into customers.”

Video, Personalization and ABM

This year’s survey explored the relationship between video, personalization and ABM for the first time. Amplifying the effectiveness of video through personalization and ABM is a natural progression, Demand Metric found. More than half of the study’s participants indicated they use personalized video content, which is believed to have an impact on content effectiveness and ROI. In fact, 58% of those using personalized video reported improvement in ROI compared to 43% of those who don’t use personalized video.

Demand Metric found that video has a growing role in ABM, a strategy for targeting prospective customers at the account level rather than the individual lead level. Just 8% of respondents this year reported using video with their ABM strategy, but another 6% say they plan to add video to ABM. Similar to the tie between analytics and ROI, the survey also found that inclusion of video with ABM is facilitated by integration of video viewing data with marketing automation and CRM systems.

Video Going Beyond Marketing

The power of video as an influential medium has helped it move beyond the marketing department to nearly every other function in an organization. However, marketing remains the primary user at 86%, followed by internal communications (19%), sales teams (15%), executive teams (11%), support teams (11%), human resources (8%) and others (11%).

This year’s survey was administered online during the period of October 5 through October 28, 2016 and includes responses from 289 people, primarily in marketing and sales departments at B2B companies, but B2C companies were also included.

To view the full survey report, click here: https://www.vidyard.com/resources/state-of-video-marketing-2016/

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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.

About Demand Metric

Demand Metric is a marketing research and advisory firm serving a membership community of over 40,000 marketing professionals and consultants in 75 countries.  Offering consulting methodologies, advisory services, and 500+ premium marketing tools and templates, Demand Metric resources and expertise help the marketing community plan more efficiently and effectively, answer the difficult questions about their work with authority and conviction and complete marketing projects more quickly and with greater confidence, boosting the respect of the marketing team and making it easier to justify resources the team needs to succeed.  To learn more about Demand Metric, please visit: www.demandmetric.com.

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

The post Study: Video Marketing Most Effective When Measured with Advanced Analytics appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/press-releases/study-video-marketing-effective-measured-advanced-analytics/

Big Bang, Small Budget: How Scrappy Startup Videos Changed the Game for #FlipMyFunnel

Picture this: you have an incredibly important goal, something that will change the course of your business. A big part of your strategy rides on it, and it’s up to you to make it happen. Oh, and as an added bonus, you have very little budget to make it happen. Sound familiar? Chances are if you’re on a startup team – whether it’s a tech company or a restaurant – this will be familiar territory.

Sangram Vajre, CMO and Co-Founder of Atlanta account-based marketing startup Terminus, faced this problem when his team decided to turn marketing on its head, literally. They created #FlipMyFunnel, a community and event series based around ABM strategies, and had the daunting task of promoting it to the world. Lacking in the resources to make a big impact in a crowded space, Vajre and his team got scrappy – and started with everyone’s favorite medium: video.

I had the opportunity to hear all about Terminus’ video strategy during Vajre’s talk at Viewtopia 2016, The Video Marketing Summit, and here are the four big lessons I walked away with.

1. Startup Videos Don’t Have to be Perfect

The first video Vajre and his team put together was to promote the idea behind #FlipMyFunnel. Vajre admits the video was never intended for public consumption, and that he may or may not have been a bit drunk at the time. “Videos are really cool because it puts that human element out there,” Vajre said at the start of his talk. “We made this video to explain #FlipMyFunnel to our designer, and it wasn’t supposed to go out to people.”

But the video proved to be such a powerful and succinct message that they decided to send it out to customers and see what they thought. The response was unpredictable, and overwhelming. “We thought ‘Let’s just get an idea out there!’ and now we use this video to send out to prospects to help them figure out what account-based marketing and the concept of flipping your funnel really is. They watch, learn, laugh, and it puts a smile on their face. ”

Creating a new market isn’t easy, even for big brands. So Terminus’ success at creating such a great community around their funnel-flipping concept really stands out. “It’s a scrappy video, taken on an iPhone that started a movement for us that is now 3000+ people that come to the conferences in cities all over North America,” said Vajre. And it kicked-off a series of video-led campaigns that would end up putting Terminus on the map very quickly.

For me, the biggest take-away from the first portion of Vajre’s talk is simple – as a startup, you don’t always have a big budget to make things happen. But video lets you show off new concepts or ideas to your prospects, and drive emotion in a way that you simply can’t do with text. Sometimes low-budget marketing falls flat, but if you use your assets wisely, and put your passion into words, sometimes you’ll find yourself with a runaway hit like Terminus.

2. Personalization Isn’t Just for Prospects

We’re big believers in personalized video at Vidyard, and we have many customers (including Terminus) that use our Personalized Video platform to add really immersive and engaging details to their prospect campaigns. But Terminus was confronted with a different problem when planning their first #FlipMyFunnel conference – how does a relatively unknown company assemble a high-profile team of speakers to talk account-based marketing at an event they have never heard of in Atlanta?

Vajre looked again to video, but this time, he made it personal:

His team didn’t use any fancy personalization tools – they simply created a video for each person on their A-list and fired away. And because of this technique, they didn’t have to dip into their B-list even once. “There are people that you normally wouldn’t be able to ever reach – and not only do they open this kind of video, but they share it with their entire organization, and tell their team that this is how they should be talking to their customers. And they spoke at our conference.”

Vajre and his team realized that they needed to go way outside the box if they were going to land big-name speakers for #FlipMyFunnel. So rather than pushing resources towards polished marketing assets or trying to secure third-party introductions, Vajre turned back to the same video technique that made #FlipMyFunnel successful in the first place. Scrappy video – albeit with a tripod this time – and hard work. Putting together a video for every speaker they wanted to target wasn’t an instant, easy to do process, but the results speak for themselves.

How can your team apply this kind of thinking to your KPIs? Every person on your sales team probably has a camera on their smartphone sitting in their pocket or purse. Most laptops have cameras now as well. Get them using it, and sending out personal messages to key prospects. You may not get everyone to watch, but you’ll have way more luck than trying to cold email everyone.

3. Don’t Tell Your Own Story

While Vajre shared a ton of great video tips during his talk, this one stood to me the most. It’s easy for marketers to fall into the trap of always creating content that is self-promotional, but when they do this, they miss out on the best promotion tool they have: customers.

“No matter how many product demos, white papers, or all the other marketing stuff that we could create, nobody tells our story better than our customers,” said Vajre. “Nowhere on our website do we have product videos. We only have customer videos. When they tell it, they’re going to tell it as practitioners, and the people who faced the problem that we solve. It’s not going to be about Terminus. And that’s really what our goal is.”

Vajre shared a video he produced with Joe Chernov, which was so successful at telling the Terminus story that people started reaching out to Chernov directly for more information. “The video doesn’t talk about Terminus directly – there’s no technology or features. Only pain points we’re solving. And we actually tried creating a bit of product-focused content to test against this video. Chernov’s video generated the most engagement, the most conversation, and even got us a few tweets to Joe about it.”

For Terminus, customer content created conversations (and conversions) in a way that no product-focused video ever could. And to me this really speaks to the power of video – giving your prospects the opportunity to put themselves in your customers’ shoes is key, and when you can show your customers expressing how big of an impact your business has on theirs, you’re doing the hard work for them. The best part? Any department in your funnel – marketing or sales – can use these assets effectively. And it’s cross promo for your amazing customers too.

4. Scrappy Startup Videos Succeed

Terminus has grown from 3 people to 70 in just a few short years, and has customers like NetSuite, PGi and Tata. Vajre and his team have built a massive following for #FlipMyFunnel and the events continue to draw in huge crowds in every city they are held. Ask Vajre what the key to success has been, and he will sum it all up in one word: video.

“Videos have been, by far, the most interesting and important asset that we have used at all of these events to promote our conferences, get people to the event, and actually really tell the story of what #FlipmyFunnel is and what Terminus is.” Vajre said this near the start of his talk, and every example he shared built upon the power of video to drive interest in events, explain complex topics, and showcase how Terminus helps their customers succeed.

But the biggest takeaway from this talk wasn’t that video is powerful. Viewtopia wouldn’t exist if people weren’t seeing benefits from their video campaigns. Video works – but sometimes scrappy, fast videos are just as effective as polished content. And between the first, slightly-tipsy explanation of #FlipMyFunnel to the polished, customer-focused videos Terminus features everywhere on their site, Vajre and his team have been reaping the benefits of video from day one. That effort paid off at this year’s Video Marketing Awards, where the Terminus team walked away with a VMA for Small Business, Big Bang.

So, you have a smartphone in your hand and a product to sell. What’s next for your business?

The post Big Bang, Small Budget: How Scrappy Startup Videos Changed the Game for #FlipMyFunnel appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/scrappy-startup-videos-changed-game-flipmyfunnel/

Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Kim Koserski

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 Kim Koserski, Demand Generation Manager here at Vidyard. Learn why the UK was her favorite country to visit, and how she speaks 4 languages in this great video:

What Didn’t Make the Cut

Kim had way more to say than sharing her love of Tom Yum Soup, so here are a few more of her fabulous answers:

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

So it’s pretty embarrassing, but my favorite video right now is the Bork series. It’s this little silly dog that barks along to classic soundtracks like Indiana Bork, and Borkbusters, and Jurassic Bork. The best one is Careless Bork which I highly recommend you check out if you have not seen yet.

It’s a pretty dumb video, but it’s my favorite for a least this week!

What’s your favourite place to eat in Kitchener, and what should we order there?

It’s hard to pick just one place as there’s so many good places popping up in Kitchener, but I would probably say Public Kitchen. I’m a really big fan of the tapas style of eating because you can eat more different varieties of food without eating too much food overall. My favorite dish is the oyster buck-a-shuck night!

The post Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Kim Koserski appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/meet-vidyard-team-video-style-kim-koserski/

Why the Video Platform Reigns as the Best of Internal Communications Tools

If you’re on an internal communications team, you’ve probably felt at some point that you’re in a bit of a thankless job. You don’t have a direct line to bringing in sales and increasing profits or building product lines. Yours is the job that’s tougher to measure – you’re focused on communicating with and engaging employees, and helping them feel connected to the business, leading to an increase in morale and productivity. But employees are too busy for you and your messages! They have work to do and don’t want distractions or uninteresting information.

Your role is vital to your business, yet your efforts may not be getting the recognition they need and deserve. But why? You’re using email, communicating on your company intranet or social platform…you’re trying to strengthen your strategy with all the best internal communications tools.

But are you using video? 54% of internal communications professionals say their employees expect video. Not only do they want it, but employees have come to expect it! So if you want to give employees what they want and need, video is key. But how do you do it? You can’t put internal (and confidential) information on YouTube, and you probably don’t have a background in IT or development to figure out how to embed video files on your site.

That’s why the smartest internal communicators look to a video platform to enhance their communications tools and strategies. Why? Let me count the reasons for you, so when you’re considering the best internal communications tools to strengthen your own results, you’ll know exactly what to look for:

1. Securely share your internal and confidential information

One of the biggest concerns for an internal communications team? That any of the materials disseminated to employees may find their way outside of the company, which can lead to product patent issues, security leaks, or any other breaches. With a video platform, you can lock down your videos so they are accessible only through certain domains, or by predefined groups or email addresses. So no matter how you share your information, you can rest easy knowing that it’s well protected, and can only be viewed by the audience you intended. 

2. Embed and share your videos where your employees are

YouTube isn’t always a great solution for internal communication teams due to security, and also because some locations around the world block the site. If you’re a large company with offices around the world, you need something better. No matter what size company you are, you need a solution that reaches your employees on any device, using multiple communications vehicles. If a video platform is one of your internal communications tools, you can easily embed your video content on your Intranet, or even in your email (by including a clickable video thumbnail that opens up on a branded ‘sharing page’). You can even include all your content on a Video Hub, which acts like your own internal YouTube channel, where employees can search organized content. No matter where they are, or if they’re using a mobile device or computer, you’ll be able to get your employees video content that will help them feel connected to you.

3. Edit your content easily, without the mess of tearing down and resharing

One of the constants about internal communications is that it’s always changing. Often messages need to be edited to heighten urgency, revise dates or action items, emphasize key points or remove outdated ones, or even fix accidental errors. But if you’ve shared content through a variety of vehicles it can take a lot of time and effort to pull down all the content and reshare it – you may even lose track of where it’s been shared. When you’re using a video platform as part of your internal communications tools, you can edit a video in your library, and wherever that video has been shared by you, it will automatically update with the new version. You’ll have the confidence of knowing that your employees will always have the latest and greatest information.

4. Get the analytics you need to strengthen your content

However you’re disseminating your messages, how do you know how they’re being received? Are your employees deleting your emails or only skimming them? How often are they accessing your Intranet? If you’re using a video platform to manage your video content, you’ll get detailed analytics on what your viewers are watching, skipping, and rewatching. You’ll know for certain, in greater depth than with other communications mediums, how your content is resounding with employees. That kind of data can help you plan your future communications content and goals, so you can give your employees what’s most useful and relevant to them. You can access this unmatched insight into your audience’s digital body language any time, giving you a more honest and real-time look at employees’ true engagement levels.

5. Take advantage of the full power of video live streaming

Town hall meetings, executive messages, company events…with live streaming, you can share whatever you want in the moment, bringing your employees into a relevant and exciting experience. If you’re using a video platform, you can live stream your videos and offer the content to employees on any device and through multiple vehicles. Your video platform can even give you analytics on this live streamed content, like who watched, which parts they watched, and where they dropped off. You can even turn this live streamed content into immediately accessible on-demand video, so the content can live on and continue telling its story (how useful is that for out-of-office or sick employees, or those who work in different time zones!).

6. Control your story by providing a distraction-free journey of relevant content

If you’re sending out internal communications messages in a one-and-done format, you may keep your employees’ interest for one message, but how do you hold on to that engagement for the next and the next communication? How are you offering related content on the same or similar topics?

If you’re using a video platform, you can add annotations and calls-to-action into your videos (during playback or when the video ends), so right when your audience is interested in learning more or if you want them to take a required action, you have a way for them to do that. Like this:

You can add ‘playlists’ of videos into your video as well, so you can link related content and keep your audience moving along a journey without making them sit through one giant, long video. Then they can pick the video that’s most relevant to them, especially if you’ve created content based on team or skill/knowledge level etc. Like this:

If you’re using the right video platform, you can also create a Video Hub, which I briefly mentioned above as a place where your videos may be embedded and shared. A Video Hub is essentially your own YouTube channel but better, so they’re perfect for creating a journey of content: there are no distractions, no ads, no trying to dig through videos and find what you’re looking for. You can organize all your video content in one place, in whatever searchable categories you like, so your employees can easily and quickly get what they need. Your strong content can live on, continuing to drive action and improve engagement. Here are a couple snippets of one of our Hubs, showing videos broken down by category:

7. Create an experience for your employees that’s part of your brand

You know when you’re searching the Internet and you come across a video on a website and you know instantly that it’s a YouTube video that they’ve embedded on their site? That’s because of YouTube’s easily recognized and ubiquitous branding: their play button, red colors, and logo all give it away. But do you really want to be representing YouTube (or any other video player) to your employees? While it is actually possible to remove the YouTube logo from your videos, a video platform can take your branding even further – you have the ability to brand your own video player (the container that holds and plays your video file) with your brand colors and logo so you can strengthen your brand’s power with your employees. After all, credibility can be influenced by the small details; just like you wouldn’t want your communications going out with spelling and grammar mistakes, a branded player can tell your audience that you’ve worked hard to present them a polished, professional, and strongly relevant and engaging message.

8. Don’t worry about coding or bugging the IT department

The best may have been saved for last! Communications teams need to work fast – imperative messages can’t wait. You need tools that work as fast as you do, and make your job easier. The right video platform handles all the nitty gritty work so you don’t have to. No coding to embed or update videos, or share live streaming content, or add calls-to-action. No having to work with IT to get your video content and platform working seamlessly with your other tools and communications vehicles. With the right video platform, all you need to worry about is your message, and the platform handles the rest! Isn’t that a relief!

Still unsure if video is right for you? Here are a few more reasons why your employees really want video!

Are you using a video platform or looking to add it into your strategy? What excites you the most about it? Do you have any burning questions you’d love to get the answer to? Let us know!

The post Why the Video Platform Reigns as the Best of Internal Communications Tools appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/internal-communications/video-platform-reigns-best-internal-communications-tools/

More Content is Not Always Better – Wise Words from Chris Vandermarel

Content marketing may be all the rage, but now that everyone is doing it — how can brands stay relevant? Leveraging good content is just the beginning – but taking advantage of every opportunity to engage with prospects and keep them excited is what smart marketers are doing to keep ahead of the curve. And to understand how companies can make the most of their content, we sat down with Chris Vandermarel, Demand Generation Manager at Toronto-based LookBookHQ.

Vandermarel helps bring leads into the popular content engagement platform, and his place within the company is one part drive, one part serendipity. “I love technology, and from the early days I had a Mac at home, and really loved the intersection of art and science that happened in the digital platform,” Vandermarel said, “Coming out of school, I graduated with a business degree, concentration in Marketing, and I knew I really wanted to exist where marketing and technology coincide.”

Past roles at ESRI and the Activa Group gave Vandermarel a solid background in marketing automation and demand generation, but it was a chance meeting that brought him to LookBookHQ. “By coincidence I ran into an account executive at LookbookHQ who I went to school with at an airport. He quickly gave me a demo of LookbookHQ and after that I got connected with the Director of Marketing and found my home in demand generation at LookBookHQ.”

We sat down with Vandermarel to get his take on how content marketing has evolved, and how demand generation professionals can keep prospects coming back for more. Let’s dig in!

How has content marketing evolved since you started in demand generation?

Content marketing has changed a lot, and I’ve definitely seen a few big shifts. A lot of marketers have been asked to think like publishers, and I think a lot of marketers also misinterpreted that and started creating more and more content with a “more is better” mentality. But we really have to move beyond that and try to work to surface the right content at the right time — as well as keeping buyers engaged once they interact with that content.

How can B2B marketers stand out amidst the noise?

Digital B2B marketing has become a very noisy space. A lot of people are trying to say a lot of things, but I can talk a bit about how we get around this at LookBookHQ. We’re blessed with a really solid creative team here. They do great work, and we really try to look at things in two ways. We look at not only at what we’re saying, but how we’re saying it.

With respect to how we’re saying it, we really try to have a tone that is attractive, funny and ironic. It really gets to the point and doesn’t use fluffy words.

And in terms of what we’re saying, we want to serve up content that people will find valuable. We know whether it’s an eBook or a white paper, or case study, the people consuming the content are trying to answer the question “What’s in it for me?” I think that’s something that we all need to think about as marketers and make sure that we’re always answering that question, otherwise our campaigns are doomed to fail from the beginning.

How do you keep prospects engaged with your content?

Our tagline at LookBookHQ is “do more with the moment” and what we’re really trying to do is take those precious moments of attention that those prospects give you, and make sure that you’re maximizing them, and that you’re getting as much out of it as possible.

This is something that digital publishers do really well, including sites like Netflix and YouTube. I don’t know how many times you go on YouTube trying to find a certain video, but then you end up watching three, four or five additional videos because there’s just so much recommended content that comes up as you’re watching that primary piece.

That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with our platform and our own marketing – we’re trying to do as much as we can with that moment of attention because it’s very costly to bring people back with retargeting and email communications, with click-through rates as low as they are. So the more that you can get with that moment of attention the better!

How does LookBook market itself?

I would say our marketing is both efficient and effective, and what we usually try to do is start with a core message that we really want to own, and want to resonate with our audience.

It really all trickles down from there because we can pump that into all kinds of different campaigns that we’re running. We’re also very critical of the programs we take on, we make sure that we’re calculating the ROI on them, we make sure that they’re having a strong impact on the funnel, and most importantly we look at the attributed revenue when we’re done.

What resources do you read, listen to, or watch to become better at your job?

Of course, I love the Vidyard blog – I think you’re doing awesome stuff there. I like the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog too. I think that the Demand Gen Report and MarketingSherpa are doing a great job with the different research studies they’re putting out, and the case studies that they have.

I really try to make sure that I’m a part of the online communities for technologies that we use, from Marketo to Eloqua to Engagio, and I make sure that I stay apprised of what’s going on there. And with any live events, I’m making sure I come out to any case studies, and hands-on sessions so I can see the tactics that marketers are using.

The post More Content is Not Always Better – Wise Words from Chris Vandermarel appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/content-not-always-better-wise-words-chris-vandermarel/

Vidyard Does the Mannequin Challenge

Every once in awhile, a new video trend takes the internet by storm. From the Harlem Shake to the Ice Bucket Challenge, every year seems to bring us a new (kinda wacky), themed video challenge. This year, it’s the Mannequin Challenge.

In true Vidyard fashion, we never back down from a challenge. Especially when it has to do with video.

Introducing, Vidyard’s very own Mannequin Challenge:

You know, just a regular lunch hour at Vidyard.

And because we’re so competitive, we want to know who was the best mannequin! Time to vote. Share your favorite in the comments! Or even better, share your own Mannequin Challenge video.

The post Vidyard Does the Mannequin Challenge appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/vidyard-mannequin-challenge/

Thoughts from Viewtopia – Video has Evolved

Last week, hundreds of marketers, sales leaders, and video producers came together in San Francisco to challenge the status quo of video for business. Long regarded as simply a top-of-funnel asset, Viewtopia presented the evolution of video within an organization. From new ways to use video across the entire marketing funnel, to sales teams using personalized video to engage prospects, all the way to HR teams using video internally for training and executive briefings – video is no one-trick pony.

If you weren’t able to make the trip to San Francisco (or didn’t tune into our Live Stream) here are some of the biggest lessons we took away from Viewtopia:

Storytelling Isn’t Just a Buzzword

Everyone loves talking about storytelling – your brand should have a story, your marketing should tell a story, even your sales team needs to structure their conversations like a good book, but what does that mean in the context of video? Laura Ramos was our first keynote speaker at Viewtopia 2016, and in addition to sharing some of her extraordinary expertise and years of marketing insights, she hammered home one major point – anyone interacting with prospects shouldn’t just be conveying ideas. They should be telling stories.

 

Don’t just convey ideas, tell stories @lauraramos #Viewtopia16 pic.twitter.com/1HmSdpFqdH

— Elaine Ip (@_elaineip) November 9, 2016

But storytelling isn’t as simple as just crafting an exciting tale of mystery and intrigue and shoving your product in there. Ramos took this conversation deeper, and looked to Simon Sinek’s TED talk on the importance of “why” to back up her point. Storytelling isn’t just about being entertained – it’s about educating your prospects, and making sure they are not only captivated but walk away with meaningful information, and a tangible next step.

YouTube is Important — But so is Your Website

Steering away from the more high-level talks around video strategy, one of the more tangible themes to come out of several talks and keynotes was the importance of leveraging networks, but also bringing your video home. More than 20 billion videos are played across SnapChat, YouTube and Facebook every day, but what happens to these prospects once they’re done watching?

 

More than 20B videos are played on Snapchat, YouTube & Facebook each day. Let that soak in. #viewtopia16 pic.twitter.com/SOM3LD2MNW

— iMEDIA Conference (@iMEDIA_yeg) November 9, 2016

Next-level marketers are moving video content back onto their company website, and organizing it in a meaningful way to allow for discovery and conversions. Whether it’s creating company-hosted video hubs like Act-On, or simply ensuring that anything you put on YouTube is also available on your website, controlling your video isn’t just about seeing who’s watched what content and when. Hosting your own video channel means that when a prospect finishes watching one video, you control what comes next — no cat videos, and no competitor’s content. Unless you want cat videos, in which case, power to you.

Always Have a Call-To-Action

When YouTube first rolled out, brands that engaged were able to quickly have an impact. It was a new frontier, and Nike quickly rose to the top of the charts by simply having video content that got people excited. But marketers now need to prove the ROI of their video content, and the pressure is on to ensure videos actually drive conversions rather than simply build awareness

 

Content can be used beyond marketing and brand awareness. #viewtopia @vidyard pic.twitter.com/rYX5hS9jNj

— Nicole Banks ☕️ (@melovecoffee) November 9, 2016

Leveraging modern Online Video Platforms (OVPs) allows marketers to fully customize the video experience, including adding interactive elements like forms, and links to other videos or content pieces. No longer a passive asset, video must become an active marketing tool that not only drives engagement, but generates leads. And thanks to the evolution of video technology, marketers can collect contact information directly through videos, and sales professionals can include interactive experiences directly in videos to give prospects the power to self-identify.

The new world of video isn’t just a set-it-and-forget-it asset used solely to generate views. It’s an active, powerful tool that — when used properly — can pay for itself in pipeline alone.

Marketing Automation and Video are a Match Made in Heaven

Several of our speakers came from the marketing automation space, but their views on video were far from biased. Marketers are having a harder time than ever proving the ROI of their marketing campaigns, and video has long been viewed as a black box. But modern OVPs integrate with major marketing tools like Marketo, Eloqua, Act-On and HubSpot giving marketers unprecedented insights into how prospects are engaging with content, and changing the way demand generation teams react to video views.

 

Biggest Challenges with Video Marketinghttps://t.co/4We18G9uIa#VideoMarketing #Challenges #Viewtopia16 pic.twitter.com/4aeIH1VCYn

— Angelo Georgescu (@AngeloGeorgescu) November 10, 2016

Whether you’re automatically suggesting relevant content to prospects that engage with your latest product update video, or signalling your sales team when a prospect watches 100% of your demo video, marketing automation and video data are an unbeatable combo. And demand generation teams that see their video content as a silo will quickly be left behind.

Personalization is Not Just a Gimmick

Personalized video isn’t new anymore — we’ve been helping companies personalize their video content across holiday campaigns, event promotion, and even product launches. But that level of personalization isn’t just a top-of-funnel marketing tool anymore. Truly innovative brands are using personalized video on sales prospecting, and even for event recruitment.

 

Interesting to hear how @sangramvajre sent @meisenberg a personalized video asking her to share expertise @ #FlipMyFunnel – #Viewtopia16 pic.twitter.com/zQ8tqBzWPo

— miss arty pants (@miss_arty_pants) November 10, 2016

Terminus CMO Sangram Varje spoke at length about using personalized content to bring incredible speakers to their first user conference, #FlipMyFunnel. Personalized video allowed them to cut through the noise, and get noticed — which, for a company that was relatively small at the time, was no mean feat.

Easy to use products like ViewedIt are also making it possible for sales teams to quickly personalize video and send it out to prospects, bringing in a new wave of prospecting. Rather than boring cold-calls and BASHO emails, sales professionals are taking a few extra minutes to create content that speaks to their prospect’s pain points rather than yelling about features, and the results speak for themselves.

And Don’t Forget to Sample the Refreshments

Viewtopia was a jam-packed two day event, with everything from Zack King sharing how he creates his magical video content, to panel discussions of real, successful video marketers sharing their real success stories. By day one, we were overflowing with knowledge — and by day two, we really just needed to sit down and process it all.

Thankfully, this year’s event featured plenty of space to relax and rewind, including an innovative VR game experience. And of course, nothing wraps up a great session like a glass of wine, a craft beer, or a cocktail.

 

Open bar throughout a conference? This company gets me. @vidyard #Viewtopia16 pic.twitter.com/Ta2qz8j0XP

— Stephanie Totty (@Tottums) November 9, 2016

We’re already planning for next year’s event, and armed with feedback from our attendees, we’re excited to make it even bigger and better than Viewtopia 2016. Hope to see you there!

The post Thoughts from Viewtopia – Video has Evolved appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/thoughts-viewtopia-video-evolved/

Winners of 2016 Video Marketing Awards Announced at Viewtopia

Lenovo, Reltio, MongoDB, SolarWinds and others recognized for innovative use of video to drive business results

KITCHENER, Ontario – November 11, 2016 – Vidyard, the video platform for business, today announced the winners of the 2016 Video Marketing Awards (VMAs), recognizing innovative marketing and sales leaders at Viewtopia, the company’s annual video marketing summit. The VMAs recognize organizations that are using video content and analytics in exceptional ways to expand their audience, generate demand and empower their sales teams to close more business.

“Video has become the medium of choice for modern marketers to engage, entertain and educate their audiences,” said Vidyard CEO and co-founder Michael Litt. “They are creating incredible high-quality content, measuring its performance and using detailed analytics to turn viewers into customers and revenue for their organizations. And the results are coming whether the organizations are large or small, whether the videos highly produced or done on a budget. These winners prove the power of video to connect with audiences and improve the bottom line.”

Below are the winners and finalists in each VMA category:

Video Marketing Campaign of the Year

Winner: Lenovo with agency partner Traction

Finalists: Philips, Elemica

Lenovo’s marketing efforts had primarily consisted of tactics at the bottom of the funnel. With the launch of the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 12 Ultrabook, an all-in-one laptop and tablet, the company hoped to broaden its exposure to a larger audience than they had currently been marketing to and to re-engage dormant customers. They also wanted to educate users while making them feel entertained. The campaign played out in the form of five videos, including “Know your Chad” and “See Jane Run at Top Speed,” and a series of tongue-in-cheek illustrated “Survival Guides” for IT viewers to enjoy and commiserate over.

Results: Lenovo saw an immediate lift in video completion rates from 70% to 96% — a clear signal that the campaign was working. Engagement soared with a 400% lift over previous benchmarks. The videos were the most shared and the most viewed assets Lenovo commercial marketing had ever produced.  Lenovo surpassed its target of 17,000 new leads by 50% with over 25,000 and blew away its goal of 34,000 reactivated leads by engaging over 91,000 contacts. They increased the number of marketing qualified leads by 250% and improved lead quality by 200%.

Best Personalized Video Campaign

Winner: Reltio

Finalists: Veracode, Influitive

Reltio wanted a new way to build awareness and drive interest it its flagship product with a top-of-funnel awareness campaign. The company launched a personalized video campaign targeting 10,000 leads to build awareness and identify their most engaged prospects.

Results: Nearly 30% of all individuals who opened the email clicked through to watch the video. That marked a 10X increase in click-through rates compared to their average marketing campaign. Reltio is now launching a second personalized video campaign as part of its account-based marketing effort.

Best Use of Video for Sales Prospecting or ABM

Winner: MongoDB

Finalists: Act-On, P2 Energy Solutions

MongoDB wanted to use more customer testimonials to show the impact that MongoDB could have on their organizations. With a small marketing team and small budget, MongoDB picked a few customers to do high-quality testimonials. The end goal was to provide powerful assets for the sales team to better engage key prospects and move them through the buying journey faster.

Results: The sales team was ecstatic, and the videos become one of their top three calls to action in outbound outreach efforts to new prospects. The videos also served as tools for new sales reps to learn how customers use MongoDB.

Best Online Video Presence for a B2B Brand

Winner: SolarWinds

Finalists: Applied Predictive Technologies, Prophix

Video is a key component of the SolarWinds marketing strategy, helping the company create a unique, relatable voice that stands out for IT professionals. The video team is a big contributor to brand, social, product and demand gen creative campaign strategy and leverages a multi-channel distribution strategy to reach its audiences across the web. Its videos have been featured on Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Reddit and other media sites. SolarWinds’ customers are IT professionals, and the company uses a snarky, geeky tone to connect with its audience. Top examples include “Happy IT Professionals Day” “Free Tool Brack-IT-ology”, “Meet the Head Geeks,” and their newly released parodies of hit show Stranger Things called “Stranger IT.”

Results: The SolarWinds content has helped the business reach a wide array of new audiences and boost engagement with its current customers and prospects. Its YouTube channel features nearly 1,000 videos, and the top 15 each have more than 50,000 views. SolarWinds continues to invest in video as a primary content medium for marketing and communications, brand and social media to build and engage its B2B buyer’s audience.

Breakout Video Marketer of the Year

Winner: Jonas Construction Software

Finalists: RL Solutions, ExamSoft

Jonas Construction Software started out a year ago with no video content but a goal to provide prospective clients with a more personalized and dynamic digital experience to guide them to content that addressed their existing needs. In its “Why Jonas” video, the company created a video that explained to customers how Jonas could help them. The used pop-out features in the video to direct viewers to product pages. Viewers who made it to the end of the video got a final call-to-action pointing them to a product tour. The company has invested in a series of product and testimonial videos and is tracking audience engagement to help identify, qualify and convert more leads.

Results: Jonas Construction Software quickly noticed improvement in the quality of its leads, and prospective clients are more engaged with its content. Now roughly 50% of all Jonas’ leads from its website come directly from video content. 20% of closed business comes from deals that originated with a video view. Conversion rates on email marketing programs with video content are 200% that of traditional email campaigns. Sales velocity also has increased, the amount of time needed to convert a lead to an opportunity has been cut in half, and the time need to close new business is down by 30%.

Small Business, Big Bang

Winner: Terminus

Finalists: Social123, Xenex

Terminus employed a video marketing strategy to raise awareness for account-based marketing (ABM), which was just a buzz word for the B2B marketing industry a year ago. Terminus launched its #FlipMyFunnel campaign with personalized videos aimed at B2B marketing and sales thought leaders the company wanted to attend its first conference of the same name. They wanted 200 people to attend the first event in Atlanta. CMO Sangram Vajre created an individual video for each recipient with an opening “Hi (first name). Sangram here!”. Based on the early success of video content, Terminus now leverages custom and personalized video for outbound prospecting, ABM, event awareness, customer testimonials and product demonstrations.

Results: Besides getting 300 people to attend that first #FlipMyFunnel, Terminus credits video as a huge part of its ABM strategy and success. The company has produced eight customer testimonial videos this year with four more in production. They integrated Vidyard with Uberflip to track engagement and attribution of its video content. The unique video stream of content has proven to be an important asset for the sales team, especially to move deals through the pipeline more quickly. Sales development reps also have started producing their own personalized videos to use in outreach to help them cut through the clutter and increase connect rates.

Video Marketing Impact Award

Winner: Tradeshift

Finalists: Rapid7, BenefitMall

After working primarily with large corporations, Tradeshift recently started expanding into the mid-market categories and needed help generating demand. Enterprise Marketing head Travis Bickham recognized that Tradeshift’s traditional demand gen model didn’t scale to smaller companies, and he needed a new way to stand out in the competitive mid-market. Already using Vidyard, Bickham could see from the platform’s analytics that customers watched a lot of video before ever talking to sales teams. He saw that using video as the basis for all demand gen efforts would help Tradeshift accelerate leads and accounts down the funnel by providing engaging content and lead scoring at every stage. With Vidyard’s integration with Marketo, Bickham could track metrics on leads, conversions and opportunity revenue that his team helped drive through video content. Bickham later used Vidyard’s personalization technology to send out holiday videos with each prospect’s name featured in the video they received.

Results: 100% of active opportunities that convert to deals are exposed to video before and after sales qualification. In outbound emails promoting customer success stories, video has double the click-through rate compared to PDFs when both versions were tested. Leads who view videos reach qualified status 4X faster than those who don’t. Tradeshift’s personalized holiday video campaign resulted in a 230% increase in click-through rates, an 88% increase in eBook downloads and a surge in qualified pipeline development. More than 10% of marketing-sourced qualified leads in the first half of 2016 came from that personalized video campaign, resulting in a cost-per-opportunity that was lower than the average cost-per-lead of other campaigns, an unheard-of set of results in the world of demand generation.

Video Marketing Trailblazer

Winner: Bisk Education

Finalists: Cisco, Marketo

Bisk Education partners with universities to help finance, develop and support online degree programs and with businesses to offer training and education programs. The company recently began investing in video marketing and created Bisk Studios to handle all video strategy, production, marketing and distribution. Bisk Studios contributes to several campaigns at a time, supporting multiple brands and the overall Bisk brand. Usually their videos are a piece of a larger marketing campaign or content strategy but sometimes they comprise the entire campaign. Bisk Studios also drives internal communications programs, brand awareness, training, and other video-based programs across the organization. Investing in Bisk Studios has transformed the way the company markets its own business and partners with other organizations. Going beyond traditional marketing and social videos, their production of a full documentary with Notre Dame shows what can happen when an organization gets serious about video.

Results: Bisk’s video series with Florida State University, “Study Snacks” drove the most Facebook shares of any of its social efforts to date with more than 2,000 views. Their “Spartans Will” project with Michigan State University influenced many students to commit to a specific degree program. On a broader level, Bisk employees are now engaged in using video initiatives across the entire company. Employee events are now covered by the video crew, and one internal company culture video had a 85% click-through rate and over 70% engagement – even after the video was already shown in a group meeting.

###

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 Winners of 2016 Video Marketing Awards Announced at Viewtopia appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/press-releases/winners-2016-video-marketing-awards-announced-viewtopia/

The Best of the Best: 2016 Video Marketing Awards

Marketing can be a bit of a thankless job. It’s not every day someone emails you to say ‘thank you’ for the campaign you’ve run, or the video you’ve made. Sometimes the only indication you have that things are going well is opens, clicks, and video views. And that’s why we created the Video Marketing Awards.

All campaigns take effort, but really great video usually goes above and beyond. It takes passion, creativity, resourcefulness, and a whole lot of hard work to make awesome video content, and we believe that marketers producing great video deserve to be recognized. At Viewtopia, the Video Marketing Summit held in San Francisco November 9-10, one of the biggest themes to emerge from all of the talks, keynotes and sessions was companies using video more than ever, and bringing more and more of that video production in-house.

So, across 9 categories, and 9 extraordinary companies doing great things with video, here are your 2016 Video Marketing Award winners!

Video Marketing Campaign of the Year – Lenovo & Traction

Before engaging marketing creative agency, Traction, to create compelling content for their business customers, Lenovo’s marketing efforts had primarily consisted of bottom-of-funnel tactics. With the launch of the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 12 Ultrabook, an all in one laptop and tablet, the brand hoped to broaden its exposure to a larger audience than they had currently been marketing to and re-engage dormant customers. Lenovo also needed to ensure the results of this campaign made it into Eloqua, their Marketing Automation Platform.

Rather than dropping buzzwords and generic marketing, Lenovo opted to speak to customers on a level they could relate to, and used entertainment as an education platform. Looking at how IT teams typically deal with technology, they discovered that end users tend to put wear and tear on their equipment in ways no-one could imagine.

Thus, the “Users Happen” campaign was born. The campaign played out in the form of five videos, and a series of four tongue-in-cheek illustrated “Survival Guides” for IT viewers to enjoy and commiserate over.

Lenovo saw an immediate lift in video completion rates from 70% to 96%—a clear signal that the campaign was working. Plus, engagement soared with a 400% lift over previous benchmarks.

The videos were the most shared and the most viewed assets Lenovo commercial marketing had ever produced.

Best Personalized Video Campaign – Reltio

Reltio was looking for a new way to build awareness and drive interest in its flagship product via a top-of-funnel awareness campaign. They also needed a video solution that tied engagement data from this top-of-funnel material to Act-On, their Marketing Automation Platform. Recognizing the potential of personalized video, they launched a targeted campaign to more than 10,000 leads to increase awareness and identify their most engaged prospects.

With nearly 30% of all individuals who opened the email clicking through to watch their video, the personalized video campaign resulted in a 10x increase in click-through rate compared to their average marketing campaigns.

Reltio is now planning their next personalized video campaign to keep the ball rolling after this immense success.

Best Use of Video for Sales Prospecting or ABM – MongoDB

In 2016, MongoDB wanted to create more customer testimonials to highlight their stories and showcase the impact that MongoDB could have on their customers’ organizations. They decided to pick the most impactful stories and publish high-quality video testimonials with those customers. MongoDB doesn’t have a massive marketing team, or a big budget, so everyone chipped in to make the campaign happen. The end goal was to give their sales team powerful tools to help better engage key prospects and move them through the funnel faster. They also needed a system that integrated with Eloqua, their Marketing Automation Platform.

To make their video series happen, MongoDB flew their video team around the world from Chicago to Berlin, capturing inspirational stories at every stop. The videos were released over 12 weeks, and are now evergreen content that they can leverage across digital platforms and in email campaigns.

The results spoke for themselves: happy sales people, and more engaged prospects. As an added bonus, the content is also a useful onboarding tool for new sales reps who are trying to understand how customers use MongoDB. Integrating Vidyard into their video process and Eloqua instance has given MongoDB the power to leverage video across product launches, sales enablement, and customer marketing campaigns, proving this is only the first of many campaigns.

Best Online Video Presence for a B2B Brand – SolarWinds

Video is a key component of everything SolarWinds does. It’s not a focal point of a campaign, it leads people to the campaign focus and supports it. Their videos have been featured on Buzzfeed, Reddit, The Huffington Post and others, and their Email in Real Life campaign received a 2014 PR Platinum award nomination. Their snarky, geeky tone helps drive real connection with their IT professional audience, and their goal is to keep getting attention with humour and keep prospects interested by producing high-quality content.

Video has become a core part of SolarWinds brand, and supports all aspects of their online and digital presence. Their YouTube channel is home to nearly 1,000 videos and their top 15 videos each have more than 50k views. Not bad for an IT solutions provider!

Breakout Video Marketer of the Year – Jones Construction Software

Jones Construction Software started out 12 months ago with no video content, whatsoever.

When they decided to embark on the video journey, step one was to create assets that the construction industry would find value in. They wanted to produce content that engaged viewers and helped contour the video experience for prospective clients.

Step two was to capture relevant leads with Vidyard Events, and calls-to-action that integrated that data into Act-On, their Marketing Automation Platform. The goal was to keep viewers engaged, and have relevant content and follow-up information available to keep them engaged and interested.

Jones Construction Software saw a huge increase in the number of leads and opportunities since implementing video. They generate leads from content like product tours and case studies, and now roughly 50% of all of their website leads are coming directly from video. Using calls-to-action in their “Jonas Why” video, they saw an 80% click through rate and generated 180 leads, all from a single video. And as far as bottom line goes, 20% of Jones’ closed business comes from deals that started with a video, and sales velocity has skyrocketed. Even conversions take 50% less time, which has shaved almost 50 days off the process.

Small Business, Big Bang – Terminus

When Terminus, an account-based marketing platform, first started using Vidyard and video in 2015, account-based marketing was just a buzzword for B2B marketers. Terminus wanted to go beyond the buzz, and build a category for ABM. Their CEO, Sangram Varje, came up with the concept of #FlipMyFunnel, turning the traditional lead generation funnel on its head by laser-focusing on best-fit contacts and customers for marketing.

When they decided to hold their first user conference in Atlanta, the first step in the #FlipMyFunnel campaign was to create personalized videos for the B2B marketing and sales thought leaders they knew they wanted to attend.

Sangram produced tons of individual videos for these B2B innovators. Each video started with “Hi (first name)! Sangram here!” These videos worked, with a 95% response rate and Terminus sold out the conference with 300 attendees.

For the Terminus brand, video has been such a huge part of their ABM strategy and success. Sangram and his team have produced eight customer video testimonials this year, with four more in production.

One secret to their success with customer testimonials is integrating Vidyard with Uberflip to track engagement on case studies in their Hub. This unique stream of content has proven to be one of the most valuable assets for their sales team to use, especially to progress opportunities faster through the pipeline. Sales development reps have also started producing their own personalized videos to use in outreach.

Terminus is growing very quickly and video has been instrumental in helping them achieve these results.

Video Marketing Impact Award – Tradeshift

Good marketers build video around campaigns. Great marketers build campaigns around video. Tradeshift knew that video usage was on the rise. Big time. As a Vidyard customer, Tradeshift were able to use the platform’s powerful analytics to observe that customers were watching a lot of video before ever talking to sales teams. Using video as the basis for all demand generation efforts helped Tradeshift accelerate leads and accounts down the funnel by having engaging content and lead scoring at every stage.

Tradeshift is using video content throughout every aspect of the buyer’s journey to increase click-through and conversion rates, increase time-on-page and engagement time, improve email marketing click-through rates and generate net-new leads. Tradeshift has also used personalized video to drive engagement with key target accounts and generate more pipeline.

Their personalized video holiday campaign resulted in a 230% increase in campaign CTR, and an 88% increase in eBook downloads. More than 10% of marketing-sourced qualified opportunities over the past 6 months was sourced from personalized video, resulting in a cost-per-opportunity that was lower than average, and an unheard-of set of results in the world of demand generation.

Video Marketing Trailblazer – Bisk

Bisk partners with universities to help finance, develop and support online degree and certificate programs, and with businesses to offer training and education designed to amplify employee potential and drive organizational results. Until recently, there was no integrated video marketing element to their campaigns and communications, and no dedicated team to support it. Now, all videos come from Bisk Studios, their story-loving, forward-thinking, data-informed video production team focused on making a mark in the video marketing industry.

Bisk Studios contributes to multiple campaigns at once, supporting various brands (including multiple campaigns within each brand) and the overall Bisk brand. Bisk Studios does not directly place the videos in market, but works with the various marketing team members to provide video creative that meets their specific objectives for their campaigns. Their assets have been used on websites, landing pages, social platforms, paid media, webinars, and in brand outreach.

Social video projects are driving the most Facebook shares of any of their social efforts to date, with over 2,000 views on their Study Snacks series from organic and shared posts. This includes over 500 engagements in a two-week period, three times higher than their average post. On top of that, one website campaign that featured a multi-video series reduced bounce rates by 49% and exit rates by 67%. Significantly better than Bisk’s typical content, with the average visitor watching 100% of at least one video on the page.

Video Marketing Vision – Deltek and Media One Creative

Deltek is investing in personalized video strategy to enhance lead qualification, sales efficiency, and sales effectiveness in 2017. With the ability to generate customized videos on the fly to educate inbound leads on their products, then track their engagement in their marketing automation platform, Deltek is taking the next step to automate lead qualification and improve the efficiency of their inside sales team by focusing on the most engaged leads. They are an exceptional example of blending art and science to deliver creative video campaigns to attract, qualify and convert more prospects in a way that scales with great efficiency.

The post The Best of the Best: 2016 Video Marketing Awards appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/best-best-2016-video-marketing-awards/

7 Ways HR Can Use Video to Better Engage and Hire Top Talent

There’s a reason why we see video everywhere. Okay, many reasons. Marketers use it to attract buyers and salespeople use it to sell because audiences love it. It’s human, relatable, engaging, exciting, educating…so why shouldn’t other business teams use it, too? Like Human Resources. HR is all about people, so why not use the medium that is considered the next best thing to being there in person?

If you’re part of a recruitment or Human Resources team, maybe you’re already using video to attract talent. Many organizations have a video on their company website, giving potential candidates a taste of what it’s like to work there and what drives the company forward.

Is that you? High five for using video! But…is a basic video on your website really all you can do? You know as well as anyone that if you want to attract top talent, you have to stand out and do something special. Think about it this way: Would you hire a candidate who just did the bare minimum or even the standard? Probably not. You want someone who jumps out at you, impresses you, and makes you feel like they’re going to do an amazing job for you.

Well, candidates want to experience the same thing in their job search. After all, we spend most of our lives at work, so the best candidates want to make sure they’re choosing the best employer. These eight tips to turn your basic HR video into an amazing and useful tool!

1. Brand your video for instant recognition

The play button and YouTube logo are probably so familiar to you that you could describe what they look like without looking. So many videos live on YouTube, even company videos that are embedded from YouTube on company websites. But your video is supposed to be an experience of your company and your brand, so why let YouTube take all the glory and recognition?

If you’re using a video platform like Vidyard, that play button, the YouTube logo, even the red status bar (called the scrub bar) all disappear, because your videos live in Vidyard, and not on YouTube. That gives you the power to embed a video directly on your careers page (or anywhere else) that is branded with your company’s logo (as a watermark) and colors. Something like this, where you can see the logo in the bottom right of the video:

This screenshot, from the same video, shows the green scrub bar, a color that is associated with the Plugin brand. (This last shot is the end slate – the video’s branded book end – so it makes the small logo watermark redundant.)

2. Hunt top talent with personalized videos

You want to hire top talent, and sometimes that means hunting down the best of the best from LinkedIn or other sources, and reaching out to them. But if you’re really interested in this candidate, the likelihood is other companies are, too. So how do you reaaaally get their attention and stand out from the crowd?

With Personalized Video! You can weave a candidate’s name and other unique personal details right into the story of your video. You don’t have to create one video for every candidate – Personalized Video just requires one video that automatically generates for each person. It’s an undeniably engaging and incredible experience, which is exactly how you want candidates to feel about you!

Check out a Personalized Video that University of Waterloo created to attract new students. Keep in mind, this is the generic version, so anywhere where it says “You” in the video would be replaced by the viewer’s name and other details (e.g. Blake’s stuff, or Emily’s room).

(Isn’t Personalized Video cool? Learn more about it and try it out with a video made just for you!)

3. Improve your recruitment videos by giving audiences what they’re interested in

Recruitment videos are meant to excite potential employees while educating them on what it’s like to work at your company. But what should you say? Do you give an office tour? Talk about health and safety? Show pictures of the latest company picnic? Get the CEO on camera? You’ve got a lot to say, and you want to make sure you’re saying the right thing.

If you’re using a video platform (*cough* like Vidyard), you can see exactly how candidates are responding to your video. You can discover where in your video most people are dropping off – if they’re holding on 60% of the way through or more, you’re doing fairly well, but if they’re dropping off 10 seconds into a two-minute video, you’re in trouble. You can see which parts they are rewatching – is this section of the video exciting? Maybe you should show more of it! Or does it give detailed information that audiences are trying to catch? Maybe you can slow it down. You can also see which sections people are skipping; if they’re whizzing right by your photo montage set to music of the office holiday party, you may need to realize that only current employees enjoy seeing those, and stick to what will attract the best talent.

When you get the best quality video analytics, you can make sure your video continues to be one of the best out there. Don’t be scared, that doesn’t always mean a complete reshoot – maybe just a trim and edit! It’s worth the effort to get an in-depth look at how your candidates are responding to your content. After all, you want your company to be considered one of the best employers, and a really awesome video is a great help in showing you off!

4. Ask about interview requirements and test knowledge with interactive video elements

Video is no longer just a one-way medium where you just push your message to an audience. With interactive elements like forms that are built right into your videos, you can use videos to have a more engaging conversation than you ever felt possible. It won’t just be a more exciting experience for the candidate, it will also be useful for you. Add a form into your video to ask about accommodation needs, ask for feedback, or even ask skills-based questions that would be applicable to the role. Imagine what you could do when you can turn some of the boring steps in a recruitment process into an experience where the candidate feels heard and engaged!

Calls-to-action are another interactive element that HR professionals can put to use. Right inside your video, you can ask your viewer questions, pose options, and suggest they take an action, whether that’s completing a form, moving to a different part of your website, emailing a specific recruiter, or selecting which team they want to work for and watching the next appropriate video (maybe you have different videos for different teams that you recruit for!). The point is, these elements in your video help keep your audience engaged, and create a two-way ‘conversation’ before you even speak to them directly. Who wouldn’t be impressed with a company and a recruiter who puts so much effort into the candidates’ experience?

You’re probably aware that YouTube has some basic annotation tools that you can add to your videos, and if you’re comfortable with that platform, try them out and see what you can do! But if you’re looking for something a little more that will really step up your game, you can find out more about the best interactive elements for your videos! (While the video is geared toward a marketing and sales approach, it’ll show you a great taste of what you can do with forms and annotations right inside your video!)

5. Identify the most engaged candidates

Many companies hiring processes are automated to some degree. Often, candidates can find a position on a job board, click the link to apply, send their resume, and bam, they’ve applied. And that can all happen without talking to a recruiter, or even looking at the company website. Now that it’s so easy to apply (no more door-to-door job seeking!), this can mean an avalanche-like onslaught of applications for recruiters. And, just as software is great at identifying keywords, candidates are almost as great at jamming all those keywords into their resumes.

What candidates can’t fake? Their true interest in a company and a job. Their actions speak volumes, actions like watching your recruitment videos! If you want to identify who these engaged candidates are who are doing their research, just add an email gate to your video from inside your video platform. Candidates will have provide their contact information to you before they can click play. You’ll get a complete list of candidates who went beyond just clicking ‘Apply’ and actually wanted to hear what you have to say. Now that you have their emails, you can get cracking on putting those ones on the top of the pile!

6. Quickly and efficiently get a grasp of culture fit

Resumes and cover letters are great, but they don’t necessarily show you who someone is, what they’re like, and if they’re going to fit into your company culture. Which means recruiters have to book interviews and go through many first rounds before narrowing down the list to candidates that could be right at home in your company. What if there was a way to narrow that list down without having to book countless interviews and sit through some awkward meetings?

Video doesn’t have to be just for the recruiter. You can ask candidates to create their own short video and send it right to you so you can get a sense of them in person without, well, having to meet them in person. Sound intriguing? Video interviewing “increases speed of hire, allowing recruiters to focus more time and energy on the best candidates”, according to one leader of a UK-based recruitment firm.  

Sound too tricky to ask of your candidates? ViewedIt allows anyone to create and send videos (for free!), and all it takes is a computer! They can even keep their resume on screen while recording, so they can reference certain skills, past jobs, or even answer questions that you provide. You’re dreaming right now about blasting through all those first-level interviews and snatching up the best candidates, aren’t you?

7. Share video interviews with the right people, quickly and easily

Once you’ve narrowed down your list of candidates that seem like they could be a good fit, then comes the struggle of booking in interviews with hiring managers, and briefing them in detail about each candidate’s qualifications and benefits. Or, you could let hiring managers (and any other appropriate coworkers) check out the candidates themselves, as quickly and easily as you did. Actually, even quicker and easier. How? With a Video Hub.

A Video Hub is like a library where you can store and organize all your videos (by team or role or hiring manager…whatever you like!). Managers can take a gander through the videos you share, and help narrow down the list of candidates they want to meet (and you don’t have to worry about these videos being seen by unintended audiences because your Hub can be locked down by permissions). And just like that, you’ve sped up the process for everyone, and got that much closer to bringing top talent on board before they’re snatched up by another company.

Have you done some awesome things with video for your HR department? Or watched or created any awesome videos you’d like to share? I’d love to hear about it!

The post 7 Ways HR Can Use Video to Better Engage and Hire Top Talent appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/7-ways-hr-can-use-video-to-better-engage-and-hire-top-talent/