Mystery Solved: What Goes Into an Award-Winning Content Marketing Campaign that Sales Loves

As a modern marketing team we’re always looking for new ways to inspire our customers and educate our online audiences. But we also make sure not to forget one of our key ‘customers’ when planning out new programs: our own internal Sales team. As active practitioners of sales and marketing alignment, we know the most impactful campaigns are those that deliver real value to our prospects and customers, but are also designed to help Sales quickly identify potential buyers and accelerate pipeline development.

So it was particularly exciting when we heard we had won the 2017 Killer Content Award for Sales Enablement for one of our top-performing campaigns of the past year.

So what was the secret to delivering an award-winning campaign that had Sales giving Marketing a standing ovation? Nothing more than some amazing content, an interactive survey, and an integrated launch plan that put our sales team front and center.

The Campaign: Video Marketing Maturity Assessment

The idea for the campaign originated from discussions with our own sales team and our channel partner, Demand Spring. Both were hearing from prospects that they were unsure how to benchmark their video programs against others in the industry, and that they didn’t know if, or where, they needed help to become best-in-class video marketers. Without the ability to easily compare themselves to industry benchmarks, it was to create the business case to invest further in video and Vidyard. So we teamed up with Demand Spring to develop the Video Marketing Maturity Assessment that would enable prospects to benchmark their video programs against industry norms, and to clearly understand what they could do next to take their programs to the next level of maturity.

Take the Assessment

Measure Your Own Video Marketing Maturity!

Take the Assessment

The campaign included a few fundamental content assets. The primary Video Marketing Maturity Assessment tool was built as an interactive survey powered by SnapApp. Users answer a series of dynamic questions related to how they are using video today, what types of technologies they have in place, and so on. We also included a complementary eBook that outlined the various stages of video marketing maturity and the characteristics of each. But the secret sauce was kept for the end. Once completing the assessment, each prospect would receive a custom follow-up from a sales rep with additional content tailored just for them. Depending on what level of maturity they found themselves at, the sales rep would follow up with exclusive content assets to help them clearly understand how we can help at their current stage and what they can do to reach the next level of maturity (and beyond!).

Building Around the Needs of the Sales Team

The mechanics of the program were rooted in the idea that we wanted to find the quickest path to turn a campaign response into a sales opportunity while providing meaningful insights and value to the customer. The assessment itself intentionally asked questions which allowed us to assess the relative maturity of the prospect when compared to video marketing best practices. We also accounted for many of the key questions that our own sales team would ask during a typical discovery call. So once a user had completed the online assessment, the sales team had much of the information they would need to have a relevant, personalized follow-up conversation. Lots of the qualification work already done!

To further help increase response rates to the follow-up email, we provided our sales team with a unique value-add to enable a give-to-get approach by way of in-depth, exclusive follow-up guides tailored for each stage of maturity on how to move to the next stage of maturity. Are you at maturity level #1 (very little use of video at all)? Sales will follow-up with a guide on how to get started with video content. At maturity level #3 (fairly advanced usage of video in marketing)? Sales will congratulate you and then share a custom guide on how to expand your video programs into sales and customer service. And the most important thing of all is that everything was 100% prescriptive for the sales team. They knew exactly what to follow up with based on where the user scored in the maturity assessment. Personalized, value-add sales outreach, powered by your friends in marketing. Talk about sales acceleration!

It’s also worth noting that our sales team is now using this campaign as part of their outbound activities as well. Once they’ve piqued the interest of a prospective customer, they will often point them to the assessment tool because it provides real value to the prospect but also helps to answer some key qualifying questions quickly and with a high degree of accuracy.

Take-Aways and Lessons Learned

We found lots of great takeaways from the success of this program, here are just a few highlights that you may want to consider when embarking on something similar:

• Involve the sales team early on in your campaign planning. Test your ideas with different sales reps to see if think they program will truly help to accelerate deal velocity.
• Learn how your sales team really qualifies buyers and consider how to build those qualifying questions into your campaigns. The more they know up-front, the more efficient and effective they can be in turning a lead into a customer.
• Maturity assessments can be a great idea! Everyone likes to compare themselves to their peers and industry benchmarks. Just make sure the questions and the content have a high degree of integrity and are truly aligned with industry best practices. Value first, lead velocity second.
• Great interactive content experiences can go a long way. By partnering with SnapApp and Demand Spring, we were able to deliver something very engaging that looked professional and worked seamlessly. It was quick, inexpensive, and helped us deliver a strong ROI.

Finally, don’t forget about promotion! The content was great, but it was only successful because we promoted it via email, video marketing, our blog, social media, digital ads, our partner community, and more! With more than 1,000 completed assessments and hundreds of thousands of dollars in qualified pipeline, this was much more than just a content campaign, it was an integrated program that showcased how modern marketing can really move the needle for a business.

The post Mystery Solved: What Goes Into an Award-Winning Content Marketing Campaign that Sales Loves appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/award-winning-content-marketing-campaign-sales-loves/

Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Ellen Stafford

Meet the Team is our monthly chance to introduce you to the fabulous, quirky, talented people who work at Vidyard, using our favorite medium — video! For this episode, we caught up with Ellen Stafford, the Business Development Manager here at Vidyard. Discover what videos make her smile, and what she wanted to be when she grew up in this video:

What Didn’t Make the Cut

Ellen shared a lot more than her dog’s reaction to guests, so here are a few more of her answers:

What brought you to Vidyard?

I used to work for a technology company very close in Toronto and I had heard about Vidyard through that organization — the buzz was happening! I really wanted to move to this area, and move to a smaller company where I could really make an impact. So I did!

What do you do in your free time?

I spend a lot of my free time with my dog. We go hiking quite a bit, but it’s winter now so not as much at the moment. I also moved recently, so I spend a lot of time at home improvement stores and on Pinterest figuring out what i want to do with my new space.

Now show me one of those bed-stealing cat videos…

The post Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Ellen Stafford appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/meet-vidyard-team-video-style-ellen-stafford/

Go Where Your Customers Are – Wise Words from Sweta Patel

Many brands start using social media to build awareness for their brand, but few realize that social is just the beginning. And now that every brand starts with a social presence on day one, Sweta Patel believes companies that ignore other traditional channels do so at their own peril. “Social selling may be where you reach your audience, but email marketing, webinars, and events are all channels that you can engage your audiences and build your pipeline,” Patel told us over Google Hangout.

Patel, a Demand Generation Consultant and Customer Acquisition Specialist, has worked with brands like Kyocera, WD-40, and Full Circle Insights to build social communities, drive more leads, and ultimately close more deals. To understand the importance of traditional marketing channels alongside a savvy social media strategy, we dove into demand generation, marketing awareness, and more in this interview:

How can marketers stand out amid the noise?

It’s a bit nebulous. Everyone always wants to jump on the bandwagon of a new network or a new channel, but it should be more about focusing on where your audience is and focusing on the conversion rate of your audience.

So I think it’s shifting the mindset from a quantity point of view to a quality point of view. Sure having Facebook, Twitter, and all these social networks is great. But in order to pinpoint the audience that you’re going after to really close the deals, it’s important that you focus on things that aren’t as common. For example our company was too focused on big channels like social media, going to Dreamforce, etc., and I realized that these places have so many people that we’re just this small person there that doesn’t exist. But, if we were to hold more events ourselves with people where they were tailored towards our target audience and make them feel exclusive, that would make us come off as a thought leader in this space.

What types of programs resonate best with B2B audiences?

Lately, I’ve seen that short form content resonates really well on paid channels. Especially on social media. People want instantaneous, short form content like checklists or cheat sheets. Anything where they don’t have to spend a lot of their time reading.

Video is another great high-converting asset that has worked really well for us, especially on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn ads. These resonate better than something like longer webinars because we’ve seen that webinars are great for nurturing later in the funnel but they’re not so great for net-new leads. People don’t want to set aside a set amount of their day to watch  a webinar when there is so much information out there. Why would I want to sit down for 60 minutes and watch something when I just received 10 emails on the same topic?

What is one demand gen strategy that businesses miss out on?

I see this with review channels a lot. I feel like a lot of companies think that reviews are more of a B2C play, but if we really look at the purchase path and the intent of a buyer, B2C or B2B, we are seeing that they are making decisions based on what they find and read online.

Buyers are wanting information. People go to movies based on reviews. So building that reputation strategy and protecting that reputation is heavily important, especially for B2B brands that are focused on lead generation. Lead generation starts with reviews. People who know what you are, and what you do, but they want to know who is talking about you.

What resources do you frequent to get better at your job?

As a B2B marketer, SiriusDecisions is a publication that I focus on. Also Funnelholic is another great one.

As a demand gen person it’s important to have great advertising understanding and know how to create effective ads, and Bizable just has tons of stuff you can go through. Sales is something I’m also closely aligned with so I follow SalesHacker, HubSpot, and the Marketo blog when I’m creating campaigns.

Enjoyed reading Sweta Patel’s insights on demand generation? Check out Stephanie Totty’s Wise Words interview to discover why including clients in your content marketing helps validate and humanize your brand!

The post Go Where Your Customers Are – Wise Words from Sweta Patel appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/go-customers-wise-words-sweta-patel/

Forrester Research Predicts Account-Based Everything in 2017

According to Forrester Research, a revolution is coming for account-based marketing. While many companies claim to be experts in ABM, Forrester has found that a lack of connectivity between marketing and sales, combined with a deluge of tools with similar feature sets are holding back real ABM success.

2017 will be the year that all of this changes, as ABM finally moves into the mainstream and companies begin to align their team towards account-based marketing, sales, and customer success. Forrester predicts that marketers will find themselves taking a much bigger role in both account selection and customer success, with post-sale onboarding transforming into an opportunity to build customer advocates. Technology stacks will also begin to evolve this year, as vendors consolidate and transform their solutions to enable marketing and sales teams to work from one platform rather than assembling a patchwork system of products.

This shift towards account-based business will not only change the way companies structure their teams, but will influence hiring as well. Customer-facing skills will become a must-have for any marketer, and new organizational models will see sales, marketing and support become blended business units rather than silos operating against their own goals.

Discover why Forrester is predicting skyrocketing usage of account-based marketing in 2017 in their new report Predictions 2017: ABM Boosts B2B Marketing’s Customer Obsession IQ!

The post Forrester Research Predicts Account-Based Everything in 2017 appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/forrester-research-predicts-account-based-everything-2017/

9 Tips on Writing a Blog Post People Will Actually Read

How to Get Your Sales Team Using — And Loving — Video

With the average business email account receiving over 100 emails per day, anything that gets more responses is a welcome change. And adding video to your prospecting emails can increase response rates by up to 8x! Not only that, but 75% of late-stage prospects that received a personalized video became closed deals. Sounds awesome, right? But this post isn’t about convincing you that video is the best tool for your sales team to close more deals. That’s what this post is for!

So with that in mind, how do you get the video ball rolling for your sales team? And most importantly, how do you keep them doing it long enough to see real results? I sat down with our sales team leaders to get their take on how to motivate salespeople to start using video, and how to measure and reward them for video selling success!

Land and Expand

Ellen, the manager of our BDR team suggested starting small when it comes to video and working your way up. Pick a pilot group, and help them find success to show your broader team how easy it is. Whether they’re sending webcam selfie videos as a first-touch, or going more in-depth on the prospect’s website to show off how your solution could benefit them directly, showing a few key sales people the ropes is probably easier than trying to get 100 of them going at once.

Ellen also added that a big part of this is practicing what you preach. Even if you’re starting with a super small group, it’s time for you – or your team manager – to join the ranks and start doing some cold outreach yourselves. This provides two big motivators:

 

1. Your team sees that you are learning this new tactic alongside them, so they’re even more motivated to get better at it.
2. You get to experience any pain points your team is having in real-time and start coming up with solutions and new strategies right away. That’s win-win for you and your team!

 

If you’re not in a position to get down into the trenches with your team, there is still a way you can motivate them with your own video experience.

At Vidyard our executives send out company updates via video using the same technology our sales team uses to reach out to prospects. It cuts through the noise in everyone’s inbox, and our executive team can see metrics on whether or not their videos were really engaging. They aren’t high-budget productions either – here’s a screenshot of one our CEO, Michael Litt filmed in one of our meeting rooms:

Is there a meeting or weekly update that you can replace with video?

Tracking Progress & Rewarding Success

The cornerstone of any successful sales program is keeping the team motivated. While I won’t go into suggestions for spiffs — the team at LevelEleven does a fantastic job of that — it is sometimes hard to come up with a way of challenging employees to use a new technology or strategy. Katie, the manager of our business development team, told me she rewards employees based on a few criteria to get them excited and energized about using video.

First is looking at engagement on videos from the people her BDRs are targeting. Early on, she focused on rewarding members of her team based on the total number of seconds watched across all videos. This is a great starting metric as it focuses on getting as many videos out the door as possible, but it falls short as your team gets more comfortable with video, and starts sending out shorter content.

Now our BDRs are rewarded based on the average percentage viewed across all of their videos – so if a BDR sends out two videos, and one is watched until the 50% mark and one is watched until the 100% mark, their average score would be 75%. Building challenges like this gives your team an incentive to put quality over quantity, as it puts the onus on the sales person to make watchable content. This, in turn bubbles up in quantity as sales people get more comfortable with producing their own videos.

Dan Wardle, who manages our SMB team added that his team uses more of a show-and-tell process for their most successful videos. Everyone submits their best video and they discuss as a team what made the video successful. Spiffs are awarded by vote from the team, and the videos are stored in a separate hub for team members to refer back to. The big added bonus to this technique is that you slowly build a library of successful video content that can serve as an internal resource for new hires.

Giving Your Team the Right Tools

Getting started with video doesn’t have to be difficult for salespeople. Whether it’s their first day on the job, or they have been a quota-carrying sales leader for decades, video has never been easier to create, share and track. Our team uses ViewedIt to record selfie-style cold call emails, create micro demos, and measure the response of their video content. The recent Enterprise expansion to ViewedIt plugs this data into our Salesforce instance, allowing our team leads like Ellen, Katie, and Dan to measure the results of their team. The spiffs I mentioned above depend on it!

When it comes to educating your sales team on how to find success with video, we’ve got that covered for you! Check out the Video Selling Success Kit for resources on personalizing your content, and a cheat-sheet with 7 practical ways to use video to close more deals!

The post How to Get Your Sales Team Using — And Loving — Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/get-sales-team-using-loving-video/

Choosing a Video Platform: What to Evaluate for Marketing and Sales

As video is becoming more and more essential to how businesses communicate with their audiences—whether potential customers, current customers, or employees—a video platform (VP) has become a necessary and useful tool for many business teams so they can manage, optimize, and measure content, and learn about their audiences.

Since teams have different goals and needs, what should marketing and sales teams (who are both focused on pipeline and closing deals) look for when choosing the right video platform for them? For marketers, for example, the tool would need to not only help you manage your growing library of video content, but also enable you to measure that video content’s effectiveness, generate more and better qualified leads, and allow video to fit seamlessly with the rest of your digital activities. When you’re on the hunt for a VP, consider a full list of options that you should be looking for.

Outline Your Needs First

There are 12 major categories on which to evaluate VPs. Of course, you may place more value on some categories than another company based on your unique business needs. And that’s exactly why identifying these needs first is imperative. For marketers, a few features may be key, while another team may need their own unique features. Try utilizing a list like the one illustrated below, which shows a snapshot that some marketers might favor, to compare platforms along similar criteria:

A layout like this could help you assign weights (percentages, numbers, or even letter grades) to each category according to its importance in the VP solution you’re looking for. For the example above, if a VP had extraordinary optimization features but lacked in some of the other categories, it would likely be eliminated from the decision set as the importance of optimization was only 5%.

12 Key Evaluation Criteria

These are the attributes you’re going to want to evaluate your VP short list on:

1. Content Management: look for things like the ease with which you can upload and manage new video content. Do you have to involve IT every time? Can you upload directly from your YouTube channel? As your library grows in size and complexity of topics for different audiences, is it searchable and taggable?
2. Optimization: You’re always looking for ways to improve your video content so how will this VP help you do that? Identify if it has built in optimization features such as A/B split testing, CTR reporting, and insights on actual audience engagement that will help you understand what’s driving conversions or where viewers are dropping off.
3. Content Distribution: is it a simple task to share your videos to multiple channels from within your VP? And even more importantly: if changes are made to your video in the VP, are they automatically updated in all locations where the video has previously been shared? Does your VP offer a branded home like a video hub where you can keep viewers on your site and engaged with your content?
4. Lead Capture: are there opportunities to generate leads from within your videos and are they easy to set up? Look for things like email gates and contact forms (that can be customized to your needs) built into the video. Then ask: where are these leads sent to? It’s no fun if you have to manage another database, but if the information can be sent directly to your marketing automation or CRM platform, you’re golden.
5. Lead Scoring & Qualification: Does the VP at hand allow video viewing behavior to impact your lead qualification? It should, because a lead that’s spent 30 minutes watching your product videos is more valuable than one that’s watched only 30 seconds of your latest video blog.
6. Reporting, Analytics & ROI: VPs should be more than a place to keep all of your videos. Investigate the detailed metrics offered by a VP. More than video views, look for a platform that will provide you insight on detailed viewing behavior for each video – what videos are known viewers watching? What portions are they re-watching? What are they skipping? How is this viewer engagement information gathered? Is it through behind-the-scenes data collection, like cookies, that doesn’t interfere with the user’s experience, or are you forced to add email gates and forms to every single video? And as a whole, how is video contributing to new business? Can you track an individual video’s influence all the way to a closed deal?
7. Cross-Functional Opportunities: Sure you may be looking for a marketing and/or sales solution right now, but could this platform also work for internal communications or customer support as well as your whole organization becomes more video-focused? It’s always better to have fewer technologies to manage, so this is key. Does it have associated products and features to enable different teams to achieve their own unique goals, as well as easily align on shared goals? Is it easy to use and provide opportunities to limit or grant access to different teams?
8. Integrations: Integrations are critical – they streamline information transfer between your current systems and your VP. Discover what integrations exist (and how easy they are to set up and use) for a given VP like your marketing automation and CRM (including Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot, Act-On, and Salesforce); your Enterprise Collaboration system such as Sharepoint or Chatter; and Web Analytics such as Adobe or Google Analytics.
9. Sales Enablement: The ability to privately send videos and track whether a prospect viewed it, how much they consumed, and when they did so can make a big impact on the next sales call with that lead, so look into whether or not your shortlisted VPs can do that. As well, can your sales team take advantage of your marketing video content? The easier it is for them to access and send it (like directly from their email!) the easier it will be for your sales team to engage prospects with accurate and creative content, and close more deals.
10. Security: Does the VP have a robust security model to support internal and private video use-cases in addition to outbound marketing and sales communications?
11. A Personalized Experience: Does the VP give you the ability to personalize a marketing video for each lead at scale? A personalized video can lead to a 500% lift in email conversion, and a 16x increase in conversion ratios for campaign landing pages. With impressive results, consider if you’re willing to miss out on an opportunity to engage with audiences on a 1:1 level. Does the VP also allow sales teams to create their own individual personalized videos to send to prospects?
12. Product Innovation: Does the VP indicate strong, continuous innovation that represents the future of video? How often are new products/features launched? Do these new products and features help you advance your own strategy? Is the VP platform leading the charge, or following competitors?

Conclusion

Don’t forget to define success for the adoption of this new technology. If you’re embarking on this investment, you’ll want to make sure you’ve defined KPIs beforehand so you can evaluate its success for your business even after you’ve made your selection.

The post Choosing a Video Platform: What to Evaluate for Marketing and Sales appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/choosing-a-video-platform-evaluate-for-marketing-and-sales/

Watch this Video: Volvo’s Live Fully Now

Every so often we come across a really amazing example of video marketing and we just need to share it with you. Volvo’s latest video is one of those.

Video Transcript:

Hey guys! We just discovered this awesome video from Volvo and we really wanted to share it with you. Take a look, and I’ll catch you on the other side.

My goodness, don’t you remember when you went first to school. You went to kindergarten and kindergarten, the idea was to push along so you could get into first grade. And then push along so you could get into second grade, third grade, and so on going up and up. And then you went to high school and this was a great transition in life and now the pressure is being put on. You must get ahead, you must go up the grades and finally be good enough to get to college. And then when you get to college, you’re still going step-by-step, step-by-step, up to the great moment in which you’re ready to go out into the world. And then when you go out into this famous world comes the struggle for success and profession of business. And then, suddenly when you’re about 40 or 45 years old in the middle of life, you wake up one day and say “huh? I’ve arrived.” And while it is of tremendous use for us to be able to look ahead and to plan, there is no use planning for a future which, when you get to it and it becomes the present, you won’t be there. You’ll be living in some other future which hasn’t yet arrived. And so, in this way, one is never able actually to inherit and enjoy the fruits of one’s actions.

You can’t live at all unless you can live fully now.

Wasn’t that video amazing? One of the reasons I love this video so much is that it uses original audio from the philosopher Alan Watts’ talk in 1959 called “Live Fully Now”. This video teaches us that brand videos don’t have to be a ramble of features or a laundry list of benefits. They can, and often should, dig deeper. Volve did an incredible job of digging deeper and letting the story speak for itself. So now I want to know, what do you guys love about this video? Tell me in the comments below!

The post Watch this Video: Volvo’s Live Fully Now appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/watch-video-volvos-live-fully-now/

Finding the people and taking the people out of retail

NRF 2017 kicked off with a keynote titled “Building Tomorrow’s Workforce: How Retailers Are Attracting and Retaining Talent.” The CEOs of Macy’s, HSNi, Walmart, and Ashley Stewart talked about the value of great people in retail. No one would argue that retail is a people business. I have always found one the best parts of the NRF shows are the people I have met. However, I think we need to start framing this discussion differently, and if the trade-show floor was any indication, I think the industry might be on the verge of seeing where there is real opportunity.

Data Is Driving Demand for Talent and More…

Retail has undergone more drastic transformation in the last decade than in the last 100 years. As chairman and CEO Terry Lundgren of Macy’s Inc. shared, even two years ago, they had no team focused solely on the field of data analytics. He added, “But now we do.”

Technology has done amazing things to change retail, and there is still so much more that needs to be done. All the data that this technology generates needs to be processed, analyzed, and acted upon. This is what the trade show’s focus on artificial assistants, intelligent assistants, robotics, and new data capture methods and opportunities highlight.

OPOS Technical Council (OPOS – J) demo on the NRF 2017 trade-show floor.

The question of finding people to fill roles is an important one. Yet, we need to begin to address what roles will be filled by artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive and conversational computing, and robotics. When we look at the industry and reflect on the sad news of once grand retailers like Walmart and Macy’s closing stores, the challenges are obvious. You don’t need all the data in the world to know customers hate waiting in lines to check out or to return items in store. But social media is full of frustrated customers in those stores dealing with irritating wait times.

Will People, Companies, or Technology Solve the Checkout Experience?

Continue reading on the IBM Think Marketing hub.

The post Finding the people and taking the people out of retail appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BryanEisenberg/~3/n7DCxH5HX3Q/

What should you be known for?

My friend Mark Schaefer is releasing a new book on February 13th. I decided that because I love the book so much that I would giveaway a few copies on February 14th. See how you can enter below.

So you want to be Known!

The post What should you be known for? appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BryanEisenberg/~3/wIh96pOptKw/

How Marketing Can Enable Sales To Use Video

With so many conflicting priorities, is it realistic to align your sales and marketing teams in 2017? Although it may be easy to claim that these parts of your business work together like ‘peanut butter and jelly’, is there any truth to it? For the majority of businesses I would argue this is in fact a falsehood.

As a Product Marketing Specialist at Vidyard I know the struggle of sales and marketing alignment first-hand. First, let’s talk about why this struggle exists. And then I’ll talk about the good stuff—why you don’t need to fear, because there is technology to help bridge the inevitable gap that will, or already does exist in your organization.

Why is alignment so tricky?

An endless wishlist

No matter what assets the marketing team creates, the sales organization will never be satisfied (and rightly so). There is an endless list of blogs that COULD be written, proposal decks that SHOULD be built, and videos that MIGHT be effective in helping push a few deals across the line. The question is not what should be created, it is why! From the marketer’s perspective, they are not likely measured on marketing qualified leads (MQLs) but rather on the ‘quality’ of the work, or how well it aligns with brand. Right from the get-go there are two groups of people being measured on very different criteria. Different criteria coupled with an endless wishlist leads to dysfunction within the organization.

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Forrester Report: B2B Buyers Mandate a New Charter for Marketing and Sales

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Focus on creation, not on distribution

Equipping a sales team with the best content is very likely on every marketer’s list, though maybe not at the top—let’s call it a ‘nice to have’. Perhaps some of you reading this post have wondered at one point why your sales teams can’t seem to bother locating and sending collateral out to prospects. That being said, how often has your marketing team sat down and discussed a distribution strategy for all external-facing documents? That could ease the process for a sales team that should be focused on what they do best—closing deals! I know it may be hard to hear, but uploading every piece of content you have created into Google Drive is not the long-term solution.

Efficiency over everything

It’s vital to put content where the sales team lives to minimize the time spent retrieving assets. Since every minute of every day can be used towards closing the next deal, they cannot (and should not) have to spend hours of the day sourcing out the right content to use in their cadences. At Vidyard, our team had purchased a piece of technology ease this process; however, it didn’t fully integrate into the team’s daily habits and as a result it never got used. Hard lesson to learn, but a worthwhile one nonetheless. If you are a decision-maker looking to bridge the gap between your sales and marketing teams, avoid adding separate workflows as the sales team will, without a doubt, choose the path of least resistance.

What can you do to strengthen your ‘smarketing’?

To start the healing process, and begin to bring these teams together, try the following steps:

1. Sit down with individuals throughout your sales organization to understand their preferred workflows, and the current gaps that they are experiencing with respect to marketing content.
2. Since focusing on the distribution strategy for content is paramount, try creating a marketing content directory based not only on the type of content, but on when it should be used throughout a sales cadence.
3. Evaluate your current sales and marketing technology stack on how well it fits into your sales team’s daily habits, and back away from the solutions that simply do not. Begin to source out alternative products that solve for the gaps that have now been revealed for specific content distribution methods.
4. As a sales and marketing group, determine the most effective content types that will help sales close more business moving forward, and allocate internal resources accordingly.

 

We’ve discovered, at Vidyard and among our customers and prospects, that video has been the winning content type, resulting in many organizations investing in software that empowers sales teams to create, send, and track video right from their inbox. As your marketing team begins or continues to create awesome pieces of content, your sales team will inevitably have a few questions. Where can I access these videos? What videos can I use while prospecting? Am I allowed to send out videos of myself to prospects?

With ViewedIt Enterprise, your marketing teams will be able to extend the reach of the videos they are tirelessly creating by equipping sales with an approved content library that they can quickly choose from right within their preferred email client. This will help marketers benefit from more MQLs, increased budget for the next set of videos they create, and the pure joy of hearing how their incredible pieces of content helped close more deals each day. On the sales side, they can finally deliver information to their prospects in the form they wish to consume it (video, of course) and can get real-time analytics based on each prospect’s viewing behavior. Nothing like a win-win, and a great start to helping sales and marketing teams work together to kick off a strong 2017!

The post How Marketing Can Enable Sales To Use Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/how-marketing-can-enable-sales-to-use-video/

Sales and Marketing Must Join Forces or Get Left Behind

How often does your marketing team sit in on sales calls? Or vice-versa, how much feedback does your sales team pass over to marketing about lead quality? The sad fact is, most of the time marketing and sales don’t talk as much as they should.

But why? Recent research from Forrester found that 80% of marketers report their relationship with sales is “good” and 60% of sales people said the same. So where’s the disconnect? Only a third of marketers said that their metrics align closely with sales. And worse, only 40% of marketers indicated that they participate in pipeline reviews. So sales and marketing are friends — but not friends with benefits.

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B2B Buyers Mandate a New Charter for Marketing and Sales

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According to Forrester, companies that don’t fix this issue are going to be left behind. And thankfully, they have built a framework to help you bring your sales and marketing teams closer together, get on the same page with goals, and execute powerful campaigns that drive more revenue.

Sales and Marketing Sitting in a Tree

So how do you connect your teams and close the gap between sales and marketing? It starts with participation. A good smarketing team (see what we did there?) has marketing actively participating in account selection and planning as part of an account-based marketing strategy, and sales leaning on marketing for the right content and social selling opportunities. The result is a buyer-centric approach to sales and marketing that puts customers first.

Companies that are leading this charge have put emphasis on buyer-centric strategies like:

• A data strategy that both marketing and sales can get behind
• Remote sales teams that report to marketing
• Social selling programs that engage buyers where they are
• Account-based marketing frameworks that involve both teams

Want to get the full story on how to turn your sales and marketing teams into a smarketing powerhouse? Get the Forrester report B2B Buyers Mandate A New Charter For Marketing And Sales.

The post Sales and Marketing Must Join Forces or Get Left Behind appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/sales-marketing-must-join-forces-get-left-behind/

How Video Helps Sales and Marketing Alignment

It wasn’t very long ago that sales and marketing had virtually nothing in common. They used different tools, employed different tactics, and tracked different metrics. They even sat in different parts of the office at most companies.

And that lack of alignment started to cause problems. With no clear path for collaboration, the effectiveness of both departments started to suffer. Lead quality decreased, sales funnels broke, and bottom lines suffered. It became such a common problem that a billion dollar marketing automation industry sprung up to fix it. But it wasn’t a single tool that bridged the decades-old gap between sales and marketing.

Rapidly changing industries and customers have forced marketing and sales tactics to adapt at a faster pace than any other point in history. Much like a type of career-focused natural selection, both departments eliminated the tactics and strategies that didn’t work, and prioritized those that yielded the best results. The end results for both departments wound up looking a lot like the other. Sales is now more focused on delivering real value to customers and building relationships, and marketing is focused on campaigns and tactics that result in the best outcomes for sales.

Chief among those successful tactics is video.

A Win-Win

With so many tactics, tools, and strategies circulating the business world these days, sales reps and marketers alike can only focus on a very select few at any given time. There’s just not enough time in the day to be on EVERY channel and EVERY medium. Both departments narrow their focus to a select group of tactics that yield the best results. Some of these tactics are exclusive to each department. Marketing will never be heavily involved in cold calling and Sales will likely never spend much time focused on ad buys. But video is the rare exception that delivers value to both departments.

For marketers, there’s few channels more effective at solving marketing problems than video. Need more traffic? Companies using video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than non-users, and video drives a whopping 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines. Want to drive more leads? According to 70% of marketers, video produces more conversions than any other type of content. Video delivers results across multiple marketing functions and throughout the customer lifecycle.

The benefits are just as staggering on the sales side, as well. Video is a powerful alternative to the traditional sales email, and is actually more effective. 59% of executives would rather watch video than read text, while four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. And those video views aren’t just vanity metrics. Prospects who view videos of a product are 85% more likely to buy.

A Shared Tactic

This shared success with video makes it a rare opportunity for collaboration. Sales and Marketing teams have grown much closer in recent years, but much of their relationship is still transactional. Marketing will produce valuable assets for the sales team to distribute, while Sales will request specific campaigns or promotions to help them reach more accounts. While this is certainly more collaborative than the old model, the information flow is still one direction at a time.

Video is a rare opportunity for both departments to actively collaborate. Two heads are better than one, and bringing the two teams together yields better results for a wide range of video assets. Shooting a new product demo? Sales reps have run a thousand demos and know the flow and structure that works the best. Filming a personal video for a prospect? Marketers can help craft the story and make sure it stands out. Holiday videos, company updates, feature overviews—the list of potential videos sales and marketing can collaborate on is endless.

Shared Success

While collaboration fosters better relationships and communication, it also has another positive externality at the executive level: it gives both departments a shared marker for success.

It’s hard to ever have two departments align if they are focused on achieving different things. A sales manager will never care about a brand’s Instagram following the same way a marketing manager will never care about a rep’s activity numbers. But with both departments using video, there’s a large area of overlap between the two departments. Both departments care about views and engagement levels. Both departments are interested in any view drop-offs or areas of a video that are rewatched. When a marketer talks about a video’s viewer retention, somebody on the sales team will know exactly what they’re talking about.

Being on the same page for metrics allows sales and marketing to work together to improve them.

The post How Video Helps Sales and Marketing Alignment appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/how-video-helps-marketing-and-sales-alignment/

Why Video Should Play a Big Role in Your Account Based Marketing Tactics

For many marketing organizations, ABM is a powerful acronym these days. To helps marketers harness that power, we hosted a few ABM marketing expert panelists last week to chat about account-based marketing, and the secret weapon you can arm that can make your ABM program truly remarkable in 2017. This is a recap of that webinar session.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Before we can get into the experts’ discussion on how to take your ABM program to the next level, let’s back up a bit. There are varying definitions of what account-based marketing is, so to provide valuable insights for your ABM strategy, it’s best to define it for the purposes of this blog: ABM’s focus is on generating awareness and demand within targeted customer accounts rather than individual leads. Instead of the ‘spray and pray’ mentality of putting your marketing out there and hoping you’ll hit someone who’s interested, account-based marketing is more like a ‘dart gun’ approach, where you determine which companies are most likely to become customers, and then you target them specifically with your marketing efforts.

Is ABM imperative to your marketing efforts?

You could stick with ‘spray and pray’ marketing, but did you know that 92% of marketers worldwide believe account-based marketing is important to their marketing efforts? That’s because lead generation, which focuses on marketing to individual leads, doesn’t typically account for how the decision-making process in enterprises works; the average B2B process now requires 5.4 signatures, according to Harvard Business Review! So if your marketing is just attracting one person, it may be the wrong person who doesn’t have the decision-making influence you need to close the deal.

Account-based marketing is also focused on advocacy; you can truly drive revenue when you focus on the most valuable accounts, engaging them on a deeper and more personal level so they not only become customers, they become advocates. This leads to more opportunity to up-sell, cross-sell, gain referrals, and build a long-term loyal customer base.

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ABM is an exciting opportunity for marketing organizations. So how can you take your ABM program further and create engaged advocates? Here are a few takeaways from the recent webinar:

Takeaway #1: How ABM works using the ‘flipped funnel’

Sangram Vajre, one of the panelists of the webinar, is co-founder and CMO of Terminus. He is also the founder of the #FlipMyFunnel community. #FlipMyFunnel focuses on flipping the traditional marketing funnel for the purpose of account-based marketing:

The traditional marketing funnel’s stages typically include: Awareness, Interest, Consideration and Purchase. A few years ago, Sangram recognized that this may not be the most effective way to reach the leads who would be most likely to become customers. In fact, Sangram said, 99% of what we do traditionally as marketers doesn’t drive revenue for the company. That’s not a stat any marketer would be pleased about. So, feeling inspired and trying to work through and explain his idea, Sangram drew the funnel, but flipped, on a napkin, and renamed the funnel stages to Identify, Expand, Engage, and Advocate.

What do these new funnel stages mean?

To do account-based marketing well, you have to know what to focus on at each stage.

• Identify: This stage is all about identifying your best-fit customers. Sangram says that it has never been easier to determine who these customers are; there are lists you can buy and companies you can work with if you want extra help figuring out who you should be targeting and who would benefit most from your product or service.
• Expand: In the Expand stage, this is where you put your focus on the right people. Unlike typical lead marketing that hopes to attract someone who might be interested, this ABM funnel stage focuses on finding the right person. So many people can influence the decision-making process in a company, so if you’re focused on just one or two people, you may be talking to the wrong people rather than the decision-makers. This will slow down your processes and ultimately limit how much revenue you can bring into your company.  
• Engage: The Engage stage is all about getting the right content out on the right channel. Sangram also says that this is the most fun part of the funnel. We get to be creative and focus on creating content that will wow our customers, like videos, case studies, landing pages and more. And, since you’ve now identified the accounts you want to target, and you have determined who the right people are, you can figure out how to engage them in the ways that will get them to take notice. Sangram advises that you engage with people on their terms; not just through email and phone calls, but over social media, in videos, on mobile…make sure you’re marketing where your audience is, instead of praying that they will come to you.
• Advocate: In this stage, your focus is on creating raving fans! Since you’ve engaged the right people with content and through channels they enjoy, they’ll remember you and become your fans. This is key because as smart marketers know, you can’t really force someone to buy something. Instead, you have to create strong relationships by creating a strong experience over time.

 

Takeaway #2: Video is key to creating that strong experience.

Panelist Tyler Lessard, one of Vidyard’s top marketing experts and thought leaders, discussed why video is essential to any powerful ABM program. Video helps marketers build trust because it’s more human and personal. Potential customers can hear your voice and see your face, and that helps pique their interest better than other content mediums. That’s key with ABM programs, where you need to get attention, hold it, and invoke an emotional response: you need them to want to do business with you. After all, when was the last time you thought, ‘wow this templated prospecting email really blew my mind’, and when did a whitepaper make you laugh or cry?

Video is also such a great ROI generator because, as Tyler points out, it respects your audience’s time. You can explain complex ideas, and tell visual stories a lot quicker: one minute of video is actually the equivalent of 1.8 million words! What does that mean? You can get the maximum value in minimum time!

Video sets you apart from your competitors who are only doing the basic things. And one of the best things about it is it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or require a lot of resources. You’re probably even carrying around a camera in your pocket right now! You can take it from Sangram himself, who won a ‘Big Bang, Small Budget’ Video Marketing Award at this year’s Viewtopia. (You can find out more about why he won the award in this post.)

Takeaway #3: Use video in 5 ways to amp up your ABM program

Tyler wouldn’t leave you wondering how to use the most powerful medium in your ABM program. Here are 5 different ways you can use video to achieve your ABM goals:

 

1. Video in email nurture campaigns

Video can take your basic email nurture campaigns so much further. You can leverage the content you’ve already been creating, upping the excitement and engagement of plain emails that are text-based or just include static images. Add videos like explainers, testimonials, product demos, and fun promos into your videos. It works well: we’ve seen results like a 200% to 300% lift in click-through rates. Now who doesn’t want results like that?

 

2. Personalized video email campaigns

Video can do some amazing things, but even video can be taken further. If you personalize your videos with content about the viewer, like their name, their company, or even their company logo, you’ll attract and hold your audience’s attention like never before. In fact, emails that include a personalized thumbnail image of the video have seen a 300% to 1000% lift in click-through rates. Not only that, but audiences watch longer, because you’ve woven them directly into the story you’re telling. Want to see for yourself what a personalized video is like? Check out this one, which was personalized for Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing:

The value of personalized videos can be greater than you might think; some Vidyard customers have reported that, surprisingly to them, holiday and cultural videos have led to the biggest accounts of the year being won. It’s all about engaging your audiences and building a powerful experience.

 

3. Direct mail: Video in a box!

Believe it or not, direct mail marketing is back! And yes, video can—and should—be a part of your direct mail approach, too. How? You can create custom video cards that can be shipped through direct mail. Your potential customers can hold it in their hands and watch your video. 

4. Outbound sales: Personal video messages

Video shouldn’t just be used near the top of the funnel. You can send personal video messages as part of your outbound sales efforts. It doesn’t have to be some fancy, over-produced video; if you’re using ViewedIt, for example, the easy way for anyone to record, send, and track video, all you need is your computer’s webcam. Personalized thumbnails work wonders with this kind of video email, too: get a small whiteboard and write the prospective customer’s name on it, and they’ll be bound to click.

Check out this video that Tyler created as an example. Imagine if he had just watched a webinar from Sangram about account-based marketing. Tyler, who for the sake of the video pretended he worked for a translation services company, then created this ViewedIt video that recorded his computer’s screen and his face:

So much more engaging than a text email, right? And it cost nothing to create! This tactic is great for targeting key accounts because it shows that you’re going above and beyond and creating something personal just for them. The typical results of these videos have shown a 5x to 8x increase in response rate, helping you to better engage your key people.

With ViewedIt videos, you can also see if and when your potential customer watches your video, and how much they watched. Then you know when to follow up and what to follow up on, helping you focus your time effectively and tailor conversations for awesome results.

 

5. Video engagement: Who, what, how long

Engagement data is key to a strong ABM program. You need to know how each person is responding to your efforts, and what they are responding to. That’s exactly what video engagement data gives you: who watched, what they have watched, and how long they watched each video (someone who watches 10 seconds is not as engaged as someone who watches 90% of your video!).

If you include this data inside your CRM system, like Salesforce, your sales team can learn who is engaging with you the most, and when. They can collect this information all all your accounts to follow up accordingly to close the most important deals at the most opportune time.

To learn more about video in your ABM program, including how to use video when planning a major event, check out the complete on-demand webinar!

The post Why Video Should Play a Big Role in Your Account Based Marketing Tactics appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/why-video-should-play-a-big-role-in-your-account-based-marketing-tactics/

16 Video Marketing Benchmarks You Need to Know [Infographic]

Whether you’ve been in the marketing world for the last 30 years or the last 30 days, you know that video is hot…

…as in the #1 preferred content type of the average consumer, hot.

And when something is so hot, you need to (a) use it (check!) and (b) maximize its performance. So how are you using video? How are your videos performing? How are you doing in comparison to your peers?

Recently, we spent hundreds of hours analyzing video data from more than 250,000 videos and 600 million video streams to put together the first-of-it’s-kind Video in Business Benchmark Report. So marketers like you can compare yourself to the average or even best-in-class video marketers.

Want to know how you stack up? Check out 16 of the greatest findings in the infographic below!

Share the Knowledge!

We believe everyone should be able to benefit from this research, don’t you? Share these key stats: grab this infographic and spread it around to your teammates, your own blog, your desktop screensaver, you name it! … Okay that last one might be a bit much, but you get the point.

Want to dive deeper? Download the full Video in Business Benchmark Report here.

The post 16 Video Marketing Benchmarks You Need to Know [Infographic] appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/16-video-benchmarks-need-to-know-infographic/

6 Video Tips for Small Businesses on a Budget

Everything we do, it seems like we’re looking for the most efficient way to possible. Whether we’re buying sliced apples from the grocery store, or pre-painted building materials from the hardware store, it has to be efficient, and it has to be inexpensive.

That’s the name of the game in 2017.

Chances are, as a small business, you’re no different. You’re looking to maximize your bottom line with the smallest output possible.

That’s why small businesses use video. (Well this is why small businesses use video, actually.)

But video is often believed to be expensive, overwhelming, and hard to get started. That’s precisely why we put together these six tips on creating budget-friendly (or even no budget!) videos.

1. Use the Camera in Your Pocket

You probably already know this, but you have an amazing camera in your pocket (psst … it’s your phone!). So before you start thinking you’re going to have to invest in a bunch of fancy studio equipment, start with your phone and maybe a tripod for extra stability and a more professional look.

If you’re going to do this approach, you can step it up a notch by borrowing a colleague’s phone as well. Why? Having two phones means you can use one for the audio that’s closer to whoever’s speaking on camera and one for the video. Then you can just sync audio in post-production. Below is a great video walkthrough of how to do this in iMovie, but there are plenty of examples for whichever editing tool you’re using all across the web.

2. Lean on Affordable (or Free!) Technology

It’s 2017, which means that if you’re not using technology to make your job easier, you’re probably doing it wrong. There are a lot of tech options to help you complete the day-to-day tasks of video production. Check out our shortlist below.

Editing Software

Are you using a Mac? If the answer is “yes”, then you already have a powerful editing tool right at your fingertips. You can use iMovie for a lot of basic editing, including:

• Trimming video
• Merging different video clips
• Syncing audio
• Adding background music
• Adding text overlays
• And more!

Animated Production Tools

For certain video types like animations, an online production tool can really help you to create something professional-looking without the professional budget. Tools like Powtoon allow you to create animated videos for free! That’s right, $0.

Animated explainer videos are a must-have for any small business. They’re a perfect way to explain your offering and are best used for describing any complex concept.

If you do have some budget, there are plenty of agencies out there who specialize in animated explainers and will create a custom one for you for a pretty good price.

Screen Share or Webcam Production

What if you’re creating videos for more than just your website? Often when videos are created for your blog or even for communications with external partners or prospects, you don’t need a fancy video, but something simple that shows you as you.

In these situations, whether it be on your blog or through email, we recommend using a screen share or webcam video. This way, you can show yourself or demo your product. Tools like ViewedIt make it really easy to create a video and share it through email.

If you are recording a webcam video and will be publishing it externally, consider “investing” (as in only about $100) in a high definition webcam. We just tried the C920 HD Pro hi-def webcam from Logitech, and it makes a big difference to the quality of our webcam videos! Check out the difference in the examples below.

Regular MacBook Pro Webcam:

Logitech Hi-Def Webcam:

3. Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose

With so many projects on the go every day at a small business and 1 million things asking for your attention, it’s easy to get caught up in the mindset that you have to create more content all the time. And that only brand new content is good content. Or that only fresh content will get ranked on Google.

Take a breath because this is not the case. (Happy dance!)

It is most definitely a best-practice to utilize your content assets across multiple platforms and repurpose them in any way, shape, or form that’s slightly different than your initial asset. That means you should be using your video on your website, your blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more. Adjust your video ever-so-slightly for different platforms if you have the bandwidth and capacity to do so. But at the very least, get it out there!  

4. Think Beyond Video Content

As you start to use more and more video, you’ll realize that your audience watches more and more video. And then you’ll start to wonder how you can make the most of that time that they’re spending engaging with your brand in this tiny box of moving pictures.

Seize the opportunity to get them to consume more of your content! Utilize things like annotations to get them from your YouTube channel to your website or CTAs (like at the end of the video below) to get them to download your ebook.

Helping them move through the journey with your brand means more bang for your video marketing buck.

5. Don’t Forget the Background Music

It’s amazing how far background music can go to making your video seem like a professional project. It can set the mood, fill the dead space, and elicit emotion. Just make sure to spend a small amount on this so that you’ve purchased the rights to your video music and don’t risk getting fined!

There are a number of great music providers online where you can purchase great songs for videos including:

• Bedtracks
• Audio Jungle
• Audio Network

6. Test and Optimize

Just because you have a low-budget production, doesn’t mean you don’t want to make the absolute most of it. Just like anything else, you’ll want to test different aspects of your video content to ensure you’re putting out the best possible alternative.

Where do you start? The best place is testing your video splash screens. A good splash screen is the difference between someone clicking play and someone ignoring your video completely. With a video platform, you can run A/B tests no problem. But even without one, you can still run a manual test, it’ll just be more sequential in nature. Just switch up the splash screen manually after a few days, make sure you record the number of plays each one gets, and set the winner!

And that’s it!

If you put these tips into practice today, you’re sure to be creating a great video library in no time! What tips have worked for you in creating video content for your small business? Share with us in the comments!

Want to take video one step further? Learn how to make the most of your low-budget, high-impact productions by:

• creating better content using video data
• using video at each stage of the buyer’s journey
• using video in email to increase click-throughs

The post 6 Video Tips for Small Businesses on a Budget appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/6-video-tips-small-businesses-budget/