The Value-Add of Video in the Content Journey

Marketers consistently look for new ways to Engage buyers. Today’s best marketers are analytical, creative and measure everything to ensure we achieve optimal results. Modern marketers rely on a well-defined Demand Generation Strategy to engage, nurture and convert buyers throughout the stages of their buyer’s journey. A well-planned strategy includes different types of content, delivered via various programs, all helping to uniquely educate the buyer and possibly bring us one step closer to a sale.

So, what’s the secret to achieving optimal results in demand generation? Nothing is 100%, but if you are delivering content that speaks to your buyer and helps them solve a pain point, engagement is sure to happen. You need to find the right content marketing mix for your buyer as not everyone’s content consumption patterns are the same. Video is a format that is gaining in popularity as more and more B2B buyers (91% according to the 2015 Content Preference Study by Demand Gen Report) like to consume visual, interactive content.

The Role of Video?

What makes video and specifically, interactive video a good bet for the future of content? It’s all about helping the buyer. Interactive video enables a buyer to pick and choose which content they want to consume in a fast and easy way. Buyers like to drill down and get answers quickly to their questions and interactive video enables this easily. Marketers like to understand what their buyers are looking for, to capitalize on buying triggers and deliver relevant content in real -time and video offers this in spades. How? Mainly through the Buyer Intent data that video provides like what videos buyers are watching, for how long, and how many minutes of video content they’ve consumed in total. This helps marketers to produce additional, complementary content as well as to better understand what engages the buyer.

Sold on video yet? Good, but you still need to understand where and how to offer the video content to the buyer. In the past, video has been used mostly in the early engagement stage. However, if the content is relevant – there is no reason to only use at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. Videos further in the funnel like product demos, customer testimonials, or personalized sales videos can all help move buyers towards the close.

Using Data

If you have developed deep buyer insights, accurate content mapping will enable the right video content to be delivered at the right time, at any given point in the journey. Pay attention to engagement metrics to test and refine your video content. Viewing time, calls to action and even to drop off points are a good place to start as these might indicate less relevant content in that portion of the video.

It’s the engagement data that video provides that is the value-add of this format and it is why it will be used more in the marketing mix in the future. Just make sure you have integration with your CRM or marketing automation platforms to gain insight into specific lead behavior and guide future content suggestions.

Be Ready

In consuming video content, buyers can accelerate their journey by selecting certain content offers and the marketer needs to be ready. Don’t be afraid to let acceleration happen through self-selection of content, just make sure you have the next piece of content ready to continue the conversation with the buyer.

Want to learn more about how video can influence deals at every stage of the buyer’s journey? Download our guide Map Your Video Content to the Buyer’s Journey and discover:

• Why you actually only need 15% of your content at the top of your funnel
• What video assets can help you convert at every funnel stage
• How to close deals faster by creating a content journey

The post The Value-Add of Video in the Content Journey appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/value-add-of-video-content-journey/

5 Personalized Prospecting Ideas You Can Use Today

Let’s face it, regardless of how successful a rep you are, we can all use some fresh ideas every once in awhile. And since I’d bet that every one of your prospects and their dog is bombarded with sales messaging each day, you need a way to stand out.

You need to get personal.

But you probably already knew that, so let’s cut to the chase and dive into 5 new ideas for personalized sales outreach you can start using today.

1. Send a Personal Video Message

There’s nothing quite like receiving a message in your inbox that someone took time out of their day to create for you in a medium that barely anyone else is using for outreach: video.

With overstuffed inboxes and overworked employees, a personal video message can be your best avenue for cutting through the noise. Use a whiteboard with the prospect’s name on it or some other way to personalize the video’s visuals so the thumbnail is personal, too. Then embed that video thumbnail in your email, include “video” in your subject line, and you are off to the races! If you’re anything like other reps using video, you’ll see something like 5x higher click-through rates and 8x higher response rates!

Check out this example from Heba, below:

Want a simple, free video creation tool to try this with? Try ViewedIt.

2. Share Relevant Content with a Personalized Touch

Sharing content that’s helpful and relevant to your prospects is a great way to show them that you’re relevant to them. The two biggest opportunities in sharing content are:

1. To include a personal message on why this content is relevant to them, and
2. Not to overwhelm them with too much content. We’d recommend sticking to a minimum of 3 assets or videos and no more. Otherwise, it starts to feel like you haven’t personalized your recommendations.

A great tool for this is Uberflip’s Sales Streams, which allows you to share a collection of relevant content assets with a personalized message.

3. Ship Something Through Snail Mail

No, this doesn’t mean we’re regressing. The truth of the matter is that people’s inboxes are so incredibly crowded these days and yet, their mail slots remain relatively empty. And plus, most people still love receiving a good piece of old fashioned mail. But make it count and sure, probably only do this for your high-value, cream-of-the-crop prospects as it can be moderately more time consuming and does involve some cost.

Ideas for things you can send through the mail are:

• Company swag that they’d actually want to use or would provide a reminder of you when they use it or see it
• A “getting started kit” that helps them start to learn best practices around the solution you provide
• A book (yes, a real, physical book!) related to specific interests or author you’ve spoken about before

Always remember to include a personal note from you and hey, sometimes you can probably even get your marketing team involved if you and the rest of your reps want to do a small blitz out to your key target accounts.

4. Send a Thank You Video as Follow-Up

After you’ve spent time connecting with your prospect over email or on the phone, it’s always a smart idea to thank them. And since building relationships with your prospects is so important to a successfully closed deal, it’s important that it’s genuine. But sometimes a generic, quickly written email doesn’t cut it. In fact, most times it comes across as much more insincere.

Instead, create a more personal connection with this hot prospect of yours by sending them a quick thank you video. This gives the impression that you created this video just for them (and didn’t just copy and paste some text and hit “send”).

5. Engage with Prospects on Social, Regularly

Connecting with your prospects on LinkedIn is one thing, but you can’t just go straight in for the hard sell without expecting to be rejected. Just like in the “real world”, your best bet is to build a rapport.

Engaging with prospects through Twitter or LinkedIn 1-3 times before reaching out via email can be a great way to ease into this new relationship. Comment on their posts, share a related article, or congratulate them on a career move. It’s all part of the foundation that’ll lead to a personal connection, a stronger relationship, and a closed deal.

Want more? Keep learning about personal video with our live session on “3 Ways Top Sales Teams are Killing it with Personal Video”. You’ll learn how to:

• Boost your response rates by creating 1:1 personalized videos
• Identify your best opportunities by leveraging audience data
• Accelerate deal cycles by building better relationships with personal video

The post 5 Personalized Prospecting Ideas You Can Use Today appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/5-personalized-prospecting-ideas/

Chalk Talks: Crushing Your Next Product Launch with Video

Launching a new product can be a challenge. Not only do you need to educate your internal team on the product launch, but you also need to create killer sales tools and make sure that you’re driving a ton of excitement in the space so that when your product does launch, you’re driving rapid adoption with new and even existing customers.

I’m Jesse Ariss, and in this Chalk Talk, I’m going to talk to you about how you can use video to create a killer launch!

So now if you’ve ever been involved with a product launch at all, you’re probably familiar with some of the key challenges. As a product marketer, I’m always concerned about how can we communicate the value of our product? This is about what the product does for your customer more so than actually what the product does itself. Video’s a great way to do this. As well, there are so many stakeholders involved with a new product launch. Video is a great way to keep everybody informed throughout the entire process. And then finally, what good is a product launch without some incredible testimonials from some of your customers? I’ll talk to you in a moment about why I believe video is the ultimate medium for some of those case studies.

So let’s say you’ve decided to use video for your product launch. That’s a great start. I would say the next step is understanding what kind of video specifically you’re going to want to use!

Where to Start with Video

Let’s start with the explainer video. The explainer video is a two, maybe two and a half minute long video that is really high level, and it talks about what your product does from a value point of view.

So let’s use the explainer video to say “Here’s how I can help the problems that you’re having.” Let’s not get too much into the actual weeds of what the product looks like or some of the specific functionality. This is really high level stuff. We’re going to save the actual functionality for the second piece, which is the demo video.

Now the demo video can be longer than the explainer video. We see successful demo videos at around four, maybe five minutes, because you know if a customer’s watching a demo video, then they’re a lot more involved and interested at your product at this point. With the demo video, let’s still try to keep things high level, but use actual footage for your product. Try not to use illustrations or conceptual imagery because if people are watching a demo, they want to see what this product actually looks like.

I wouldn’t go too deep on a specific industry or set of features. You’ve got a great sales team behind you and if a customer wants to learn more, they’ll be more than happy to give that customer an in-depth demo.

Putting a Friendly Face on Camera

The next video that you’re definitely going to need for your product launch arsenal is the testimonial video. This is a video of a customer who’s used your product, talking about some of the values that product has brought to them. One thing I would emphasize with the testimonial video is don’t get too hung up on production quality. As a matter of fact, some of the best testimonial videos that we use and that we have were actually filmed just with a phone or webcam. They’re very rough, raw and authentic. There’s nothing more powerful than a face of someone who’s a happy customer, talking about how that product that you’ve created has really driven home some of these values and made their life easier. Again, don’t focus too much on the production value. You’re looking for raw authenticity. And the final piece of video content that you’re probably going to need is the whiteboard video or the chalkboard video, like the one you’re watching.

This is a great opportunity to get someone, say, from your development team or maybe the product manager or product marketer to stand up and talk about what they they’ve invested into your product. So maybe it’s the product manager talking about why they made a certain decision for a particular feature. This adds a real human element and shows that you’ve got a great team behind this product.That human touch goes a really long way in driving a lot of trust and excitement around your product.

Okay, so you’ve got this supporting video content, now what? You’re shaping up at this point to actually have a pretty incredible launch. The next step is around internal education. So there’s so many stakeholders in product launches today. How do you get them up to speed quickly and make sure that they’re on the same page?

Using Video Internally

The way we do it is after every meeting we have, I’ll record a screen capture of my PowerPoint presentation with a little video capture of me in the corner walking the people through what I’m talking about in that PowerPoint presentation. The reason I think this is really important is because first of all, let’s face it. If you send someone a PowerPoint in their email, what are the chances they’re going to open it? Probably pretty slim. But if you send someone a video with a little personalized face? Okay, now I’m going to click on that, now I’m going to watch!

The second thing is that it really allows for you to be super clear with what you’re trying to communicate. So say it’s messaging. There’s no longer any ambiguity around what that specific bullet meant or what that image represented and how it was supposed to be said. Again, video is a really great way to communicate this information and if you’re using a tool like Vidyard for example, you can actually see if that sales rep or if that marketing person actually watched that video, and you can follow up as needed.

Getting Personal

Okay, so you’ve got your content, you’ve got everybody trained, and now you’re ready to go with your epic launch. How do you use video in this launch? Well, of course, you can repurpose some of the video you’ve already created, and you can update blogs, you can send out emails, you can put it on your social media.

These are some pretty traditional channels, but what I would recommend is taking that a step further and sending something like a personalized video to your customers or potential customers. A personalized video is a video where it actually has an element of personalization built right in. So it would say something like their name or it could have a picture of them, or maybe it would have their company name, and that would show up in the thumbnail and actually be right in the video itself. If you played your cards right, some of the content you created before can absolutely be repurposed to be personalized. That’s definitely a trick you should keep in mind.

We found that when sending a personalized video versus just a normal email, you’re going to see open rates and click through to open rates as high as four or five percent. So if you want to make a splash and make a loud noise when you launch your product, definitely keep personalized video in mind.

The last thing when it comes to the launch is while you’re doing all this, your sales team should be sending one-to-one videos out to their prospects as well. Now these are personalized, but they’re personalized in a little bit of a different way. These are personalized in the sense that more like these internal education videos, it would be someone, it would be the sales rep, for example, with a talking head talking to that customer and specifically talking to them about how your new product can address some of their concerns, and it really lends itself back to some of those values. Definitely these two approaches to personalized video, as I mentioned, should be run in parallel and is a great way to drum up a ton of excitement around your product launch.

Pulling it All Together

So, here we are: You’ve got all your supporting video content. You’ve got your really cool explainer video. You’ve got a powerful demo video. You’ve got a testimonial that just is so authentic. You’ve got a whiteboard video. You’ve educated your team. You’ve created personalized videos that you know your customers are going to open. You’ve created a ton of excitement.

Really, this is the full package. This is what it’s all about when using video for product launches. So I hope you’re as excited as I am. I’m Jesse Ariss, and this has been a Chalk Talk!

The post Chalk Talks: Crushing Your Next Product Launch with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/chalk-talks-crushing-next-product-launch-video/

Meet the Team, Vidyard Style: Blake Smith

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! In today’s episode, we caught up with Creative Director Blake Smith on his childhood heroes, favorite travel stories, and more:

What Didn’t Make the Cut

Blake went way beyond swimming with sharks in this interview, so here are a few answers that didn’t make the cut:

What brought you to Vidyard?

That’s a long story! Michael Litt and I would pass each other in the halls of Communitech and a little birdie who still works at Vidyard introduced us. Mike and Devon were managing a media company called Redwoods Media, and they were looking for some talent to help do some of their motion graphics work. They saw my work, they liked it, and they brought me in on contract.

Over time, that turned into full time managing the Redwoods Media side of things while they fleshed out Vidyard. It was interesting starting out at the company when there were 6 of us sitting around a dinner table, which has now evolved into a Megazord of teams. It’s been a crazy experience so far, and it continues to excite me to see where we’re going next!

What is your favorite video on the internet right now?

My favorite video on the internet is nothing new – it’s actually been around for two years. It’s a called Junk Mail, and it’s a short documentary about an elderly woman named Mary. She’s 98 years old, and this piece touches the fact that she’s lonely. She has great-grandchildren and family, but they don’t visit often. So to keep herself busy, she takes all her junk mail, rips it up into little pieces, and cuts it into smaller with scissors, and then throws them out.She does this because she has nothing else to do with her day. She says in the video that if she didn’t do it, she would go nuts.

The rest of the video touches on this community centre that’s there for individuals like her that don’t have anything else to do with their day. This group of people want to make sure that the elderly people in their community that have nowhere to go and nobody to talk to have something to do other than sitting there all day. I really enjoy it because I love videos that tell a story and pull at the heart strings. And from a production standpoint, the visuals, the sound effects, the sound editing, and how it all gels together brings tears to my eyes.

What’s your favourite place to eat in Kitchener, and why?

My favourite place in KW is a place called Kenzo Ramen. A few years back I went to Japan and I was introduced to ramen – not the instant packet kind, the legit stuff. We ate it all the time because it was super cheap, and when we came back I had this fixation for it. I needed to eat more and more. About two years ago this ramen place name into the KW area as there are very few options to go out and buy ramen in our city. This place has a huge variety of different ramens and I was all over it.

I would recommend the Netsu Ramen or the King of Kings. They share the same broth, smooth yet spicy, and they come with pork, soft boiled egg…I don’t know how else to put it. It’s just really good!

The post Meet the Team, Vidyard Style: Blake Smith appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/meet-team-vidyard-style-blake-smith/

4 Easy and Effective Ways League Integrates Video Into Their Sales Strategy

This post was originally published on Upshot.

Crafting a perfect sales message can be painful, but it’s essential to capturing a decision maker’s attention. In an over-saturated sales market, why not try video? That’s exactly what we did at League. We create innovative personalized video emails in an instant. We’ve not only emerged as industry leaders in digital heath, but we’ve increased our response rate by three times. Here’s how Vidyard’s video marketing has shaped our sales strategy.

The sales industry is cut-throat and competitive. We are all too familiar with our inboxes being saturated with offers featuring the latest and greatest product or being inundated with popup ads every time we consume digital entertainment. Quite frankly, it becomes annoying and turns off potential clients.

When I accepted the position as the VP of Sales at League, a digital alternative to health benefits, I knew I wanted to build a cutting-edge team and invest in an innovative sales software. In the past year, we’ve grown from a team of one to more than 30 dedicated sales professionals. I attribute a great deal of our success to the early adoption of Vidyard. Their video creation tool is our secret weapon in the ever-competitive world of marketing and sales.

I was familiar with Vidyard and knew they had a world-class marketing and sales operation. When they launched ViewedIt, I reached out to one of my friends at the company and asked for the opportunity to spend some time with it. It only took a few moments with the software to realize that ViewedIt was exactly what our sales team needed.

How to Successfully Deploy Video in Your Sales Org

Ease-of-Use Is the Top Priority at Vidyard

Implementation and training was a snap and each of our sales reps at League are trained to use ViewedIt to communicate with select prospects. When you’re in an industry that’s dominated by big names, you need every edge you can get. Thanks to the incredibly simple, yet powerful interface in ViewedIt, the sales team at League has had no trouble separating ourselves from the crowd.

The following four features in ViewedIt are simplifying our sales cycle, saving us time and generating revenue.

• One-Click Recording: With ViewedIt, making a new video is as simple as clicking a button and just talking.
• Easy Email Sharing: Once our sales rep has recorded a message, they drop the link into an email and shoot it to the recipient. It’s as simple as that.
• A Buildable Library: After a member of our sales team has completed a video, the finished product can be added to our group library to be used for future messaging.
• Send Out a Playlist: ViewedIt allows us to create video playlists that we can send to our clients to convey a bunch of information all at once.

More than anything, ViewedIt works consistently and effectively, every time. Of course, solid tech is just the jumping off point for the myriad benefits that League has discovered over the course of our time using ViewedIt. We’ve seen tangible results throughout the sales cycle. Here is a sampling of the instant value that we’ve gained from Vidyard in six months.

Cut Through the Noise

When it comes to enticing prospective customers to try League, ViewedIt is indispensable. The inbox of most company executives is constantly getting pounded with sales emails all day every day. Even on LinkedIn and on Twitter, there’s almost no reprieve. So, to have software like ViewedIt that helps distinguish our product immediately is invaluable.

Add Valuable Personalization

One of the biggest benefits to ViewedIt is the instant connection your video emails make with the client. As opposed to a traditional solicitation email, ViewedIt puts you front and center with the customer from the get-go. This enhances the customer-provider relationship immediately.

ViewedIt Provides 3X Better Response Rate

We’ve found that video emails are much more impactful than the traditional options across the board. When a potential customer sees their name or sees a video that’s been tailored to their business, they’ll instantly appreciate the extra time and effort you’ve put into your work.

Using Video for Improving Response Rates

Convey Your Message Precisely

Let’s be honest, most executives are way too busy to read word-for-word every single sales pitch that comes their way. There is simply no time to read every email with precision. With ViewedIt, however, our clients can simply click the play button and hear exactly the message we want to convey. There’s no skimming the message, which means there’s no potential for our message to get garbled because an executive is busy with his or her assignments.

Using Video in Proposals

ViewedIt Is Impactful at Every Touchpoint

Whether you’re reaching out to a new customer, responding to questions, providing a micro demo, recap or overview of a meeting, ViewedIt’s intuitive tools make it easy to transition from old school emails to something fresh and interesting.

4 Tips and Tricks When Adopting ViewedIt for Your Company

At League, we adopted the ViewedIt platform in its infancy. As a result, we’ve had more time than most with the product, thereby learning some important lessons.

• Get Your Team Onboard: If you just stick to the standard lessons provided by Vidyard, you won’t likely see wide adoption of ViewedIt among your team. Not because the product isn’t exceptional, but because it’s new. With all new things, it’s important to assign your team specific projects that focus on the new technology. If you encourage your staff to pick up ViewedIt and use it once or twice, you’ll find that your team is much better equipped to make the most of the ViewedIt software.
• Give Your Team Helpful Feedback: When starting out with ViewedIt, some will be too stiff, some will talk too slow or too fast, some will use their hands too much or not enough. The point being, not everyone is going to be a natural when it comes to filming themselves for the first time, so be sure to provide some constructive criticism in the early stages so that everyone on the team can improve and feel confident.
• Circulate the Best Videos: When someone on your team shows a natural talent for video emails, or you run across a particularly good example of a video email, spread it around. Not only will this help motivate your employees to work hard, but it will also give them a more clearly defined goal to shoot for when they make their video.
• Circle Back Around: It should only take about two weeks until the ViewedIt software becomes a habit for your work force, but that doesn’t mean you should sit back. Keep assigning projects that are shared with the team at large, keep giving feedback and keep showcasing your best material. Using ViewedIt consistently will help make it part of your corporate culture, which can only improve ViewedIt’s already-sterling results.

Our Customers Love Video Messaging

Since transitioning to ViewedIt, we’ve received tons of feedback from our customers that state quite clearly that the first step in our relationship was due entirely to the innovative and creative use of video emails. This marketing strategy is cutting-edge new technology; early adopters can only reap huge dividends with video emails, and while the market may saturate over time, there is nothing quite like video to maintain a clear, concise and timely message.

If you want to kick your sales efforts up to the next level, then video emails are the way to go, and ViewedIt from Vidyard is the only smart option. It takes 30 seconds of our time to create a personalized video to leave a lasting impression with our prospects. While I would love to keep this secret all to myself, I would encourage sales professionals looking for the next trend in sales and marketing software to check out Vidyard.

The post 4 Easy and Effective Ways League Integrates Video Into Their Sales Strategy appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/4-ways-league-video-sales-strategy/

How the Washington Post applies the 4 Pillars of Success to the Newsroom

This week we look at a recent NPR analysis of how the Washington Post became profitable after Jeff Bezos acquired them. It was as simple as applying the unifying principles behind the 4 pillars of Amazon success and leveraging the Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It flywheel.

I am publishing these weekly over on my Facebook author page.

The post How the Washington Post applies the 4 Pillars of Success to the Newsroom appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

source http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/washington-post-applies-4-pillars-success-newsroom/

Chalk Talks: Generate More Value From Your Existing Videos

Modern businesses have amassed huge libraries of video, from explainer content, to demos, how to videos, recorded webinars, promo videos; you name it, businesses have got it on camera. So much so that businesses now have, on average, 293 videos in their library, and that number is expected to double in the next 16 months. But whether you have five videos or 5,000 videos, your goal as a marketer should be to maximize the ROI and get as much value as you can from each video asset. Today in this Chalk Talk, I want to talk about how you can use a modern video marketing platform and your existing video library to reach new audiences, generate new leads, and ultimately accelerate your deal cycle and drive prospects to the buying cycle faster with video. First things first is getting more eyes on your video content.

Where to Start

I suggest starting with your website and making sure that all of your videos are optimized for SEO, include the right metadata, and make sure that your videos are in your sitemaps so that search engines like Google can find it. Google does index video as part of the search results and it presents a very visual and compelling call to action in an otherwise sea of search results.

 

Now you can look at using video on your blog. I would suggest getting started with an old webinar, including the full video of that webinar in your blog post, and writing a quick transcript of some of the key points. This is a great way of getting eyes on a piece of older video content and also getting a free blog post topic out of it, which, as a content marketer, I love.

I would also suggest including video in your email campaigns. The play button is one of the most compelling calls to action on the web, and that goes doubly so for email. Include culture content, old campaign videos, even short how-to videos in your nurture campaigns and you will see an increased engagement on that video content and in your email campaigns.

Next up is social and YouTube. I’m a big fan of using YouTube, but I think businesses make one big mistake when they’re setting up videos on their YouTube channel, and that is not including a link back to your website. If you don’t give people an opportunity to get back to where you want them to go, they’re just going to get lost in YouTube and you’re never going to see them again.

Last but not least is video hubs. This is a relatively new piece of technology. It allows you to create a private YouTube like experience on your website and you can group your videos into categories like how-to videos, customer testimonials, culture content, and give people the chance to consume your video content while seeing recommended videos that are only from your library.

Driving More Clicks on Your Video

So, once you have those more viewers, how do you increase the click-through rate on the videos that you already have? I suggest starting with the metadata, so title, description, and the keywords on your video. You’re going to want to make sure that this is consistent across all of the videos wherever they’ve been embedded. This is one of the nice things that a like a platform like Vidyard can do. If you change the title and description in one place, it’ll propagate that change everywhere so all of your videos are always up to date.

Next up, I would say, is making sure that your thumbnail is compelling. Your thumbnail is the thing that people see before they click play, and you want to make sure that you have a compelling one because like it or not, people do judge books by their covers. Many video platforms allow you to split test your thumbnail image so you can pit two or three different thumbnails against each other and find the one that is the most compelling. This is a great way of making sure that all of your videos are always optimized for click-throughs.

Turning Viewers Into Leads

Once people are clicking on your videos, then you want to make sure that they’re converting as a result of that video content. I suggest starting with a post-roll call to action, something like a subscribe button, sign up for more information, option to download whatever content asset you’re talking about, anything that gives people who have been engaged enough to watch that video all the way to the end the opportunity to do something about it.

You can also set up a choose your own path style video, where you present three or four videos at the end of a piece of video content, giving people a chance to continue consuming that video. YouTube does a great job of this by offering recommended content, but you can do the same thing with your own videos.

Last up is lead forms, and whether you use them pre-, during, or post-roll, they’re a powerful way of getting people to self select themselves as leads, and ultimately accelerate themselves a little bit further into that buyer’s journey all on their own. I’m a big fan of post-roll lead forms because as far as I’m concerned, again, same as the post-roll CTA, if somebody’s watched your video all the way to the end, that’s a pretty compelled lead. Give them the chance to put their hand up and say “I’d like more information” or “I’d like to sign up for a demo.”

Video for Sales

Last but not least is getting your video content used by sales. Sales people are interacting with prospects on a daily basis, and they are looking for content to send out. All you have to do is make sure that that content’s easy to access and works in a way that fits with their workflow.

First up is making sure that each one of your videos has an individual page that salespeople can send prospects to similar to what you get on YouTube when you link to an individual video. Now, a platform like Vidyard makes this very easy by giving a sharing page for every single player that you create, and why this is so powerful is that it gives your sales team the ability to just select a single video, send it out to a prospect without distractions and without anything else to click on. So rather than sending them to YouTube or to a landing page, all they’re sending them to is that video, and they know for sure whether or not they’ve watched it.

Another thing you’ll want to make sure of is that it’s easy for sales to share your video content via email or through their prospecting tool. Here’s how we do this with Vidyard: Within your email tool, you’ll see a Vidyard button you can click on and this will show a drop down of all the videos you have access to. You can click on one or many different videos and it will automatically drop a thumbnail of those videos into your email and send it off to prospects. Your sales team will see who’s clicked on which videos, how long they’ve watched, and be able to get other engagement data on the video content in addition to being able to very easily share your videos.

This is very, very powerful stuff, and everyone knows that sales teams are hungry to be able to provide the right content at the right time to prospects, so a little bit of effort in terms of getting your videos so that your sales team can share them easily will go a long way in making sure that those videos stay relevant to your prospects.

So, whether you have five videos or 5,000 videos, using these tips and a video marketing platform, you can breathe life into your existing video content to get more eyes on your videos, get those people better engaged with your video content, and hopefully ultimately accelerate your sales cycle and close more deals. My name is Jon Spenceley, and this has been a Vidyard Chalk Talk.

The post Chalk Talks: Generate More Value From Your Existing Videos appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/chalk-talks-generate-value-existing-videos/

3 Fundamental Pillars of Technical Support and How Video Can Help

The expectations of customers are changing.

In a 2017 report, Salesforce found that Customer Experience is “the defining line between companies that are struggling and those that are thriving”. What’s more, customers are saying themselves that “their brand loyalty is heavily influenced by the quality of service they receive.”

This is why your service team needs to be staying ahead of the curve and finding ways to provide the best possible experience.

It’s also why they should be using video.

Top support teams are utilizing the power of video to provide a personal touch and engage deeper with customers across the entire lifecycle. In addition to marketing and selling to customers with video, Technical Support has found three key areas to increase customer satisfaction of our services:

1. Personalized Customer Engagement,
2. Knowledge Management, and
3. Troubleshooting and Case Resolution.

Let’s dive into exactly how video can help.

1. Personalized Customer Engagement

How often, as a customer service professional or even consumer have you written or received an email that apologizes for a bad experience or a mistake?

I’d bet at least once.

While apologies are good, apologies over email often sound insincere or lacking in empathy. Let’s face it, there are only so many ways to apologize in writing. If you introduce video, however, you introduce a whole new form of communication: body language. Now your clients will see you empathizing with them. They’ll hear their name spoken and the physical gesture of a hand reaching out to them directly, which shows your team means their issue seriously.

Speaking in short, clear, actionable sentences along with verbal pauses give you the ability to add resolve to your messages and more easily demonstrate commitment to improving. Video also invites a more open dialog with your clients by humanizing your message and opening yourself up to a response.

On a brighter note, video doesn’t only have to be the way you crawl (graciously) back from a mistake. It can also be used for positive outreach! Try replacing automated text-based “thank you” notes with personalized videos. You’ll be guaranteed to stand out in your customer’s inbox as well as make them feel like they’re worthy of your time (always great for that NPS score). Check out an example of one of these that I recorded below:

2. Knowledge Management

Today more than ever, customers expect a seamless experience. Apps for your phone don’t come with manuals and software applications are moving to digital knowledge-bases instead of lengthy PDFs or printed guides.

The easier you can make it for your consumer to use your product, the better. A 2015 McKinsey customer experience survey of 27,000 US consumers across 44 industries found that companies that focus on providing a superior and low effort experience across their customer journeys realized positive business results, including a 10-15% increase in revenue growth and a 20 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

But this trend towards ease of use doesn’t mean that customers don’t need help at all. They do. But when they look for help, they want it in bite-sized chunks. By creating short, polished videos for product overviews and major features, you can onboard more end users and guide them towards successfully using your products in a repeatable and consistent way.

Organizing and structuring searchable video content and embedding that content in a Knowledge Base will give your customers access to branded instructions and best practices to onboard themselves.  With video analytics you are able to tell which of your videos are most or least engaging and how frequently they are being consumed. This leaves the perfect opportunity for optimizing your content. You control the branding and message, and your customers can self-service themselves more easily.

Take a look at an example we created for our own knowledge base for a question we’re regularly asked at Vidyard:

3. Troubleshooting and Case Resolution

Have you ever tried to explain a concept to someone over the phone or email and it just wasn’t getting through?

It happens all the time. For me, I was speaking with a non-technical customer early in my career who had never resized a window within the Windows Operating System. Explaining how to position the mouse pointer over the edge of a window until a double arrow icon appeared was painful. The terms “pointer”, “window”, “double-arrow”, “click-and-hold” and others were all foreign to this user.

Had I had access to video, the process likely would’ve been a lot less painful. Video would’ve easily shown the user exactly how to gesture, where to go, and what it looks like all in a more efficient way than simple text can.

Just think about this: the last time you tried to replace the air filter on your car, use a new recipe, or check out a movie review, where did you turn? Increasingly the answer is YouTube or Facebook channels showing quick 30-60 second videos of how to solve these common problems. Search Engine Island found that searches related to “how-to” on YouTube are growing 70% year over year.

Video engages you in the process of solving your problem. Explaining in text how to remove a hidden bolt, or tell when your curry sauce is ready is more difficult than showing exactly what it looks like.

Enabling your Technical Support Representatives to provide video walkthroughs of complex troubleshooting or implementation techniques will reduce your Average Case Handle Time, engage your customers in a more positive experience and lower your cost per case. By making these videos re-usable, your teams can focus on more critical or less common types of problems, providing the team with more engaging roles and speeding up the average handle time of even the most difficult cases.

Finally, video also humanizes your support team and can reduce escalating tensions by putting a face to the company representative. It removes the anonymity that makes criticism and insult so easy in our text-based connected world.  

Check out an example here:

Increasing customer engagement, improving average close time, and giving your customers the power to self-serve will positively impact your business. Utilizing video ensures your customers are best positioned for success and are more engaged with your brand.  As companies start to ask for higher levels of service and customer experience becomes a larger factor than price in the decision making process, it is vital to find new ways to ensure a consistent, effective method of working with your customers. Video brings the best of your team forward. It is more personal than text and less interruptive than a phone call. Your positive correlation to Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) will be seen and your team will have more energy to focus on the most important cases. This is the power of video within Technical Support.

The post 3 Fundamental Pillars of Technical Support and How Video Can Help appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/3-pillars-technical-support-video/

Why You Need Read Like Your Career Depends Upon It

Man, not again.  

This was the thought racing through my head.

The writing was on the wall.

I was working for a non-profit organization as a copywriter. The organization was going through internal changes, and I had a hunch my job would be phased out. Turns out I was right.

Thankfully, I had started acting on my hunch and decided to learn a new skill. By the time my position was phased out, I was well on my way to transitioning into a different position.

To make this pivot, I leveraged my skills and experience so I could create a bridge to similar work: content strategy. I started reading several books on the topic. This was 2013, so there wasn’t a ton on the market. But there were several helpful books, such as:

• Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach
• Content Strategy for Mobile by Karen McGrane
• Clout by Colleen Jones
• The Web Content Strategist’s Bible by Richard Sheffield
• Content Rules by Ann Handley and C. C. Chapman
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott
• Managing Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose

Reading these books, and many other books and articles on complementary topics, gave me the confidence and skills I needed to make the move.

Were it not for the knowledge I gained from these resources, I would have never been able to transition into a new line of work. Through no fault of my own or ill will from the organization, I would have been left out in the cold.

Crazy enough, this wasn’t the only time I’ve had to make such a transition.

I’ve had several professional transitions, and I’ve had to learn new skills along the way: primarily through reading books.

Here’s a snapshot of my professional background in the past 10 years:

• Insurance Sales (Personal & Business)
• Retail Store Manager
• Pastoral Ministry
• Call Center Sales Representative
• Copywriting
• Content Management
• Marketing Manager

For many years, I’ve wrestled with the changes I’ve gone through. When I was in high school, I assumed I would go to college and then work, raise a family, and retire. I had this idea my life would follow a straight line from beginning to end. Turns out my professional career has looked more like an EKG of someone with a high heart rate. It’s up and down and all over the place.

Some of my transitions were on purpose. For example, I originally obtained a bachelor’s degree in marketing, then pursued a career in insurance, then decided to resign from that line of work in order to pursue pastoral ministry. But other transitions were not.

There were times when circumstances necessitated looking for a new job or when something turned out to be the wrong fit. And that’s okay.

For many of you, your career path will look similar to mine. And you have to be okay with this. Gone are the days when you could go to college, work for the same employer, and live in the same town until you retired.

I understand this will not be the case for some professions—like nurses and doctors, lawyers, accountants, and teachers—who tend to have a more linear professional development. But most people will experience significant career changes. Here are some sobering statistics to consider:

• Average employee tenure is 4.6 years.
• Average millennial tenure is less than 3 years.
• Life expectancy of a company on the S&P 500 is barely 15 years.

Add to this the growing trend in the United States workforce toward hiring contingent workers (e.g., contract, part-time, etc.), and you can see that job security is a vapor. Here today. Gone tomorrow.

Throughout your life, you may go through 10–15 different jobs during your career. If you’re a millennial, this number will most likely be higher. Recent studies discovered that millennials will change jobs four times before they’re 32.

Regardless to say, we will face a lot of change throughout our careers.

On one hand, part of the changes we will go through come as a result of discovering who we are, what we want to do, and what we want out of life. On the other hand, some of the changes we go through will be brought on by circumstances beyond our control: mergers, outsourcing, company collapses, or company relocation.

My aim in telling you this isn’t to dash your dreams against the rocks. Think of it more like me waving smelling salts under your nose to wake you up to the common reality most of us will face in the US.

It’s time to wake up, and get ready for these new challenges!

But where do we start?

How can we prepare ourselves for this new economic reality?

Simple.

Set a new target.

The key to preparing for a changing career path

The age-old wisdom in the US has been this for years:

• Get a college degree
• Get a job
• Start a family
• Retire

Well, this advice has some merit to it. But today, it’s incomplete.

At one point in US history, obtaining a college degree would place you in a position to get a job and stay employed with the same company for years. It was important what school you went to and what course of study you pursued.

But today, getting a bachelor’s degree is merely a prerequisite for many jobs, and you aren’t guaranteed to get a job in your field of study. Research conducted found that two-thirds of college graduates had a job that required a bachelor’s degree, but only 27.3% of these graduates were in a job directly related to their field of study. For example, if you’re studying literature, you might find yourself working in advertising.

Getting a college degree is an important first step, but it’s not the end. To prepare yourself for the new economic challenges you will face, you need to set your sights on becoming a lifelong learner.

This isn’t something you can be passive about. According to a recent report by The Economist, lifelong learning is becoming an economic imperative. In other words, we need to be constantly learning. We have to have our eyes on obtaining new skills and gaining different experiences to ensure our professional marketability.

A lifelong learner is someone who is self-motivated and committed to gaining new knowledge and skills. You have many ways to accomplish this goal—you can get a new degree, obtain a graduate certificate, or take online courses. At times, some of these options may be best for you and what you want to accomplish. But one of the best, most affordable, and flexible ways you can improve yourself professionally is by reading books.

Your turn

Do you read like your career depends upon it?

If not, I get it.

Today, people are reading less than before. Several recent studies reveal a growing decline in reading:

• The National Endowment for the Arts reports a three-decade low among US adults who read literature.
• A Pew Research Center survey found a small decline in the number of American adults who read a book.

Even though this decline is reading is troubling on many levels, it does provide you with a great opportunity to get ahead. “A readership crisis is really a leadership crisis,” writes Michael Hyatt. Michael goes on to say, “And for people who know how to respond, crisis is just another way of saying opportunity.”

If you’re ready to start reading more books, then I encourage you to take a moment to make a reading plan. This way you can create your own personal reading plan, and really enjoy the benefits reading has to offer.

The post Why You Need Read Like Your Career Depends Upon It appeared first on The Copybot.

source http://thecopybot.com/career-path/

3 Things You Need to Know to Dominate Video On YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram

Would you write the same birthday card to your Grandma May on her 80th birthday as to your nephew Sal on his 8th birthday? I would bet not. Why? Because they have different tastes and are looking for different things. Sure, they’re both birthday cards but you can’t just reuse the same card for a different purpose.

The same goes for video (or any content, for that matter) across different social platforms. Since content consumers go to different social platforms for different reasons, it’s important to understand so that you can tailor your video content accordingly.

Take Facebook and YouTube for example:

• YouTube is mature and diverse
• YouTube is a video-first destination with a focus on maximizing video consumption, whereas Facebook is social first and focuses on ease of sharing
• YouTube has a big focus on search, whereas Facebook does not
• YouTube has both short and long-form content, whereas Facebook has mainly short-form

Mark Robertson, Co-founder of Little Monster Media Co., recently shared the 7 Rules for Optimizing B2B Video on YouTube and Social. This is a quick recap of some of the top lessons from his talk with three key ways to maximize the impact of your video content across different platforms. If you want to watch Mark’s full, 29 minute session, you can check it out here.

1. Content Discovery

One of the biggest differences across platforms is the way content is consumed. Mark defines the difference as a “push” and “pull” experience.

Social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn rely on the discovery through a “push” experience or mainly organic, passive discovery. To be watched, a video on Facebook must catch the consumer’s eye as they’re scrolling through their feed.

YouTube, on the other hand, has a “pull” experience where consumers of content have to know what they’re looking for in order to find it.

As Mark says, “On Facebook, your mission is to stop someone scrolling past your video in their newsfeed and grab their attention immediately.” And, in fact, 65% of people who watch the first three seconds of a video will watch more than 10 seconds on Facebook.  

We can see the difference in content across different platforms even just from the meta tags used. That’s exactly what’s represented in the word clouds below:

• YouTube is mainly descriptive, but definitely diverse
• Facebook is emotional, inspirational, and provocative (think about the reaction buttons on Facebook) 
• Instagram is fun, happy, and about building a community

Learn more about the patterns of content discovery on each platform from Mark’s talk.

2. Getting Traffic Back to Your Website

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that one of your main goals is likely to drive traffic back to your site.

Yeah?

Of course it is. And, just like everything else, there are different ways to do this for different platforms. The best opportunities are outlined below:

3. Design and Aspect Ratio

Depending on where your video will be hosted, you may want to adjust the size or design of your video. On Facebook, vertical video is making a come-back because it fits so well within the mobile feed. Whereas, YouTube has a slightly better full-screen experience and therefore still works best with standard dimensions.

Of course, for an optimal video on Instagram, it’ll be a 1:1 aspect ratio.

Here’s a full breakdown of recommended technical requirements for video on each platform according to their user guidelines:

Facebook:

• Caption length text: Text only, max 2,200 characters
• Recommended Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1 / 16:9 / HDTV, 2:39:1 or 2:40:1 / Widescreen / 9:16, 1:1 / 1.33:1 / 4:3 / SDTV, 1.375:1 / film, 1.85:1 / Film, no pillar boxing or letter boxing
• Length: 120 minutes max
• Minimum resolution: minimum width 600 pixels, length dependent on video aspect ratio
• File Size: Up to 4GB max
• Frames: 30fps max
• Format: Full list of supported file formats here
• Bitrate: No limit to bitrate file if you’re using two pass encoding, as long as long as your file doesn’t exceed 1 GB. Otherwise, 8 megabits per second for 1080p and 4 megabits per second for 720p.
• Your image should include minimal text. See how the amount of text in your ad image will impact the reach of your ad.

YouTube:

• YouTube uses 16:9 aspect ratio players. If you’re uploading a non-16:9 file, it will be processed and displayed correctly as well, with pillar boxes (black bars on the left and right) or letter boxes (black bars at the top and bottom) provided by the player.
• Content should be encoded and uploaded in the same frame rate it was recorded. Common frame rates include: 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, 60 frames per second (other frame rates are also acceptable).
• Bitrate recommendations:

See more from YouTube here.

Instagram:

• Aspect Ratio: 1:1
• Video: H.264 video compression, high profile preferred, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan
• Format: .mp4 container ideally with leading mov atom, no edit lists
• Audio: Stereo AAC audio compression, 128kbps + preferred
• Caption: Text only, 125 characters recommended
• Caption length text: 2,200 characters Max
• Video aspect ratio: Landscape (1.91:1), Square (1:1), Vertical (4:5)
• Minimum resolution: 600 x 315 pixels (1.91:1 landscape) / 600 x 600 pixels (1:1 square) / 600 x 750 pixels (4:5 vertical)
• Minimum length: No minimum
• Maximum length: 60 seconds
• File type: Full list of supported file formats
• Supported video codecs: H.264, VP8
• Supported audio codecs: AAC, Vorbis
• Maximum size: 4GB
• Frame rate: 30fps max
• Bitrate: No limit to bitrate file if you’re using two pass encoding, as long as your file doesn’t exceed 1 GB. Otherwise, 8 megabits per second for 1080p and 4 megabits per second for 720p.
• Thumbnail image ratio: Should match the aspect ratio of your video. Your image should include minimal text. See how the amount of text in your ad image will impact the reach of your ad.

See more from Instagram here.

Discover the 7 Rules for Social Video

Watch the full version of Mark’s talk, 7 Rules for Optimizing B2B Video on YouTube and Social, to also see:

• • Channel and profile page best practices for optimizing for video
  • Advertising guidelines for YouTube and Facebook
  • Recommendations for meta descriptions, tagging, etc
  • How to maximize engagement with the text surrounding your video
  • And more!

The post 3 Things You Need to Know to Dominate Video On YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/3-need-know-dominate-video-youtube-facebook-instagram/

11 Simple Ways to Improve Your Internal Communication with Video

For most of human existence, we’ve been trying to come up with ways to say things to people who aren’t in the room. There have been carrier pigeons, smoke signals, semaphores, trumpets, and now SMS, emails, voicemails, movies, emojis, and snaps. But does it ever compare to face-to-face interaction?

Most would agree not. That’s because, with each of these forms, something of the message is lost. You miss out on the interplay of all the senses that comes with seeing, hearing, and reading all the non-verbal communication that we’ve evolved to receive. Yet in the device-addicted, always-connected modern landscape of business, one technology is bringing back the human spark: video.

Why is it new? Because with quick-capture technology like Vidyard’s ViewedIt, it’s finally easy. And because video has a higher informational throughput—you can say far more with less effort—it’s opening up a world of possibility for internal communications.

Here are 11 ways that video is perfect for internal communications:

 

1. Executive fireside chats

Fireside chats are far from a new concept, but what about internal ones? With the power of webcams or a quick camera + tripod set up, there’s no need for heavy industrial camera equipment and a marketing-led, makeup-padded production. In fact, Vidyard customers are finding that engagement rises and internal audiences watch for longer when videos are informal. Just a little lighting, maybe a hi-definition webcam, and your executives have a direct channel to the entire company.

2. Capturing meetings 

It’s always the webinar or the whiteboard brainstorming session that you didn’t think to capture that you end up needing. Erase those regrets and set up either screencapture or your laptop webcam (or both!) to document the entire thing. Save them for easy recall by tagging them by date, time, and topic.

3. Broadcasting standups

Saving team weekly or bi-weekly meetings via video helps teams remember what happened previously and allows team members who weren’t there to stay up to date.

4. Keeping remote teams connected

Video communicates more than phone calls do alone and they help alleviate the alienation that remote workers can often feel. This is increasingly important as already, 43% of the U.S. workforce works remotely to some degree, reports The New York Times, and this figure is expected to grow to 50% by 2020. It’s important for your organization to nail down these video communication skills now to maintain that connection no matter what.

Want to learn more on this? Check out this post on how video is reviving culture for remote employees.

5. Walk-throughs

Ever have someone circulate an internal email on how to change your HR benefits or update an Outlook setting that looked like an impenetrable wall of jargon-filled text? Suffer those email essays no longer. Technologies like ViewedIt allow you to screen-capture while you talk so that everyone can follow along. It’s like a webinar, but without the mind-numbing complexity.

At Vidyard, we just switched from using Google Hangout video calls to Zoom video calls for our meetings. Our handy Greg Bowen made these videos for us all to learn how to switch our calendar invites:

6. Onboarding

While many organizations have onboarding processes, it’s remarkably difficult to build a bullet-proof system. Instead, new hires typically pester more senior employees with corner-case questions until they’re ramped up. This is great for team building, but bad for productivity. Senior folk who record their answers in video, need only do it once, for all future new hires. These videos can then be stored in a simple video onboarding hub for easy access.

7. Peer-to-peer messages

Some questions or problems transcend text or voicemail, and it’s easiest to ask them via video. This way, employees can walk through their thought process, lead their peers up to where they got stuck, and invite their responses.

8. Tribal knowledge data dumps

Whenever a teammate reaches an “aha moment” and discovers something critical, it’s not unusual for people to gather around their desk to see. Usually, the knowledge transfer ends there. With video, however, teams can share their newly won tribal knowledge with a wider group and save it for future new hires.

9. Product feedback

Constant feedback is crucial to agile development teams but more often than not, they either have to hunt through analytics or interview users to get it. With simple video capture, product teams can solicit feedback from across the organization to hear, see, and watch reactions from everyone in a client-facing role.

10. Product announcements

If a product team wants to demonstrate a new feature, it’s not uncommon for leadership to gather everyone into conference halls or onto webinars for a demonstration. If your product team works in sprints that are measured in weeks, this is impractical, and announcements must either wait or developers must pack it all into the release notes and hope that people read it. With video, these teams can simply show how the feature works in real-time and track to see who has actually watched.

When we first launched ViewedIt internally, our product champion, Daryna Kulya, shared a video with us all with the details we needed to know:

11. Marketing announcements

As a marketer, there are few things worse than hearing what your new marketing message has evolved into after it’s gone through the telephone-game process of making its rounds through the company. Video, on the other hand, allows you to distribute your exact phrasing, intonation, and wording directly to everyone in the company to a place where they can return whenever they wish. It’s also really great to communicate a marketing launch to the whole company. Check out this video I created to announce the launch of our Video Selling Institute:

Video is ideal for internal communications and can be had for a fraction of the cost of raising a roost of hardy carrier pigeons. And the best part? We haven’t even discovered half of the uses yet. Be part of the video shift—download the ViewedIt plugin and see what your organization comes up with!

The post 11 Simple Ways to Improve Your Internal Communication with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/11-ways-video-improve-internal-communication/