4 Tactical Ways Salespeople Can Build Trust with Video

Have you ever had a text message conversation that was needlessly tense? Where you wrote something, saw your friend’s little “typing” indicator come up, and then watched it drop off with no reply?

If you’re like me, you wondered, “Was it something I said? Did they take it the wrong way? Have I offended them?” The ensuing minutes can feel like hours.

This painful uncertainty is essentially what it’s like to sell via cold emails or voicemails. You’re blindly casting out messages and wondering whether your prospect understood you. Why? Because text and voice alone just never communicate enough. And, without the ability to say more, it’s pretty tough to land any sales.

Bridging the trust gap

For a sale to happen, “there has to be a trust and an emotional connection,” says Hunter Madeley, the Chief Sales Officer at Hubspot. Without that, prospects can’t be sure that a salesman won’t mislead them about the product, embarrass them in front of their boss, or take the money and run.

According to Psychology Today, there’s an easy way to establish this trust. You must demonstrate that you exhibit the 3 c’s of trustworthy people: competence, character, and caring.

Here’s how video helps you quickly check those boxes:

• Competence: Video can demonstrate your professionalism through your demeanor, your dress, and your smile. According to the scientific journal Evolution & Human Behavior, even if you only manage a friendly grin, it will make people 10% more willing to trust you.
• Character: Video lets you demonstrate your personality so that you’re more memorable. Once prospects see and hear you a few times, you’ll evolve from a stranger into an acquaintance.  
• Caring: People naturally assume that videos take more effort than email, and if you’re making an effort, you’re showing that you care.

With the power of video, you can start a conversation with prospects that’s devoid of long pauses, awkward misunderstandings, and ‘…’ responses.

Here are 4 tactical applications for building trust with video:

1. Use it to avoid misunderstandings: If you ever find yourself composing an email that takes you more than ten minutes to write, shut it down and record a video. If whatever you’re trying to say requires that much careful wording, it’s highly likely that something’s going to get lost in translation. It’s far better to show, not just tell, via video. This helps weed out any misunderstandings and keep the trust level high.
2. Help the ‘ghost’ buyers: There’s a segment of the market that wants to buy, but doesn’t want to talk to sales. “Everybody on the planet has had unpleasant experiences with salespeople,” writes Geoffrey James, a professional sales coach, in Inc. “Many have walked away from a sales situation feeling manipulated.” These sort of prospects will avoid talking you at all cost and instead will ravenously research on your website. With video, you can reach out, help them, and establish an early rapport. Send them recordings of yourself explaining the product and suggesting places that they research. This gives them at least part of what they need without having to submit to a live call and gives you the opportunity to build up some trust.
3. Reinforce conversations: We’ve all had a great call or demonstration with a client whereafter we wonder, “how much of that are they going to remember? And how effectively will they communicate this to their boss?” Don’t leave it up to chance: immediately send a follow-up video while it’s all still fresh in your mind. Highlight the most important points over again. Later in the sales cycle, when they’ve talked to competitors and they’re feeling more confused than ever about who does what, you’ll be able to defend your credibility because you’ve documented what you said.
4. Show vulnerability and doubt: Just as seeming clueless can cause clients to distrust you, so can seeming too certain. “If you’re absolutely convinced the customer needs your product, the customer will sense you’re close-minded and become close-minded in return,” says Geoffrey. You can use video recordings to share your thoughts, and show that you are actually considering their perspective.

Don’t leave your prospects wondering what you meant. Start using video to show your competence, your character, and that you care to build the kind of trust that leads to sales!

The post 4 Tactical Ways Salespeople Can Build Trust with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/4-tactical-ways-salespeople-can-build-trust-video/

Content Pros: Why a Waiter Should Be Your Next Content Pro

Teaming up with the team at Convince & Convert, Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard hosts the Content Pros Podcast. For this week’s episode, Tyler is joined by Clair Byrd, Director of Competitive Marketing at Twilio to talk about creating the perfect content vehicle. Check out the full podcast:

Here’s a few of our favourite moments:

During your time at InVision, how did you create such a vast network of external contributors to your blog?

There are a couple things that when we were building this program we wanted to shift. I’d been involved in trying to build contributed programs for a long time and I always saw a lot of problems. I tried to go in with the mindset of just taking those problems off the table. One, you have to make people look really sexy. That was job number one, was to design a blog that was beautiful and people felt proud of being on. Beyond anything else, that was our job number one, make them look really great.

Number two, let them write about what they want to write about. So many contributed programs that I’ve been a part of have so many strict editorial guidelines and rules and they actually prescribe topics to you. That’s not how we approach this at all. We were like, “That’s nonsense. No one is going to actually write about something that we want them to write about. We will empower them to write about the topics that they care about.” Instead of having an editorial line, we put together a framework where we’re like, “If your topic falls within design skills and methodology, design culture, and design leadership, we will publish it.” We would happily contradict that point of view the next week. We didn’t feel like there needed to be any sense of stream of consciousness around what we were trying to do because we really wanted to represent a healthy cross-section of the design community. We empowered people to write about what they wanted to.

The third thing was that we staffed differently than a normal content marketing team. We actually have people who will sit in a Google document and co-write with an author to make them feel better about the direction that their piece is taking and actually give them a really great engagement layer with a real human that makes it feel more like a partnership and less like they’re doing us a favor. We spend a lot of time with our writers to really give them a deliverable or a final piece that they’re really proud of. That’s a core tenant of the InVision marketing program, is make great stuff. Don’t be gross, that’s another one.

The last thing is that we did a lot of outbound work. This is not an easy thing. I feel like many people who set up a contributed program set it up, tell the world that they’re taking contribution, and then suddenly, the pieces will just roll in. That is absolutely not the case. We spent months and months and months going outbound, searching the internet high and low for writers who we thought were really great with something interesting to talk about and gave them the opportunity to contribute to the blog, but also told them that they would be getting a custom catered unique experience with a beautiful final deliverable that we would do the absolute best that we could to get as many eyeballs on as possible.

We also even started engaging syndicates so that when a fast company would pick up a blog post from the InVision blog, they got the byline. We didn’t care if we got the byline. We just wanted the links in the post, to be completely honest. We wanted to expand the breadth, expand the footprint of our content and we didn’t really care if we got the credit ’cause it wasn’t ours to take. It was that person’s credit to take and we were just basically riding on their coattails and providing them a hype machine in which to share their ideas with the community that they really cared about.

How did you design the blog at InVision to be so clean, clear and easy to read?

Everything that is on any InVision property is designed in house, which I think is different and I think that that actually helps with the deep understanding of the values of the company to create this really consistent thoughtful brand experience that expresses the company’s values. Plus one to doing things in house. From the perspective of approaching the blog, we were speaking to designers. We just took a design thinking approach. Designers, how do they want to read? What is the problem that we’re trying to solve?

We’re trying to communicate to designers something that they don’t know how to do yet around design leadership. What is the best format in which to do that? We ended up landing on this incredibly clean, no ads, no side bars, readable mobile-optimized experience because we knew that these designers are probably on the bus and they’re reading something or they’re on their commute. They’re probably not sitting at their desk at work. We did actually make sure that we backed this up with true facts about how people engage with our content, but the hypothesis was simply build the best solution for our audience. We cannot stress the importance of good web strategy and readability and accessibility with regard to web best practices. I would highly recommend all content people get comfortable and literate with what it is to design for the web. This is a really important thing, especially if your audience is technical. However, even still, a readable experience is going to do nothing but benefit you.

Get The Full Story

If you want to hear the full podcast, we’ve posted it above, and you can read a full transcript of this talk on Convince & Convert, where it was originally posted!

The post Content Pros: Why a Waiter Should Be Your Next Content Pro appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/content-pros-waiter-next-content-pro/

Crush Your Support Goals With Video

In the ever changing world of support, we know that creating high quality support is becoming harder than ever to execute. What’s the secret to success in this digital era? A truly outstanding customer experience—the kind that evokes heart-eyed emojis and maybe even a slow-clap.

More and more businesses are waking up to this reality but are finding that it’s becoming harder to deliver. Customers demand faster and better support practically by the day according to Salesforce’s 2017 State of Service report and support organizations are being asked to do more with the same old resources. So, what’s the best possible answer to creating more of an impact for your support goals? Video! Video is simple to record, convenient, and adds that personal touch to convey any message.

Marketers and salespeople have long known the explanatory power of video and it’s high time customer support organizations caught up. Why is video so impactful? Because it offers a higher informational throughput than legacy channels such as email, phone, or live chat.

Since video is the future for support, we wanted to make it easy for you to learn the best practices. Below are a few examples of how you can use video to to exceed your support goals.

Save Time by Replacing Phone and Email with Video Messages

Video is much more precise because support agents can record their screen as they perform the action. This leaves zero room for interpretation—it shows rather than tells—and is a huge time saver for both the sender and the viewer. Agents need only a few minutes to record a just-in-time video and customers need only the same to view it. There’s no email writing, rewriting, or editing. There’s no waiting for the customer to return from inactivity during chat support or having to repeat themselves over the phone. Agents can move on to other tickets in the interim.

Optimize videos to increase team efficiency

Video analytics allow you to continually optimize your entire team’s performance. As agents create, send, and save videos, your team can review what worked, what didn’t, and see where they can improve. Unlike other forms of support content such as emails, portals, PDF guides, and FAQs, video offers a wealth of usage data such as how much of each video a viewer has watched and where they’re struggling, rewatching, and pausing.

Increase Customer Satisfaction with Video

Videos boost customer satisfaction. In a day and age when more and more support is automated, customers who can’t fix their own problems are typically dying for the type of human connection that video delivers. With video, customers can actually see your agents empathizing with them, can hear their name spoken, and can see the physical gesture of a hand reaching out which shows that your team takes their issue seriously.

Increase Productivity with a CRM Integration

Agents who automate their video responses are far more productive. A good video automation platform will offer a super tight CRM integration. This allows agents to create and share videos from CRM support responses, automatically ties videos to customer case records, and even triggers actions. For example, if a distraught customer only watches 25 percent of a support video, agents can be notified to reach out.

Now that you’ve had a taste of what the best support agents are doing to reach their support goals, take a look at the eBook now!

 

The post Crush Your Support Goals With Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/crush-support-goals-video/

The Top 3 Trends in Customer Service

Customer expectations are higher than ever and still rising—buyers in both B2B and B2C want e-commerce-level convenience and they want it instantly, everywhere. To keep up, modern customer support teams are turning to social media, video, and service design for answers.  

Customers Want Support on Social

Customers want support in the most convenient way possible. The less work, the better, and that means more and more support traffic has been migrating onto social media and messaging platforms. Social media now accounts for 10 percent of all support traffic, and Twitter alone has seen a 250 percent increase in support traffic over the past three years according to the social care platform, Conversocial. The major social media and messaging platforms from Facebook to WhatsApp have all launched business support options in anticipation of this shift.

Why do consumers and busy professionals find social media and messaging support so attractive? Because it’s easy: they already spend much of their time on mobile and they can get help without leaving these apps. Americans now spend five hours per day on mobile phones and one in five of those minutes on Facebook according to TechCrunch.

Social support is more than a fad—Conversocial finds that 42 percent of consumers now prefer it over all other forms of support. If your brand wants to offer great support, it better become a little more social.

Customers Want Faster Support

Today’s consumers want quick resolution. As Shep Hyken, an expert on customer service and New York Times bestselling author wrote in Forbes, “Great companies don’t put customers on hold for extended periods of time.” And 39 percent of customers expect a response within four hours, according to Fast Company. This puts modern customer service organizations under pressure to find ways to deflect more support calls and achieve more first-call resolutions. One way they are doing this is through asynchronous messaging technologies like video.

“Video is asynchronous. When it’s recorded and when it’s watched are at different times, so it’s on-demand. It cuts through the challenges of time and distance,” explains Jeff Loeb, Chief Marketing Officer at Vidyard. Customer support agents who send videos via email can easily provide screen-capture walk-throughs to customers which can be saved and revisited. Companies are also incorporating more video into their self-help portals to build out video knowledge bases to educate their customers on-demand, and creating on-the-spot videos to walk users through their issue quickly:

The goal for companies is, of course, not to abandon customers and force them to support themselves—just the opposite. Brands are charged with improving the experience by making resolution immediate. “Self-service has the biggest impact when based on a win-win philosophy. The primary goal should always be an improved customer relationship,” says Fast Company.

Customers Demand Better Experiences

According to Gartner, 89 percent of companies now expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer service yet very few are living up to that aspiration. Forrester finds that only 23 percent of B2B companies claim to have a customer-centric approach and Salesforce finds that only 17 percent of brands have integrated their customer data across their organizations. What are we to make of this mess? That brands know what they want but not how to get there.

Good service design appears to be the unifying characteristic among brands who are succeeding at creating great customer experiences. Brands like IBM, Uber, and General Assembly rely heavily on service designers whose job it is to define their customer journeys and then work cross-functionally to iron-out the kinks. According to Laura Weiss, Principal at Weiss Collaborative and Senior Experience Design Advisor at consulting firm Slalom, “These journeys are not always easy. They require an alignment of customer needs and organizational capabilities.” Service designers smooth out sales-to-support handoffs, improve onboarding, educate customers, and create experiences that make customs rave with delight and want to renew.

If your customer support organization wants to keep up, it must adapt. That means launching support on social media and messaging apps, reducing resolution time with video and self-help portals, and uniting the business to create more streamlined customer experiences. The brands that do this will find themselves prepared to compete amidst the ever-rising tide of consumer expectations far into the future.

The post The Top 3 Trends in Customer Service appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/top-3-trends-customer-service/

Can I Send You an Audible Code?

Jeffrey and I have a handful of Audible codes left for free audio book copies of Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It. If you would be interested in listening to it and possibly providing an honest review, just send us a message as soon as possible.

Please help me Speak at SXSW

I, along with other senior marketers, have proposed a panel called:

Thrive and Win in an Amazon World

These great panelists and I will discuss how companies can both use Amazon as a channel to grow, learn from its success how to compete against it, and which tactic is better for your company at its particular growth stage.

This is a very competitive process.  There are 3000 panels submitted this year and only “a small percentage” will be accepted. 

Speaking panels are selected through a crowd-sourcing process, which is why we are asking for your help.

Here’s the link for the full text of the panel including supporting info and videos:

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/76224 

Please take less than 4 minutes to register and vote to help us present.

Voting on this panel ends Friday August 25^th at midnight, but please don’t wait until then to help out.

Voting Instructions
So here is how you can vote:

1.  You register to vote here:
https://auth.sxsw.com/users/sign_up

Once you have done this first step, you have done the hardest part

2. Then you vote (vote up!)
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/76224

3. Comment

If you are so inclined, a comment on the panel page would be helpful as well.

Thank you for your help! I will let you know how this turns out.

For your listening pleasure: The Marketing Book Podcast

I had the honor to join Doug Burdett on his Marketing Book Podcast for episode 137. See why Doug says “I haven’t read a book like this since Who Moved My Cheese. It’s that smart and ingeniously written.”

 

The post Can I Send You an Audible Code? appeared first on Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg.

source http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/can-send-audible-code/

Your Go-to Guide for Video Marketing Is Here!

Don’t you love when everything lines up perfectly and is made easy for you? It usually doesn’t happen all the time, but today is your lucky day! We’ve compiled our Video Marketing Handbook as your one-stop-shop for everything from video production to optimizing and tracking your video’s performance. Along with that, we’ve partnered with experts to bring you an incredible resource packed with inspiring examples and proven best practices.

Getting started with video can be daunting. From thinking of what story you’re aiming to tell to strategy and optimization of your video content, producing killer video content and video analytics. There’s plenty to take into account when you and your team are putting together a stellar video marketing campaign. Below are a few key takeaways that will take your video marketing to new heights and make you think a little bit differently about how you’re executing your next video marketing campaign.

Define Your Video Marketing Goals and Strategy

Whether you’ve just stepped onto the scene, or you’ve been using videos for ages, you need a road map outlining what it’s all for, where you’re going, and how you’ll measure success. Your plan doesn’t need to be incredibly detailed (as the performance of your first few videos will often signal some necessary changes as you go), but you should have a good idea of how you’ll align video content with the goals of your company. A solid plan can be the difference between knowing your content is delivering ROI, versus throwing metaphorical spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Use Emotions to Drive Action

One glance at the types of videos brands are releasing these days is enough to see that there’s a huge trend toward content that makes people feel. From laundry detergent to software and everything in between, brands are playing on emotions. Today you’re not merely sold an airline ticket, rather you’re nurtured with a tear-jerking video campaign about families connecting from across the globe; you see friends reuniting and eighty-year-olds boarding their first, exciting flight. This story-based content is everywhere, and you can bet your bottom dollar there’s a reason it’s getting so emotional. Almost 70% of B2B marketers have discovered, video has emerged as the content format that’s most effective for both engaging and converting online audiences.

Understand Performance with Video Analytics

So you’ve created some videos and they’re embedded on your website ready to impress and drive business. You’ve even integrated with your marketing automation platform to track viewers. This is terrific but, after all is said and done, how do you know whether your videos are successful? If your CMO was to ask which videos have been the most effective – which ones you should continue making – how would you answer?

Unfortunately, production and optimization are just the first two parts of the video puzzle and you must become data driven in order to improve your video strategy moving forward. We’ll look at the importance of measuring your video’s performance against setting goals, as well as how to use your audience’s engagement data to determine if your video is delivering ROI. For example, we always suggest aiming to maintain at least 60% of your audience through to the very end of a video (where they can engage with your call to action).

Take the Leap!

There’s (obviously) plenty more than just those key takeaways in our Video Marketing Handbook! So, download the guide below and feel inspired to think more strategically about your video content!

The post Your Go-to Guide for Video Marketing Is Here! appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/go-to-guide-video-marketing/

Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Greg Bowen

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 Greg Bowen, Systems Analyst at Vidyard. Learn why he didn’t become a police officer, and the hardest thing about playing the bagpipes by watching this video!

What Didn’t Make the Cut

Greg shared a lot more than just how to look cool playing the bagpipes, so here’s a few more of his answers:

What is your favourite video on the internet right now?

My favourite YouTube video of all time that I will never get tired of is “Hey ya ya” by He Man and the Masters of the Universe:

Never gets old for me! But currently my favourite video is the video of my pipe band competing at the Cambridge Highland games. I could watch it dozens of times. Spoiler alert – we won!

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

I have a few! The first one is probably Ace Shawarma. The have the best shawarma poutine, and granted I have never really tried any other shawarma poutines, but it’s just fantastic. Next place for meals would be Gilt. Everything is amazing, but the bacon wrapped dates are especially great.

Lastly, for cocktails, the Grand Trunk Saloon. You cannot go wrong they have so many different kinds of drinks whether you want bold, sweet, or other flavours. And the should food is phenomenal!

The post Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Greg Bowen appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/meet-vidyard-team-video-style-greg-bowen/

4 Cold Calling Tactics you can Only Learn from Improv Comedy

What do Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Michael Dubin (the CEO of Dollar Shave Club) all have in common? Two things: they’re all known for quick-witted responses and they all got their start in improv comedy.

For those not familiar, improv is where actors make up the show as they go. There’s no script, the audience provides plot point suggestions, and it’s all about hilarious honesty and occasionally cringe-worthy mistakes. Because it forces participants to think quickly on their feet, there’s a tremendous amount it can teach your sales team about being top performing cold callers.

Improv: Your Cold Call Secret Weapon

Now, are we actually advocating that you go sign your entire sales team up for improv classes? Yup. Michaela DiChrio, former Manager of Enterprise Sales Development at Salesforce did just that and she found that “It helped our BDRs think on their feet and understand how to continue leading a conversation even when they were hit with unfamiliar topics, questions, and objections. Without a doubt, it made them more agile on the phones.”

Improv acclimates your sales team to jumping into awkward situations. The action moves fast and improv actors must respond faster than they can filter themselves, so what they blurt out is often painfully honest. With time, your sales team will lose any sense of self-consciousness. They’ll become brazen, bold, fearless about cold calling and able to keep a lively conversation going with a brick wall. That’s when they’ll start to apply these tactics:

1. Yes, and…

Imagine this scene: An improv actor throws an imaginary salmon at her partner and shouts, “Get away, bear!” and the partner just says, “We’re not bears, we’re rabbits.” What happens next? The comedy dies a sudden and painful death. Why? Because the second actor didn’t accept the situation. He said “no” when he should have said “Yes!” Now there’s tension because they can’t agree. If this was a cold call, that first actor would have hung up.

Salespeople say “no” a lot more than they realize and it destroys their chances of building rapport. They do it every time they correct their prospect, repeats themselves, or tells their prospect how to feel. Instead, as a salesperson, you need to say “Yes!” and build a scene with the person on the other end of the phone.

Using “Yes, and…” validates your prospect’s feelings. Is the prospect worried about your product’s reliability? Yes, that’s a valid concern, and here are some other facts to consider. Does the prospect hate salespeople? Yes, that’s common—and me too, if they’re disingenuous. This agreement is the equivalent of catching the metaphorical salmon—it allows salespeople to build trust and then redirect the conversation somewhere more productive.

2. Don’t be entertaining, be honest

Many new salespeople think they must play the role of an overly gregarious or aggressive “sales guy/gal.” Similarly, in improv, new actors think they have to be funny, and they try to act like a standup comedian. In both cases, it doesn’t work because audiences can sense a phony. What can improvers and salespeople do? They can drop the act and be completely honest.

Improv is all about tapping into honesty. If another actor tells you that you’re the bridge troll and your reaction is to shout, “Oh, I’m really green with jealousy,” it’ll fall worse than flat. It’s not punny. Instead, hunch over and become the troll. Snarl, grimace, demand your troll toll, and rant about the architectural advantages of cantilevered versus truss bridges.

This is honest to the situation and it works the same in cold calls: be yourself. If the prospect gives you a phony excuse like that they’re in a meeting, reply with genuine surprise. “You picked up your phone in a meeting?” If they tell you that they don’t have any budget, express genuine concern. “Oh wow, that sounds serious. Our product and me being a salesperson aside, what are you going to do?” You will see that prospects find this pure, guileless honesty so disarming that they’re forced to sheepishly drop their own act as well. Together you’ll have a more productive conversation.

3. Give offerings

Finally, improv is as much about giving as it is getting. New improv actors mostly sit around on stage waiting for something to react to and ask each other boring questions like “Who are you supposed to be?” Those questions put the onus on their teammates to come up with the scene and it’s tiring to carry this weight. The same is true of cold calling: new salespeople who only ask boring questions of their prospect like, “What does your business do?” put all the weight on their prospect and are annoying. The answer? Learn to give offerings.

In improv, offerings are about taking action, describing the scene, and offering a role to your partner. For example, shouting, “What a wonderful realm this is, is that not so my good steed?” This gives your partner something substantial to work with—something they can say “yes, and…” to. In cold calling, your offerings will be interesting tips, quotes, facts, and statistics that spark discussion, such as, “Did you know that according to Gartner, 90 percent of companies collect data but only 5 percent use it wisely? What’s your reaction to that?” You’ll find that with offerings, prospecting conversations morph into real conversations and you get a lot further.  

Great cold callers are like Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Michael Dubin: they think quickly on their feet. By exposing your sales team to improv, you’ll make them masters of the cold call, help them close more deals, and honestly, it just might make your office a funnier place.

The post 4 Cold Calling Tactics you can Only Learn from Improv Comedy appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/4-cold-calling-tactics-can-learn-improv-comedy/

4 Types of Messages you Must Replace with Video

Are you familiar with the acronym TLDR? It stands for ‘too long, didn’t read’ and began as internet slang to say ‘you have written too much.’ It has evolved over time, however, and has taken on a different meaning: People everywhere now add it as a disclaimer on the headers of long emails and articles to say, “I have written too much.” The irony is, of course, thicker than molasses.

Why are we writing things to each other that we know we won’t read? Because we have a lot to say and no good way to communicate it. The world isn’t just complicated anymore, it’s complex, and we’re limited by the information throughput of text, a centuries-old technology. But there’s a simple answer: video.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth 1.8 million. No really, that’s what Forrester concluded. Video is ideal for breaking down complex topics because it has far higher information throughput—it includes simultaneous visuals, audio, and text, but it also offers so much more. Video connects with people on an emotional level. If text is a straw, video is a firehose, and there is a plethora of good uses for it.

Here are 4 types of messages you must replace with video:

Any email longer than 300 words

The average American spends 13 hours each week on email according to Fast Company. That’s a tremulous amount of time and much of it is spent editing, correcting, and re-formatting—bolding headers, adding bullets, and highlighting. Yet all of this can be done better on video.

With a quick-capture video tool, you can use your webcam to simply talk things through. All the incorrect grammar and colloquial language that you’re afraid to put into print do just fine when spoken and you can ramble on tangents and still get your point across. Audiences will comprehend more just from your body language. We’ve experimented with this extensively and an email that normally might take 45 minutes to write and edit can be explained in a 3-minute video. It’s faster for both the viewer and the recorder, so everyone wins. Any time you find yourself writing an email that drags on, close it, and tell it to your computer camera instead.

Walk-throughs, setups, and onboarding

Raise your hand if somewhere in your company employee portal there are novel-length PDFs full of screenshots and text on how to get set up in a new system. (Now put your hand down, people are probably looking.) These screenshot walk-throughs are the epitome of inefficiency because they still leave big gaps. Anyone who has used them has wondered how figure A led to figure B and why they’re not seeing figure C. It’s like trying to interpret the movie Casablanca from just a handful of stills.

Use videos for your walkthroughs. There’s a reason that ‘how to’ is still the top growing category of video on YouTube: watching is easier. With tools like ViewedIt, you can capture both your screen and your webcam and you can talk new users through logging into new systems, filling out expense reports, and properly closing sales deals.

Secure partner communications

Perhaps the best way on Earth to spread information is to tell someone that it’s secret. We’ve all known this since grade-school. So how can we expect our partners and affiliates not to spread product, pricing, and upcoming feature releases if we share them by emails that are just begging to be forwarded? We can’t, and that’s why there’s secure video.

With a securely hosted video platform, you can control the flow of information. You get to both harness the explanatory power of video and you get to lock it down so that only certain parties can access it. Whenever you’re communicating sensitive information to partners, help them do the right thing: make it a secure video.

Anything that could be improved with a human touch

We envision a world where nearly all human resources communications come via video. It’s only fitting, as email drains the ‘human’ away and often leaves us with long, dry, difficult-to-follow resources: for example, first-day welcome emails, explanations of benefits, how to set up a 401k, and a list of IT contact information. What might all this clutter look like if we applied video?

Everything would become more personal. Imagine having quick, custom, ‘Welcome to the company!’ videos from executives and human resources folk and pre-recorded videos to explain benefits and paperwork in a simple way. Or what about a video from the IT department saying hello, explaining how things work, and how best to reach them? Or a quick video tour of the grounds or facilities to show you the office gym, bike park, and good spots for lunch? You’d create a personal touch in a way that supplements human interaction and makes them feel more at home.

If you apply video to your communications, you don’t just become more efficient: you make everyone more efficient. You can stop writing your novel-grade emails and people can stop finding them TLDR!

The post 4 Types of Messages you Must Replace with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/4-types-messages-replace-with-video/

Content Pros: How Cheaper Video is Improving Content Quality with Tyler Lessard

Teaming up with the team at Convince & Convert, Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard hosts the Content Pros Podcast. For this week’s episode, Tyler shared his own knowledge with Uberflip’s Randy Frisch about video marketing, and how a new focus on video is changing the face of modern marketing. Check out the full podcast:

Here’s a few of our favourite moments:

How often video production being done in-house these days versus externally?

It’s definitely a growing trend that we’re seeing. It’s not just because I’m biased with respect to my role in the industry but it genuinely is happening. I test these ideas with friends and peers in the market as well as with our customers. We’re absolutely seeing more and more content production and particularly video production coming in-house and organizations. It’s been exciting to see a lot more people with journalism backgrounds coming in-house into content marketing roles, seeing writers and folks from a traditional writing background coming in to do these things. But, yeah, we are seeing it follow suit with video now.

There is a recognition that having the ability to create and publish video content no different from how you create and publish a blog post is becoming important for businesses and will be critical over the next few years. What’s been happening alongside that and the reason that we’re seeing it be successful is that, well, A, there’s this younger generation of folks who’ve grown up on this. They’re creating videos and publishing them on YouTube. They’re sharing videos everyday on Snapchat and other channels. And, they recognize that not every video has to be a big Hollywood production. It’s just as good to say, “Hey. We’ve got a great idea here. Let’s get somebody on camera in front of a whiteboard talking about this as a way to explore or peel back a how-to topic.” Or, “Let’s do a quick motion graphic video.”

The team here I’ve got, I mentioned we have three folks, and what they can do in a matter of a couple of days still blows my mind, and it’s really incredible to see. I think the accessibility of video is now there and the people who can really churn amazing content out quickly are out there. And, the cost for this is not merely what it was and also, of course, production equipment and those things have all come down. It’s definitely happening and more and more companies we’re working with are bringing in-house production talent to the table, and it’s helping them go from delivering one or two videos a month to one or two videos a week. And, it really is changing the perspective.

Where should your videos live? On your website? YouTube?

Tyler: Yeah. I think a lot of the debate really just stems from where we’ve come from. The traditional approach for businesses was if you’re creating a video asset to just stand alone as a promotional piece or to be a part of some other campaign or program, the default was we’ll upload it to YouTube as a place to host that video because it’s free and it’s easy. We would then potentially also link to that video using an embed code on our website, or landing page, or the different place that that video would be embedded.

The video would live in both places. It would be on your YouTube channel, but it would also be on your website. But, the version embedded on your website is basically just that YouTube version streaming over. In a lot of cases, that’s a good start to what you’re doing and obviously it’s nice that it’s free and very simple to manage as an organization. But, one of the challenges now we’re facing is as video is becoming a more integrated part of these different programs that we’re doing, it’s not a one-off kind of brand thing. It’s now we’re doing customer stories on video. We’re doing product demos and explainers. It’s just becoming another piece of our content toolkit for the programs we’re running. Using YouTube as a way to host the videos that are going to play back on your own landing pages and your own websites comes with a number of challenges.

Simple things like, well, at the end of the video is YouTube going to recommend one of your competitors’ videos? You lack that brand control over what that playback experience looks like. But, you’re also missing a lot of the potential capabilities of what you get with video. For example, can you understand when somebody is watching that video just like you might track if they interact with or download a PDF from your website? If they come to watch that customer story video, do you know who watched it and how long they engaged? YouTube is not going to give you that. You’re just going to know there’s another tick on the view counter.

There’s a number of things that as we evolve as content marketers we’re being thoughtful about as video becomes a more integrated part of what we do. And so, that’s where new more premium video platforms are coming into play that align with how traditional B2B marketers really work. And so, it’s the notion of being able to host and distribute those videos in a way on your website that you can brand the experience, that you could create interactive content that would ask them questions or have calls to action to do something next but also in a way that enables you to track and know who’s actually watching what content and using that data back as part of your organization.

That’s what we’re starting to see as a trend. I’d say YouTube is still very important as a distribution channel so we encourage everybody to still post their videos to YouTube because people may find you there. But, when you’re posting those videos on your own sites and your own campaigns, that’s where using a video platform makes a lot more sense because of the incremental value you can get.

Get The Full Story

If you want to hear the full podcast, we’ve posted it above, and you can read a full transcript of this talk on Convince & Convert, where it was originally posted!

The post Content Pros: How Cheaper Video is Improving Content Quality with Tyler Lessard appeared first on Vidyard.

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Let’s Chalk! All the Latest Video Marketing How-To’s in One Simple Place

Gone are the days of video being reserved for big-budget brand campaigns and social media programs. For many businesses, video is now playing an important role across their digital properties and throughout the entire buyer’s journey. From top-of-funnel campaigns to bottom-of-funnel thought leadership and sales enablement, video has emerged as a powerful tool for boosting engagement and conversion rates.

But being successful with video takes a lot more than just pressing record and firing up a YouTube channel. When used properly, video can help improve your web SEO performance, increase email conversion rates, generate more leads for your sales team, improve the ROI of your next event and much more. Over the last five years we’ve learned a lot about how to make the most of video, and we’re now sharing the most important insights in our new library of Video Marketing Chalk Talks!

What You’ll Find in the Chalk Talk Library

The Video Marketing Chalk Talks offers practical how-to information for the latest B2B video marketing best practices.  From Developing a Video Content Plan to Generating Leads with Video to Crushing Your Next Product Launch, there’s something for every aspect of your marketing organization. It’s not about video production, it’s about how to use video in very specific ways across your marketing team to help you generate better business results. Below are a few examples of what you can find in this new resource library.

Developing a Video Strategy

Most businesses are investing in video as a way to improve marketing and sales performance and deliver a better customer experience. Yet most companies are still taking a reactive approach to video production instead of a proactive approach to a video strategy. In Developing a Video Strategy, we explore how to develop a plan for video content creation, distribution and measurement that aligns with your business goals.

Generating More Value from Your Existing Video Content

Many businesses have built up a library of videos including webinars, explainers, customer stories and product demos. But most aren’t leveraging that content on a regular basis to attract new audiences, generate new leads or boost engagement with their brand. In the Generating More Value from Your Existing Videos discover how to breathe new life into your existing video content to engage more viewers, accelerate more deals and extract more value from your previous investments.

Tracking and Measuring Video Performance

Do view counts really count? In Tracking and Measuring Video Performance, learn how to track a more relevant set of video analytics and audience engagement data to better understand the reach and business impact of your video content. Learn the benefits of tracking video engagement data within your marketing automation and CRM systems and how to use those insights to enable true video ROI reporting.

More Video Marketing Knowledge Awaits!

So, what are you waiting for? Hop over here to check out the entire library of snackable Video Marketing Chalk Talks and walk away with new insights on how to deliver better results with video!

The post Let’s Chalk! All the Latest Video Marketing How-To’s in One Simple Place appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/latest-video-marketing-howtos-one-place/

What’s the Secret Formula for Creating a Great Video?

The secret formula in creating a great video? It all starts with your story. Maury Rogow, CEO and executive producer at leading video production company Rip Media Group, shares with us the key formula they use to create great video.

Data strays and story stays in people’s memory. A lot of companies think all they need is data points, but really, what they need to have is an emotional touch with somebody’s heart. If you have that, then people will remember you, they’ll share what you created, and they’ll talk about it. But how do you get that magic essence?

We’ve created an acronym that we use all the time in our production room. When we’re creating scripts and concepts, we ask each other, “What’s the STUFF in that video? What’s the STUFF in that script?” What’s the STUFF? It’s what’s sexy, touching, unique, funny, or elicits fear in the hearts and the minds of the people watching.

THE S.T.U.F.F.

Let’s start with what’s sexy. What’s sexy about your brand, or your product, or the people in your company? Now, sexy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a fashion brand or Victoria Secret’s or anything like that. What sexy is, is what sizzles. What’s different? What really makes you stand out? It might not be something that you’re really thinking of that’s obvious, so you’ve got to dig deep. I have an example for you down below, of somebody who was trying to do something very basic and mundane – sell a used car from 20 years ago. But, he put together a video that was absolutely epic:

The real gold in this video is that he made something mundane into something sexy, into something that sizzled. Not only did he get five and a half million views on that video, but he also got over 2,000 offers to buy that car. It absolutely works.

The next point is touching. What’s touching about your product, your service, the people that you’re helping? Think about the results that you’re putting out into the world with your product or service. If it’s touching, think about nostalgia, think about history. Can you share stories of the origin of how you started your company, and why you started your company? If you can touch people’s hearts they’ll remember you. If you take a look below, you’ll see a video that we created for a non-profit organization that really needed help getting mentors to help them out and help more people that were homeless:

What you see in this video is not just live action and animation, but we mixed the two together. What we did was we talked about the results. We had the person that was affected by the program, talk about it in a very unique and different way.

The next point is U, for unique. You can also think of unique as unexpected. What’s unexpected? What’s unique about you, or the way you do things? The world really wants to know because it’s what makes you stand out. The hearts and the minds of viewers want variety. They want something different. They want their day to be disrupted just a little bit, and that makes you memorable. Take a look at the video below, where a big brand did something completely unique and unexpected and they stand out from the pack.

We have sexy, touching, unique. What’s the next? It’s F, for funny. If you go for funny and it works, there’s really nothing better. You will be memorable. For a great example of funny, check out the video below for a huge brand that took a risk and really, it paid off.

The last point is F, for fear. Fear is a very strong emotion that we all carry. If you can bring a little bit of fear, or a little bit of lack of security out of your audience, they’ll respond and they’ll really want to learn more. If you have a look at the video below, it was done for Save the Children. I think you’ll see a combination of fear and touching, combined in a beautiful way:

That’s the STUFF. What’s sexy, touching, unique, funny, or elicits fear in your audience. Those are the five key emotions that you should be taking into consideration for your next production!

If there’s anything we can do to help out, we’re offering a free consultation with our team at Rip Media and we’d love to speak with you.  Just follow this link to book at time!

The post What’s the Secret Formula for Creating a Great Video? appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/whats-secret-formula-creating-great-video/

Drive Your SEO Performance with Video

Search engine optimization is all about publishing the right content on your website to ensure you rank highly for internet search queries that match your business or topics and keywords that you want to generate inbound traffic from. Using video across your website can be a great way to boost your SEO performance and give you a better shot at ranking highly with Google, but only if you do it properly.

My name is Tyler Lessard, and in this Chalk Talk, we’ll discuss the latest best practices for using video to drive your SEO performance and more inbound lead flow.

With video becoming a more important part of modern websites, it’s also becoming an important part of your SEO strategy. What’s interesting with video is it can help your SEO plans from a few different perspectives. Consider this for the moment: When somebody goes onto Google or other search engines and enters a search query, they’re presented with a few different tabs of results, which give you a few different chances at bat.

Showing Up in All the Right Places

First, is the All tab, which is going to present all the different web pages that are the a best fit for the search query. The second is a Video tab, which is going to present the videos that Google knows of online that are the best answers to that question.

Using video in the right way can actually give you a better shot at ranking highly in both of these different areas as long as you’re thinking about it in the right way. In addition to ranking highly for video and generally in the All tab, video can also help with your domain authority by driving longer engagement on your site and more back links back to your domain.

So let’s talk practically about how to do this, and make sure that you’re optimizing your SEO results and not hurting your SEO by adding more video to your website.

Video Hosting Matters for SEO

The first thing you’ll want to consider is where you’re hosting your videos. If you’re using YouTube to host your videos, and to then link to the YouTube version from your site, it’s not going to help your website’s SEO at all. Anybody searching for something related to that video are going to be directed to YouTube and not to your domain.

Using a platform like Vidyard or other video hosting platform, you can instead embed videos directly on your website, and this is going to give you all the domain juice related to that video content. Once you start doing that, there’s a few things you’ll want to consider each time you publish a new video.

The first very important step is the metadata you want to add to your web page. Every time you add a video to an HTML page, you’ll want to go in and update it with the Video Object schema type and add in the different tags related to that video. This is what tells Google and other search engines that there’s a video on this page and the related information about it.

The title, the description, the length, and so on is going to give Google the information it needs to understand that content and give you a shot at ranking in the Video tab. Once you have multiple videos on your site, you’re going to want to create an XML document called the video sitemap. The video site map gives Google complete information about all the videos across your website and it’s basically an aggregate of all this various video metadata. So it gives Google one place to know what you have, where it lives, and other metadata about those video assets.

What’s important here is that you can upload your video sitemap to the Google Search Console to make sure Google is always up to date and properly indexing your video content. Now if you’re using a platform like YouTube, you’re going to have to do much of this manually. If you’re using a platform like a Vidyard, some of this can happen automatically, so that every time a video is added, the metadata is automatically published to your page and a video sitemap is automatically updated and submitted to Google to keep you up to date. That’s going to help your with ranking in the Video tab and giving Google an idea of where your videos are. But equally important is using video to drive your master SEO and driving more traffic in general to your web pages, not just the video itself. And this is where transcriptions come into play.

Adding Transcriptions to Your Site

Transcriptions can be defined as transcribing the audio from your video into text format and placing it within the page so that Google can crawl all of that text, just like it does other text on your site, to identify key words and give you an opportunity to rank highly for search queries.

Now what you’ll want to think about here is two different types of transcription approach, depending on how you’re embedding your videos. First, if you’re embedding videos as a complementary part of a page, you can do the audio transcription, but just embed it in the metadata, so that Google can crawl it, but it doesn’t show up as text on the page and clutter up the information on the site. But if you have pages where you’re embedding just the video, say it’s a video blog, what you can also do is add the transcription as copy to the page. And what this allows you to do is to tweak the content a little bit, but to add header tags within the page throughout the content that’s going to give Google, again, a better idea of what those keywords are and what this page should rank for.

I always encourage that if you’re doing video as the hero on the page. If you don’t want all the copy cluttering up the website, then you can use CSS and Javascipt to hide some of that content, which is what we often do. So you can see the beginning of the content, but then you have to click a button to expand it and read more. This gives you the best of both worlds, the abilities to get all that information indexed, the headers in there for Google, but the ability for someone to expand it and actually read it if they choose to skim that content.

Video for Domain Authority

In addition to the metadata and the transcriptions, what’s also interesting to think about with video is how it can help you build domain authority. If you share your videos with third parties and they embed those videos on their site, they’re going to link back to you and build domain authority. This only works if they’re hosted natively on your site, not linked to from YouTube. If you can drive high engagement in your video content, if somebody comes to this page, watches a video for three minutes, and stays engaged on that page, that’s going to give you higher domain authority because Google see that as an indication of high value content.

People stay longer on pages with good video content, and this isn’t about just driving more traffic to the video, it’s about boosting your overall domain authority because of the richness and quality of the content that you’re delivering. In that regard you’ll want to think about how you optimize your click through rate. If somebody lands on the page, last thing you want them to do is bounce, so optimizing your thumbnail image to make sure they’re clicking through into the content. You can do that be testing different versions of your video or with a platform like Vidyard, it has integrated A/B split testing so you can figure out what’s working the best and then choose the most optimal piece to make sure that you reduce the bounce rates on that page.

The second thing you can do is track engagement. And any videos you find where half the audience is dropping off after thirty seconds, you know that that’s content you need to improve, or perhaps replace with something else to continue to ensure that you’re driving high engagement time. This is going to signal to Google that you’re an authority on that topic and give you a better shot at ranking highly from an SEO perspective.

These are a number of different ways in which you can leverage video content from an SEO perspective to not only drive people to watch your videos, but to boost your overall domain authority and improve the SEO of your web site across the whole thing, but you can’t do much of this with YouTube. So, think about how you’re going to leverage the right tools and the right video platforms to enable this and hopefully to automate much of this to ensure every time a video is posted, this stuff happens all by default.

My name is Tyler Lessard, and this has been a Vidyard Chalk Talk.

 

The post Drive Your SEO Performance with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/drive-seo-performance-video/

Are the Videos you Watch Dictated by AI?

AI isn’t a far off dream—it’s a present reality. Machine learning algorithms and neural networks now have their wiry digital hands in everything from self-driving cars to detecting credit card fraud and determining what we watch.

Why does AI determine what we watch? Because there’s just such an incredible amount of video out there. Video now accounts for 74 percent of all internet traffic and that will rise to 82 percent by 2021 according to Cisco. And while almost half a million minutes of video are uploaded to YouTube alone every day, not all of it is worthwhile (we rest our case on PewDiePie).

Consumers’ attention spans are maxed out. That’s why AI is being applied to both create video content and help users find more of what they’re looking for. But is it good for us?

AI Helps Write the Script

Imagine being a Hollywood producer pressed to find the next big blockbuster. How could you predict what audiences might want? Increasingly, studios are turning to AI for answers. According to The New York Times, the analytics firm Epagogix offers a neural network that ingests scripts and evaluates them based on plot points and historical box-office data. It does more than give a critic’s thumbs up or down: it can provide specific recommendations to increase filmmaking ROI. And this is only the beginning.

Video for both consumers and for business is being gently guided by AI recommendations. Netflix used machine learning algorithms to determine the plot and actors of the original hit series House of Cards, reports The New York Times. On a more commercial scale, marketers are using smart analytics to determine what video elements are most likely to entertain viewers and go viral. Vidyard’s video analytics, for example, can peer into user behavior to see how much they watch, what parts they watched, and what segments they revisited. Marketers armed with these automated insights can iteratively improve their videos for maximum consumption.

AI Serves up the Videos

The videos you watch are also increasingly selected for you by AI. Marketers have long experimented with using algorithms to deliver personalized experiences via the web and to deliver ads. This same technology is increasingly being used to interpret and serve up video.

AI armed with computer vision and natural language processing is now savvy enough to tell what’s happening during videos. This wasn’t the case until recently and videos were something of a black-box when it came to metadata. Marketers had to tag videos the same way they did images and tagging often couldn’t capture even a fraction of the detail. Nor does tagging and curation scale well for large enterprises with thousands of videos. But curation by AI does.

Microsoft’s new Story Remix app, soon to be released on Windows 10, can recognize objects well enough to apply animations over them, according to CNBC. Facebook’s AI is smart enough to tag your friends in videos and marketing technology startups like Clarifai, Valossa, and IRIS.TV all use AI to provide rich tags for videos which identify objects, sounds, people, locations, and all variety of context. By marrying user data with rich video data, brands can offer hyper-personalized video recommendations.

Publisher sites everywhere use this AI to serve up videos. Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix famously do it, but now so do news sites, online publications, digital magazines, and virtually any media company with a reasonably sized repository of video. IRIS.TV clients like Time Inc, Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard have seen an average 70 percent increase in views after only a few months.

The Implications of AI for Video

More and more, the videos you watch are both written and selected by AI, and all fears of killer robots aside, marketers will find that this is both good for consumers and brands. Marketers can deliver lower volume but higher value content because they’re no longer having to throw spaghetti at a wall and consumers are finding less disruption when video recommendations are increasingly relevant. Are the videos you watch dictated by AI? Absolutely, and for the time being that seems to be a pretty good thing.

The post Are the Videos you Watch Dictated by AI? appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/videos-watch-dictated-ai/