The Demand Generator’s Guide to Maximum Lead Conversion

Picture this: You think you’re sitting on the hottest lead this side of the Atlantic Ocean. You’ve put your heart, soul, time, and resources into generating this one. But is it as hot as you think? Will it convert and let you retain the title of Demand Gen Superhero in the office?

That’s where we come in! We know there’s a lot to think about when it comes to enterprise-class companies turning leads into customers faster, so Vidyard and Ascend2 have assembled the Lead Generation to Increase Conversions Report. This ultimate tool for today’s demand generation leaders will help answer these burning questions:

• Did you generate the lead using the most effective and strategic tactics possible?
• How are you going to convert this hot lead into your #1 customer?
• Do you have the most effective strategy with proven tactics in place to succeed?

The data in this edition of the study exclusively benchmarks the opinions of 75 enterprise-class companies with more than 500 employees who participated in the survey. There is too much goodness in this report to cover here, so we’ll give you just a sneak peek into what you will see within our findings.

Most Important Objectives for Lead Conversion

More than two-thirds (68%) of enterprises consider increasing lead-to-customer conversions a top priority of a lead-generation strategy. Achieving this will also require improving lead data quality – an important objective for more than half (56%) of enterprises.

Source of the Highest Conversion Rates

57% of enterprises, content download forms generate leads with the highest conversion rate. The type of content downloaded also impacts the rate of lead-to-customer conversions. Webinar registration is another top lead-generation form for 48% of enterprises.

Content Development Resources Used

The types of content generating the highest conversion rates often require specialized skills and capabilities not available in-house. That’s why 92% of enterprise-class companies outsource all or part of their content development for lead generation purposes.

This report is jam-packed with resources specifically catered to the Lead-Generation audience that you won’t find anywhere else. You’ll also learn about important research into Lead Generation Success Strategy, Sales Cycles Encountered, How Conversion Rates Are Changing, Content Producing the Most Conversions and much more!

And of course, we want you to use all these valuable research findings. So go ahead and pull stats for your next strategy review, use the graphs and charts in your next blog post, or post the findings on social media. Download the guide and share this research credited as published!

The post The Demand Generator’s Guide to Maximum Lead Conversion appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/marketing/demand-generation/demand-generators-guide-maximum-lead-conversion/

3 Takeaways from INBOUND 2017 that Impact Video in Business

INBOUND took over Boston this week uniting 20,000+ marketers, sales leaders, execs and entrepreneurs hungry for the latest insights on how to accelerate business growth. Like a great piece of video content, it did an impressive job of educating, inspiring and touching the hearts of attendees through an artful blend of keynotes (Michelle Obama was omazing), comedians (Judd Apatow OMG), experts (Rand Fishkin, Trish Bertuzzi, maybe one or twenty more) and of course, savvy practitioners. With lots of news from the event host HubSpot, three core themes stood out as strong indicators of where the market is heading. And each of them have important implications for how we think about video and it’s expanding role in the customer experience.

1. Alignment and value creation throughout the entire customer lifecycle

During INBOUND, HubSpot announced major updates to its Sales Hub solution as well as a brand new Customer Hub product line, making it clear they’re placing big bets on helping businesses create more value throughout the entire customer experience. This continues to be a major theme amongst customer engagement technology giants as they expand their capabilities for acquiring and retaining customers while federating the back-end processes and data that manage the entire customer lifecycle. This comes at a time when customers are interacting with brands in entirely new ways while expecting immediate, personalized customer service that aligns with how they want to converse and consume information (think chat and video vs. email and phone). To thrive in this new era, businesses need to align their marketing, sales and customer service organizations to work together as a well-oiled machine in a way that makes it easy for customers to find the answers they’re looking for. And they need a well integrated technology stack to power it.

Social and video are two of the hottest topics in this conversation around customer experience (I’ll get to the social piece in the next section). By its very nature, video is often the best way to educate at each stage of the customer lifecycle and to connect with customers in a more personal way. Embracing video as part of your customer experience strategy is much more than adding explainers to your website; it’s using engaging and personalized content throughout every step of the customer journey to better connect, educate and support customers. It’s about empowering customer-facing teams to create, access and share rich video content as a natural part of how they do business. To support this trend, Vidyard announced expanded capabilities for its video messaging app, Vidyard GoVideo, that now enables anyone in marketing, sales or customer service to easily capture, share and track personalized videos in a way that’s seamlessly integrated with email, CRM, sales acceleration and customer service applications.

2. Customer engagement models are drastically changing

Email, phone, blogs and website forms aren’t going away anytime soon. But all the trends seem to suggest that businesses need to pay more attention to new ways of engaging with prospects and buyers. Customers are increasingly moving towards social media and real-time chat messaging as a way to interact with brands. Prior to INBOUND, HubSpot announced their acquisition of chatbot builder Motion AI, and this week they unveiled a free Conversations tool for powering multi-channel, one-to-one communications at scale. HubSpot also announced enhanced social tools as part of HubSpot Marketing Hub for interacting with audiences on Facebook and Instagram. It was also great to see a new integration with Terminus, a leader in Account-Based Marketing (ABM) technology, that enables marketers to serve customized digital ads to specific target accounts in an automated fashion. And not surprisingly, video was highlighted as another key channel/medium that businesses need to embrace to meet the shifting expectations of today’s buyers.

During his mainstage product keynote, HubSpot’s VP of Product, Christopher O’Donnell, spoke about the importance of having a strategy for video content creation as well as a platform for video hosting, distribution, optimization and analytics. He highlighted HubSpot’s expanded partner ecosystem in this space that includes the likes of Animoto, PowToon, Shakr and Vidyard GoVideo for content creation and of course Vidyard and others as integrated video platforms. The most important take-away was the need to have solutions for both content creation and distribution/analytics that integrate seamlessly with core marketing, sales and customer service tools to enable video to become a seamless part of customer engagement strategies.

 

3. The MarTech stack is more important than ever

With shifting customer expectations and so many new ways to engage with audiences, the concepts of a marketing technology (MarTech) stack and a strong partner ecosystem are more important than ever. For most businesses, no single solution standing on its own will offer the full range of capabilities to keep up with the changing market dynamics. In recognition of this, HubSpot announced rapid growth in their HubSpot Connect partner ecosystem as well as the addition of MarTech thought leader Scott Brinker as their new VP of Platform Ecosystem. As a member of the HubSpot Connect ecosystem, I applaud this move and am excited to see HubSpot putting an even greater strategic emphasis on growing their partner community and expanding their platform capabilities. Vidyard announced a similar strategy this week by unveiling its Vidyard GoVideo partner ecosystem in an effort to make video capture and sharing an integrated part of any business application.

From a video perspective, the opportunity here is to see platforms like Vidyard and apps like Vidyard GoVideo become even more closely integrated with marketing, sales and customer service workflows to help businesses realize the true promise of going video in a way that is tightly coupled with the apps they use every day.

The post 3 Takeaways from INBOUND 2017 that Impact Video in Business appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/3-takeaways-inbound-2017-impact-video-business/

Content Pros: Proof That Your Content Needs Fewer Facts and More Story

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 Doug Landis, Growth Partner at Emergence Capital, to share his journey of becoming a bonafide storyteller and what that means for content marketing. Check out the full podcast:

Here’s a few of our favourite moments:

Why don’t you introduce yourself, give a little bit of that background and is being a chief storyteller actually as glamorous as it sounds?

Well, one little caveat to that is that I think everybody is a chief storyteller in their own little world. So you can take that title if you like it as well. Take it with you up to Canada. It’s all yours.

Interestingly enough, this notion of the chief storyteller is the title by the way I created myself when I was at Boxed. And it came out of this need for … that I noted over the course of four years that as an organization, as a company, we needed to get better at telling stories. And the reality is we needed to get better at telling our story as a company. Who we are and what we stand for. We needed to get better at telling our pitch, if you will, or our story to our customers as far as what value is delivered to them. And we needed to get better at telling our own story, our own personal story. Why do we actually work there? What gets us excited about it? About working at Boxed. And then finally, we needed to get better at telling our customer’s story.

So if you think about it, throughout the entire sales process every time you’re engaging with a customer or prospect you really are storytelling. And here’s something interesting I found over time, shifting to the role that I’m in right now at Emergence and working with all these great startups is what typically happens is you have a founder CEO that identifies a problem and they build this product to solve this problem. They gain some customer traction and then they go and build their pitch to go raise money. And when they raise the money and with that money they go out and hire a bunch of sales people and they take their pitch, which they use to go raise money and they kind of modify it a little bit and they give that to their sales team and say go, here’s the pitch.

What happened to the humanity of telling stories instead of all facts?

It’s this idea of the weekend self. You leave work and you go home to your family, you go home to your friends, you go out for the weekend and people are like so how was your day? You might even go home today and be like so I did this podcast today and it was really interesting and you tell a story about our experience just this morning and all of the sudden you go back to work the next day and what do we do? We go back to speaking in facts and figures and bullets and these truncated phrases. We wonder why people don’t remember things, we wonder why we have to take so many notes, you wonder why we have all these collaboration tools because we can’t remember shit with just a bunch of facts and figures because you know facts and figures fade and stories stick. It’s just remembering that the ethos of a great story is something that should be woven into every piece of content. Whether its content marketing content, whether it’s your first callback, whether it’s your website, whatever it may be, we should be thinking about the stories that we tell.

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: Proof That Your Content Needs Fewer Facts and More Story appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/content-pros-proof-content-needs-fewer-facts-story/

Vidyard Brings the Power of Video to Any Business App with Vidyard GoVideo Partner Ecosystem

Gainsight, SalesLoft, Drift and other technology leaders embrace Vidyard GoVideo to power native video experiences across business applications

KITCHENER, Ontario – Sept 26, 2017 – Vidyard, the leading provider of new generation video platforms for business, is bringing the power of video to a broad range of business applications with its new Vidyard GoVideo partner ecosystem program. Now offered as a free plugin that enables video capture, hosting, sharing and tracking within any third party application, Vidyard GoVideo will power video experiences for leading sales, marketing and customer experience applications including Bolstra, Drift, Engagio, Gainsight®, Influitive, Madison Logic, SalesLoft, Uberflip and WorkRamp.

“Video is a better way to communicate with customers, partners and employees, but until now has not been easy to use within our day-to-day business workflows,” says Michael Litt, co-founder and CEO of Vidyard. “With the Vidyard GoVideo partner ecosystem, we’re changing that. We enable solution providers to add video capture, sharing and tracking capabilities to their existing apps via a turnkey, no-cost solution. Together with our partner ecosystem, we’re helping businesses go video in a way that simply connects with how they do business today.”

Vidyard GoVideo is the company’s revolutionary video messaging app that enables business professionals to easily capture, share and track personal video content. With the launch of the new partner ecosystem, Vidyard GoVideo is now available as a free plugin that can be built into any business application to seamlessly power video experiences for end users. Companies such as Bolstra, Drift, Engagio, Gainsight, Influitive, Madison Logic, SalesLoft, Uberflip and WorkRamp have embraced Vidyard GoVideo to bring the power of video to business communications in a wide variety of use cases, including: sales, marketing, customer success, customer service and employee development.

 

Video: Extending the Customer Conversation

Vidyard GoVideo addresses the growing demand to use video as a better way to communicate. It’s an easy to use video messaging app for business that delivers a plug and play solution to capture, share and track videos as part of user’s daily business communications. Vidyard enables partners to embed video messaging directly into their applications that allows their end-users:

1. Record and share custom webcam videos to deliver a more personalized and engaging message.
2. Record and share custom screen capture videos to share information, answer a question, deliver an on-demand presentation and more.
3. Access and share existing on-demand videos as well as previously recorded webcam and screen capture videos from their personal library.
4. Track the engagement of individual recipients to better understand who is engaging with which content.

Vidyard GoVideo takes care of all the heavy lifting including video capture, cloud-based video hosting and encoding, video playback on dedicated pages, video engagement tracking and video view notifications. Vidyard GoVideo is the easiest way for any business professional to create, share, and track simple personalized video messages. Vidyard GoVideo has more than  130,000 users in over 100+ countries who are improving communications and workflows with video.

 

Video Across the Business

From improving communications to boosting audience engagement, video has the ability to deliver immediate value to nearly any role in modern business. The following application providers will now leverage Vidyard GoVideo within their Account-Based Marketing (ABM), Customer Advocacy, Customer Success, Sales Acceleration and Training solutions to:

• Bolstra: Enable customer success managers (CSMs) to build better relationships with clients and deliver more personalized one-to-one communications.
• Drift: Connect with website visitors that want to engage in real-time conversations in a more personal and engaging way.
• Engagio: Help marketing and sales teams stand out with key accounts and boost the performance of ABM programs with personalized video outreach.
• Gainsight: Turns deep customer insights into action at scale, including through personalized video communications at all phases of the customer lifecycle.
• Influitive: Accelerate the impact of customer marketing programs by making it easy to capture new video-based customer stories using the Influitive UpShot solution.
• Madison Logic: Help B2B marketers leverage powerful video viewer data and account-based information for more effective, personalized video targeting.
• SalesLoft: Help sales teams boost response rates by more than 300% and accelerate pipeline using personal video messaging for outbound sales prospecting.
• Uberflip: Enable sales reps to easily curate relevant content for key prospects and deliver via personal video messages as a better way to stand out.
• WorkRamp: Instrument and power all forms of employee training including self-led, instructor-led, and virtual training programs with do-it-yourself video content.

“With Vidyard GoVideo, we were able to add video messaging to our existing workflows in a way that was simple, yet powerful,” says Sean Kester, VP of product strategy at SalesLoft. “Video messaging is one of the next big waves for sales acceleration and Vidyard made it easy to deliver this to our customers in a way that is simple, seamless and effective.”

“Personalization and one to one communication are critical parts of modern marketing and sales, and that’s what customers expect today. Video is a key part of that,” says David Cancel, CEO and co-founder of Drift. “With Vidyard GoVideo, our customers can add personalized video to any conversation to build more human connections with potential buyers.”

“At Gainsight, we think a lot about how companies can make their customers successful and believe strongly that personal engagement is a major correlating factor,” says Karl Rumelhart, chief product officer at Gainsight. “Video should be a key part of every company’s Customer Success strategy — we are excited to bring this vision to life by extending our native video capabilities within Gainsight with Vidyard GoVideo.”

To learn about partnership opportunities or to apply to Vidyard’s GoVideo Partner Ecosystem program, email govideopartners@vidyard.com with your name, title, email, description of your product/technology, how many end users do you have approximately, and your development

More Information:

• Apply Now: To learn about partnership opportunities or to apply to Vidyard’s GoVideo Partner Ecosystem program, send an email to govideopartners@vidyard.com with your name, title, email, description of your product/technology, how many end users do you have approximately, and your development timeline.
• Get Vidyard GoVideo (for free): www.vidyard.com/govideo
• Blog Post: www.vidyard.com/viewedit-is-now-govideo-launch

 

About Vidyard

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

Media Contact:

Sandy Pell, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications. Vidyard. Email: press@vidyard.com

 

The post Vidyard Brings the Power of Video to Any Business App with Vidyard GoVideo Partner Ecosystem appeared first on Vidyard.

source https://www.vidyard.com/press-releases/vidyard-brings-power-video-business-app-vidyard-govideo-partner-ecosystem/

Vidyard Extends Video Messaging Leadership with the Release of Vidyard GoVideo

Vidyard expands capabilities of free video messaging app for business professionals, changes name from ViewedIt to Vidyard GoVideo to reflect bolder vision.

KITCHENER, Ontario – Sept 26, 2017 – Vidyard, the leading provider of new generation video platforms for business, today announced new capabilities, a new name and a bolder vision for its revolutionary video messaging app. Now named Vidyard GoVideo, the free application formerly called ViewedIt makes it easier than ever for business professionals, organizations and third-party app developers to create, share and track personal videos from within the tools they use every day.

“Video is the most powerful way to connect and communicate, but it’s still too difficult and largely inaccessible for the average business professional,” says Michael Litt, co-founder and CEO at Vidyard. “With Vidyard GoVideo, we’re changing that. We’re making it easy for anyone to capture and share personal video messages and screen recordings from within their application of choice. We’re helping end users and businesses go video in a way that simply connects with how they do business today.”

With more than 130,000 users in over 100 countries, Vidyard GoVideo has been embraced by business professionals as an easy way to record, share and track personal video messages and screen recordings. Business users have embraced video as a better way to connect with prospects, customers, partners and colleagues, just like they have done in their personal lives with apps like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. With new capabilities announced today, Vidyard GoVideo makes it even easier for individuals to leverage video in their professional lives, and for application providers to embed video capabilities within their existing solutions.

 

Expanded Capabilities for Video Messaging and Sharing

Vidyard GoVideo now enables anyone to add video communications to their day-to-day business activities with the following capabilities:

• Create personal video messages and screen captures with one click
• Optimize viewership with engaging animated GIF thumbnail images
• Share videos instantly via Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and now YouTube
• Track audience engagement with video view notifications

With Vidyard GoVideo Enterprise, businesses can unlock new capabilities to boost the performance of sales, support, marketing and other teams across the business:

• Empower employees with instant access to shared libraries of video content
• Track video viewing insights centrally within common marketing and sales tools
• Enhance videos with custom forms and overlay annotations to drive action
• Secure internal videos with access controls and enterprise-grade security
• Leverage the Vidyard GoVideo partner ecosystem to easily record and share videos from within a variety of other business apps

 

Powering Video Experiences Across Business Applications

Today, Vidyard has also introduced the Vidyard GoVideo partner ecosystem program, a growing community of SaaS technology vendors who are adding video capture, sharing and tracking capabilities to their own applications powered by Vidyard GoVideo. Sales, marketing and customer experience technology leaders including Bolstra, Drift, Engagio, Gainsight, Influitive, Madison Logic, SalesLoft, Uberflip and WorkRamp will leverage Vidyard GoVideo to enable their own users to go video within their applications.

“With Vidyard’s GoVideo Partner Ecosystem, we’re delivering on our mission to make it easy for anyone in business to leverage video in a way that is simple, integrated and connected,” says Steve Johnson, president, and COO at Vidyard. “We believe this is just the beginning of what’s possible when it comes to integrating video within the workplace, so we invite those interested in learning about partnership opportunities with us to connect with our team today.”

To learn about partnership opportunities or to apply to Vidyard’s GoVideo Partner Ecosystem program, send an email to govideopartners@vidyard.com.

 

How are People Using Vidyard GoVideo? Let Us Count the Ways…

Earlier this summer, to celebrate its 100,000th user, Vidyard released an inspired list of 50 ways that the community is using personal video messaging to transform the way they communicate. With its new partner community, Vidyard expects to see video messaging become a seamless part of hundreds of different business apps to make video simply a part of how we do business.

“Vidyard is constantly championing a movement for all businesses to go video. Whether it’s helping businesses use video for more personalized communications, or enabling applications to bring video experiences to their customers, they make embracing video easy for everyone,” says Jill Rowley, chief strategist and startup advisor.

More Information:

• Blog Post: www.vidyard.com/viewedit-is-now-govideo-launch
• Get Vidyard GoVideo (for free): www.vidyard.com/govideo
• Apply Now: To learn about partnership opportunities or to apply to Vidyard’s GoVideo Partner Ecosystem program, send an email to govideopartners@vidyard.com with your name, title, email, description of your product/technology, how many end users do you have approximately, and your development timeline.

 

About Vidyard

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

Media Contact:

Sandy Pell, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications. Vidyard. Email: press@vidyard.com

 

The post Vidyard Extends Video Messaging Leadership with the Release of Vidyard GoVideo appeared first on Vidyard.

source https://www.vidyard.com/press-releases/vidyard-extends-video-messaging-leadership-release-vidyard-govideo/

Vidyard Launches Partner Ecosystem and Bold New Vision to Help Everyone Go Video

The rise of video as the king of content has been nothing short of incredible. Now accounting for 73% of all Internet traffic and more than 20 billion daily views on Facebook and SnapChat alone, video is transforming how we communicate. Perhaps most importantly, it’s helping us create more personal connections with prospects, customers and fellow employees in an increasingly digital age. That’s why we’re so passionate about bringing the power of video to every business professional, and why we launched our free video messaging app nearly one year ago. It’s also why, today, we’re announcing a brand new name, exciting new partnerships and a bold vision for bringing video messaging to everyone.

I’m excited to share that our flagship video messaging app, formerly called ViewedIt, is now Vidyard GoVideo. The new name is inspired by our community of 130,000+ users in 100+ countries who have embraced video messaging in countless new ways to transform how they communicate. We’ve seen everyone from business executives and sales reps, to educators and students, using personal video messages to share new ideas and build stronger relationships. To cut through the clutter and tell a better story. We’ve learned that the greatest value they place on the solution is actually quite simple: it’s helping them go video. It’s making it easy for them to capture, share and track video messages in a way that has a meaningful impact on their day-to-day results. This simple idea has inspired us with a bold vision for how we can help individuals and businesses go video in compelling new ways.

Expanded capabilities for video messaging and sharing

Along with the new name comes an even greater commitment to helping our community leverage video to drive their success. With new features like YouTube synchronization and animated GIF thumbnails, Vidyard GoVideo now enables anyone to:

• Create personal video messages and screen captures with one click
• Optimize viewership with engaging animated GIF thumbnail images
• Share videos instantly via Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube
• Track audience engagement with video view notifications

For businesses looking to embrace video messaging in a more strategic and integrated manner, Vidyard GoVideo Enterprise now unlocks new capabilities to help boost the performance of sales, support, marketing, HR and other teams by:

• • Integrating with Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce and other business apps
  • Empowering employees with instant access to shared video libraries
  • Tracking and actioning video viewing insights within marketing and sales tools
  • Enhancing videos with forms, calls-to-action and interactive annotations
  • Securing private video content with enterprise-grade security

Introducing the Vidyard GoVideo Partner Ecosystem

But for me, the most exciting news today is the launch of our Vidyard GoVideo partner ecosystem. This growing community of business technology providers will bring the power of video messaging to their own applications, powered by Vidyard GoVideo, to support our vision of helping every business professional go video. Together we’re bringing one-click video messaging to the business apps people work in every day, from their browsers and email clients to CRM, sales acceleration, marketing automation, customer support and more. The following application providers are among the first to adopt Vidyard GoVideo as a way to:

• Bolstra: Enable customer success managers (CSMs) to build better relationships and deliver more personalized 1-to-1 communications.
• Drift: Connect with website visitors that want to engage in real-time conversations in a more personal and engaging way.
• Engagio: Help businesses stand out and boost the performance of account-based marketing and sales programs with personal video outreach.
• Gainsight: Power more personal customer communications to drive retention, expansion, and advocacy for businesses at scale.
• Influitive: Accelerate the impact of customer marketing programs by capturing video-based customer stories using the UpShot solution.
• Madison Logic: Help B2B marketers use video viewer data and account-based information for more effective video targeting.
• SalesLoft: Help sales teams boost response rates by more than 300% and accelerate pipeline by prospecting with personal video messages.
• Uberflip: Enable sales reps to curate relevant content for key prospects and deliver via personal video messages as a better way to stand out.
• WorkRamp: Instrument and power employee training including self-led, instructor-led, and virtual training with do-it-yourself video content.

Not only will these partnerships help an even broader set of users go video, they will help to ensure business professionals are offered a consistent and integrated video messaging experience as they move from one application to another. This is just the beginning of what’s possible when it comes to integrating video within the workplace, and we expect this community to grow quickly in the months to come.

Ready to go video?

Video is such a powerful way to connect and communicate, but until now it has been difficult and largely inaccessible for the average business professional. I couldn’t be more excited about how we’re changing that with Vidyard GoVideo, our new partner ecosystem, and our bold vision to make video ubiquitous across the workplace. It’s time to make video as easy to embrace in our business lives as it has become in our personal lives. Expectations of our audiences have shifted, and so too should the expectations we set for ourselves. If you haven’t tried Vidyard GoVideo yet, I encourage you to download it for free at www.vidyard.com/govideo and see for yourself if you’re ready to go video.

The post Vidyard Launches Partner Ecosystem and Bold New Vision to Help Everyone Go Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source https://www.vidyard.com/blog/viewedit-is-now-govideo-launch/

The 6 Things You Won’t Want to Miss at INBOUND 2017

Us folks at Vidyard are always at the forefront of everything happening in the sales and (video) marketing world. It’s the DNA of our business! That’s why there’s no question we’ll be seeing you at INBOUND 2017 in Boston, September 25th-28th, 2017.

Take a look at last year’s event video to see for yourself how mind-blowingly awesome this year’s event will be!

If you’re like us and you really, really, really, ❤️  video marketing, you’ll want to pay attention to the events and session we’re about to tell you about. We’ve compiled a list of events you’ll see the Vidyard team at, along with a few other of the most anticipated sessions we can’t wait to attend ourselves!

1. Brit Marling (Creator of Netflix’s the OA) & Issa Rae (Co-Creator & Star, Insecure) Spotlight  | Wednesday, September 27, 2:15 PM – 3:00 PM | Register Here
Whether you’re creating marketing campaigns or creating a hit TV show, you probably wear multiple hats at work. Brit understands the opportunities and challenges of that as well as anyone: she regularly approaches her projects as an actor, a writer, and a producer. Mostly recently, she created, co-wrote, produced, and starred in Netflix’s hit The OA. Issa is proof that YouTube didn’t kill the TV star–quite the opposite, in fact. Based on the success of her YouTube web series Awkward Black Girl, Issa has gone on to co-create and star in HBO’s critically acclaimed series Insecure. If you’re a scrappy content creator with big dreams, prepare to meet a new role model in Issa.

2. Happy Hour at the Vidyard VIP Lounge (hosted at Battery Ventures) | Wednesday, September 27 5:30pm – 7:30pm | Register Here 
Why wait until INBOUND Rocks to get the party going? Join us September 27 at 5:30 pm for two hours of fun! We’ve got cocktails, food, swag and a view overlooking the Boston waterfront! This is a great opportunity to recharge, network with your peers and see first-hand how to create a Chalk Talk live with Tyler Lessard, Vidyard’s VP Marketing. Wait that’s not all! We’ll even bring you to the event! Just look for the white Vidyard bus (and V-Bot) outside of the Boston Convention Center for a free ride! PS: All of this is happening before INBOUND Rocks, so you won’t miss a beat. *Not an official INBOUND event

3. Michelle Obama Keynote | Wednesday, September 27, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM | Register Here
Former First Lady Michelle Obama has been described as one of the greatest political communicators of our time, despite never running for elected office herself. During her time in the White House, Mrs. Obama approached the Office of the First Lady with a focus on connecting to the American public through digital and social platforms and she succeeded, not just in single-handedly making turnips cool again, but in becoming a cultural icon herself. As a world-class communicator, advocate for global education, and example of leading with openness and inclusivity, we think Mrs. Obama is the perfect person to inspire the inbound movement.

4. Community MeetUp | Wednesday, September 27, 4:00pm – 5:30pm | Register Here
Get ready to hit that Record button because the Vidyard team is in town! Join your peers and the Vidyard team on September 27th to learn practical tips for how you can increase engagement and achieve better sales and marketing results with video. Pick up some new tips & tricks from the engaging discussions that you can implement to maximize your video strategy right away. *Not an official INBOUND event

5. Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah Keynote | Tuesday, Sep 26, 2:15 PM – 3:45 PM | Register Here
Join Brian Halligan (CEO & Co-Founder of HubSpot) & Dharmesh Shah (co-founder and CTO of HubSpot) during a joint discussion about Hubspot and how their inbound marketing software helps businesses attract, engage and delight customers on the web.

6. The Psychology of Video and Why It’s More than Just Another Content Format | Tuesday, September 26, 1:00 PM – 1:45 PM | Register Here
Video is one of the hottest trends in inbound marketing and sales. Not only does it convert well, but it opens up opportunities to establish more personal, engaging and emotional connections with your audiences. Peel back the layers on the psychology of video and why we as humans crave it so much more than the written word. Learn how to use these insights to create more compelling content experiences throughout your marketing and sales programs that can transform your relationships with buyers.

If you’re also wondering on how to get ready for INBOUND, check out New Breed’s post on how to prepare for everything that is happening at INBOUND 2017.

And one last crucial stop you’ll have to make is at booth number: S23. Where you’ll find yours truly, Vidyard! Stop by to pick up a v-bot stuffy, grab a Starbucks gift card, and enter to win a Studio in a Box!

See you there!

The post The 6 Things You Won’t Want to Miss at INBOUND 2017 appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/6-things-wont-want-miss-inbound-2017/

Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Sofia Loureiro

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 Sofia Loureiro, User Experience Designer at Vidyard. Learn why she spends so much of her time training service dogs for NSD, and why her father has had such an influence on her life in this new interview:

What Didn’t Make the Cut

Sofia shared a lot more than just how tear-jerking graduation ceremonies are, so here are a few more of her answers:

What Brought You to Vidyard?

I studied Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, and I have been hearing about Vidyard since I was in my first year. Our co-founders both studied in the same program, and started working together with other Vidyard folks on Vidyard while they were in school. So I’ve been hearing about it for a while now!

I’ve always been looking for opportunities to work here, and a couple months ago I got a random message on LinkedIn to apply. I was super excited, so I did. And now I’m here!

What is your favourite video on the internet right now?

My favourite videos are standup stone by Drew Lynch on YouTube. He’s hilarious. I’m pretty sure the reason I like it so much is that he has a service dog, and jokes about service dogs a lot, so it’s hilarious and I can relate to it. Whenever I need a good laugh about people doing silly things with service dogs, I go watch his videos!

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

Four All Ice Cream! I go there very often, and my favourite flavour of ice cream is their new strawberry rhubarb sorbet. It’s just amazing.

 

 

The post Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Sofia Loureiro appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/meet-vidyard-team-video-style-sofia-loureiro/

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, some of the messaging 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 selfie ones? With the power of webcams, there’s no need for heavy industrial camera equipment and a marketing-led, makeup-padded production. In fact, Vidyard customers are finding that engagement (which ViewedIt users can track) 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 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.
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.
   
   
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.
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.

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-simple-ways-improve-internal-communication-video/

How-to Help Sales Understand Your Product Through Video

If there’s one truth when it comes to gossip, it’s that it can take on a life of it’s own. As gossip spreads, each person ends up adding their own touches — a changed word here, an exaggeration there — until the final result bears little resemblance to the initial message.

A product marketer can attest to this phenomenon when they find out their carefully constructed product announcement has gone through the blender that is the sales team and comes out unrecognizable on the other side.

Sales teams are born to reshape messages

Sales departments reshape messages by design. Salespeople sell by telling stories and learn by imitation, which makes sales departments a swirling cauldron of shifting phrases, strategies, and sound bites. Whatever works is adopted by all. Typically, this means that messages take on a much more optimistic and affirmative spin.

For example, “Our software can integrate but only if you have a really good developer” can become “hands-free integration,” and “We’re considering this feature” can become “that’ll be released any day now.”

This is bad for obvious reasons: misaligned customer expectations lead to misery for both sales and product people. As a product marketer, you owe it to your team to nip this confusion in the bud by cementing these messages in personal videos that preserve your initial intent.

5 ways to help sales teams using video:

1. Lay out your product vision in video: Product teams hate to lay out public roadmaps because they feel that it over-commits them. But, not having one can be just as bad, if not worse, because in the absence of any insights, your sales team will almost inevitably develop its own narrative. Take back control of the conversation and release soundbites on your product vision. It doesn’t have to be the whole story (you can certainly go wrong by over-sharing), but offer enough to dispel untoward beliefs about what’s coming. This puts an end to upset salespeople complaining about surprise features and customers complaining about false promises.
2. Arm sales with soundbites: Want salespeople to be on-message? Tell them exactly what to say. Enlist the most persuasive orator on your team or draft a sales leader to record a video that’s a cinematic display of persuasive sales pitch brilliance. You’ll find sales people are dying for killer phrases and messaging that’ll give them an edge over competition, so why not hand it over rather than hoping they nail it on their own?[Video example]
3. Give sales demo tutorials: Show the sales team how your product really works and record a demo for them to copy. This helps overcome the common phenomena whereby most salespeople actually get worse at demos the more they learn about the product. Why? They catch the ‘curse of knowledge.’ That’s when they learn too much to say things simply, and in their excitement to share it all, they make your product look terrifyingly complex. Help push your sales team up the demo maturity curve and teach them to say it clearly and exactly as you intended it.
4. Give the sales team actual customer use cases: Social proof and name dropping are great, but if salespeople can’t describe actual implementations in detail when customers ask, it blows their credibility. It looks as though they were making it all up. Arm your salespeople with more than surface-level stories: record videos of fully-realized customer use cases with details and statistics that can be memorized and internalized. It keeps the product-story straight and helps the sales team with their intended goal: sales.
5. Give the sales team competitive snippets: Where messages most often get crossed is in how your product compares to that of your competitors. Your salespeople may be the best in the business, but even they can get caught up in the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that your competitors are trying to instill about your product. Set the story straight with competitive video snippets where you outline your product’s advantages, overturn competitive FUD, and even lay what Marketo’s sales team calls ‘sales landmines,’ which are particularly tough product questions that you can arm your sales team with to trip up the competition.

When you set your product communications in stone with video, you set up both product marketers and sales teams for a win. You provide message consistency that you know accurately reflects your product while your sales teams gets more powerful messaging to go out and win more business.

The post How-to Help Sales Understand Your Product Through Video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/help-sales-understand-product-video/

What Movie Trailers Can Teach You About Video Marketing

In a WORLD … of video MARKETING … with a budget BALANCED ON THE EDGE OF A KNIFE … a few marketers blow their lead goals out of the water. Why? Probably because they’ve learned to create buzz by watching movie trailers.

Movies are a $286 billion industry and much of their success hinges on the handful of 1 to 2- minute movie trailers that promote them. Wherever an industry pours millions into making brief video snapshots as entertaining and persuasive as possible, we’re interested, and we think you should be too.

5 things video marketers can learn from movie trailers:

1. Infuse your videos with emotion

No, your marketing videos don’t have to make your viewers bawl, but they do have to make them feel something. That something could be annoyance (at their current process), desire, mirth, or camaraderie—whatever drives your point home.

How do movie trailers do this? According to the master of Hollywood teasers, John Long, “A great trailer has its own mini-story.” Long was recently nominated for multiple Golden Trailer Awards (yeah, it’s a thing) and he told Fast Company that he recommends breaking down the whole movie into a trailer with a “three-act setup” where you introduce a problem, complicate it, and then bring it back home and hint at a grand finale. This works, he claims, because audiences have grown more sophisticated over the years and aren’t satisfied with long, linear shots of people just talking.

For your marketing videos, the same holds true. Figure out how to break down your brand narrative into a mini-story. Are you saving the world by saving customers’ time or money? Are you skyrocketing end-users to career-stardom because of how good they’ll look after buying from you? Fit it into the three-act setup and you have a solid, attention-holding plot.

2. Begin with a powerful hook

Good trailers don’t open with a whimper—they launch into a mystery. Often, directors use tense music, an unexpected sound, a cloud of fog, or a curious piece of dialog to spark curiosity. Do the same with your marketing videos, and do it fast. Research shows that you only have a matter of seconds to snare viewers’ interest and unlike movie theatres, you don’t have a captive audience.

To achieve this hook, don’t be afraid to start somewhere other than the beginning. Copy the director Quentin Tarantino who is famous for capturing interest by leaping to an exciting scene in the middle or end of his story. After your hook, introduce your company logo or the title.

See the trailer for Bladerunner 2049 which hits all the right points:

3. The real story is told in post-production

If you’ve ever seen a movie and thought, “man, that was nothing like the trailer!” you’re definitely onto something—editing can completely change the story. The folks who cut movie trailers are rarely the same people who made the film and their only goal is to sell tickets. As such, they’ve been able to produce some pretty misleading trailers over the years. For example, the trailer for the Tim Burton film Sweeney Todd famously forgot to mention that the movie was a full-fledged musical because that fact may have hurt ticket sales.

Testament to the power of editing, an entire cottage industry of jokesters have recut movies to completely change their meaning. Just look at the horror film The Shining, turned into a romantic comedy:

Or Jaws turned into a Disney film.

Point being, it’s how you edit it, not how you shoot it, that determines what your video is about. Make sure that you have the appropriate tools, time, and talent to make something noteworthy out of your marketing video post-production.

4. Create anticipation

Finally, viewers need to take action after your video. An evocative trailer hasn’t done its job if you don’t want to actually see the movie afterward. Your marketing video should similarly leave out the best part while hinting at the grand finale. “You have to have a great way to end the piece,” says Long. “The way people’s [sic] brains are wired, first we remember how something ends, and then we remember how it begins.” How does Long typically end his trailers? Just after the dramatic climax:

For your marketing videos, you can do one even better: Instead of waiting for your viewer to hopefully buy from you later on, capitalize on that climax with a CTA or lead form within the video itself. Any viewer who has made it that far is clearly qualified and interested and it’s time to move them forward in the epic drama that is … their customer JOURNEY.

Want more video marketing tips? Read How to Use Video In Your Email Marketing Campaigns.

The post What Movie Trailers Can Teach You About Video Marketing appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/movie-trailers-can-teach-video-marketing/

How Video for Sales Boosted Terminus Email Opens by 40%

Video has become an important part of our DNA at Terminus. As an account-based marketing company, from the beginning we’ve been focused on personalization and obsessed with finding creative and authentic ways to reach contacts at our target accounts. Video is a channel that allows our sales team to personalize their outreach in powerful ways, and to put a face to what otherwise could feel like a cold outreach or sales process.

Recently a sales leader asked about the ROI of video and I was surprised by the question. Don’t get me wrong — as a sales leader myself I want to see an ROI for every tool that we use, but the impact of video seemed obvious. For an inside sales team, how could creating personalized videos during SDR outreach or during a long sales process not have an ROI?

Terminus has been at the forefront of building a new category around ABM, which has caused some interesting challenges. While we don’t have many direct competitors, our buyers typically do not have an initiative or budget set aside for our product. We face challenges around market confusion as there are many ABM players in the space, lack of knowledge around how to launch an ABM strategy, and including the entire buying committee in our sales process as marketers across several teams may need to collaborate to use our platform.

To surmount our unique set of challenges, we absolutely need to personalize our messaging and find creative ways of sharing it in order to break through the noise. We also need to reach multiple contacts in the organization throughout the entire sales process. Video has become a crucial tool in allowing us to do this quickly and efficiently.

I brought video via Vidyard’s ViewedIt into our sales prospecting at Terminus earlier this year. The results have been pretty mind-blowing. Right away we started getting real-world feedback from people like:

“You caught my attention. Kudos to you guys for a killer prospecting email. I forwarded your email to our BDR team for some inspiration…hope you don’t mind.”

“Thank you so much for actually taking the time to actually talk about me instead of just telling me what you do.”

In fact, one of the recipients of our videos wrote a whole blog post about how impressed she was intrigued and impressed by the approach from one of our SDRs, Morgan Gillespie. Here’s one example of Morgan’s creative outreach.

But the results aren’t just anecdotal either. We closely monitor and track our work and within just a few months of incorporating video, we found that we were seeing in our outreach emails (using video as a first touchpoint vs. a traditional approach):

• A 40% higher open rate
• 37% higher click rate
• 5.5% higher reply rate (compared to an email outreach from without video)

Finally, another benefit we are seeing from using video for sales is that the information we send out is getting circulated to more members of the buying committee. It’s actually reaching the decision makers because it is suited for busy people who simply don’t have the time to read lengthy emails and documents.

For those of you ready to bring the power of video to your sales process, here are some things we have learned along the way:

Be human.

Video has been a central part of my company since the beginning. In the early days, our Co-Founder & CMO, Sangram Vajre, made a series of thought leadership videos about topics related to account-based marketing (which you can also read more about in this post).

We discovered something surprising: the videos that were getting the most views were the impromptu ones where he didn’t sound scripted and there was no fancy cinematography. These videos resonated because they felt genuine and he was speaking from the heart. So we just took the same concept and took that to the sales team. Here’s another example from our SDR, Ryan Vitello.

We coach the team to film one, maybe two takes of each video from their desk or a quiet spot around the office. This makes the video feel natural and captures someone’s attention. It’s also a quick, easy way to send a personalized message. It’s easier to get out a complex topic or to provide an explanation on why you’re reaching out verbally than in an email.

Lay a proper foundation.

Right now video has an enormous advantage in business (read: the novelty factor) because it’s such a fresh and dynamic new medium. But like any channel, if not used properly it can just become one more thing to blast people and annoy them. It’s really important to provide value, and it’s the job of the sales leader to properly train and prepare their team to use every channel, video included.

At Terminus we have each of our SDRs and AEs practice doing a set number of test videos before we just give them the ability send them out to prospects. The process is simple: We have each member find five prospective companies that would be a good fit and then select one contact in each account to record a personalized video for. Once complete, they are to email these examples to their manager to provide tips and feedback. Once they have proven that they can create a valuable and effective video, we certify them to use our video platform for sales outreach.

I highly recommend that you create a training and testing process for your team before launching any type of video strategy to ensure it leaves your recipients with a positive impression of your company and brand.

Avoid the ‘me-centric’ approach. Make it about them.

Another key to not annoying people with video, we’ve found, is to remember that customers don’t care about your product until you prove that you can provide value to them.  The great news is that video is the perfect channel to do this effectively. Video allows you to quickly share what you’ve learned about the company and/or contact that caused you to reach out and how you believe that your product or service can benefit them. It’s easier to share this in a video than to pack it all into a short email.

So as with any good prospecting, first research the company to ensure it’s a good fit for your offering. Then, research the buying committee and create a plan for outreach. Use that information to carefully construct a tailored approach including multiple channels- email, phone, social and video. Your message across all channels should be the same, but can be delivered in different ways. The key is to speak to how you can help that person and organization, NOT to simply tell them what you do. Automated emails can accomplish that for less expense.

In today’s busy world of automated mass messaging it’s really hard for a sales person to break through the noise. It’s tempting to double down on automation and volume to improve your chances of success, but those efforts are not valuable and provide diminishing returns. According to the Aberdeen Group, 75 percent of customers prefer personalized offers.  Creative, value-driven, and personalized outreach will help your team stand out, and I can almost guarantee will improve your conversion rates. Video is one of the best, most effective ways to do exactly this in your sales and marketing efforts.

Let me know how it goes, and send me YOUR stories of success!

The post How Video for Sales Boosted Terminus Email Opens by 40% appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/video-sales-boosted-terminus-email-opens/