Is Personalized Content Worth The Hype?

YES! I Recently had the pleasure of joining Howard Sewell & Jason Oakley on a webinar where we focused on how to Drive B2B Engagement with Personalized Content. Howard is the President and Co-Founder of Spear Marketing Group, and Jason is the Product Marketing Manager at Uberflip

Although Howard already shared his thoughts on the Spear Marketing Blog, I wanted to highlight three key themes I took away from learning from these marketing leaders:

Focus on relevance, not noise
It appears that many marketing teams, focused on delivering personalized experiences, tend to over-index on creating noise rather than essential moments for their prospects. This critical distinction between relevance and sound is a fine line that must be considered when taking approaches like Account-Based Marketing (ABM) where the latter is often the outcome. The focus must be on creating a seamless buyer’s journey where a prospect is equipped with the right content, at the right time, to move them through the marketing funnel efficiently. Is this how your marketing team creates content, or are you merely creating noise?

“Nobody reads ads. People read what’s interesting to them, and sometimes that’s an ad.”
-Howard Gossage

Stay competitive, not complacent
Let’s face it – every company, in virtually every industry, deals with competition one way or another. Even indirectly, one of the most challenging hurdles for marketing teams is getting the attention of a buyer who has an attention span shorter than a goldfish (it’s true). When your team starts planning for next quarter or fiscal year, how are you innovating to remain top of mind for prospects and customers? Don’t be overwhelmed by the multitude of options your team has to choose from. If you don’t take a step out of our comfort zone and experiment with new tactics to acquire customers – your competitors will.

 

“This change in mentality from measuring your team’s success against vague industry benchmarks versus striving for greatness is what separates good marketing teams from great ones!”

Be yourself, be genuine
It may be my own bias creeping in (oops) but the more customers I speak with, the more I am confident in saying that marketers and salespeople need to let their figurative ‘hair down.’ For marketers, strive for telling a simple story in words that you and I use day-to-day, no more fluff, and buzzwords! For salespeople, bring the human connection back to your cadences to build meaningful relationships with your prospects. Automation is effective, sure, but is that creating more noise than relevance in your prospect’s inboxes? Personal video messaging is one of these tactics that industry-leading organizations like HubSpot and Terminus are finding success with.

A personal challenge to you – try living by a one take rule to ensure your prospects can connect with the real you, and not a scripted robot version! Deal?

The post Is Personalized Content Worth The Hype? appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/personalized-content-worth-hype/

Skip the Content Gurus and Trust Yourself

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 Jay Acunzo, Keynote Speaker and Show Host of Unthinkable, to discuss the importance of finding and trusting your intuition when it comes to creating standout content.

 

Here are a few of our favorite moments:

I’m curious, about the topics you’ve explored, the people you’ve talked to, the research that you’ve done, as it relates to this idea of intuition and it’s role in the content development experience?

I started thinking about why is there is so much average stuff out there? Nobody actually sets out to do average work, but a lot of our work ends up average. When you talk to people they’re like, “Well, I actually do aspire to do better work. I want to do something exceptional.” So I’m focused on that gap between the two. It’s never been easier to just figure out what the average is because you can ask somebody on social or Google it or go to YouTube and find a tutorial. So average is not our problem. Our problem is going from average to exceptional. If you look at the word “exceptional,” again I do the words thing for a living, so I’m fascinated by the make up of a word, exceptional has that root word “exception.” So what makes each person an exception is their own intuition.

Is intuition a part of everybody’s job within the creative process?

Yeah, let’s switch the phrase. I mean it’s a great question, but if you switch the phrase from intuition to thinking for yourself. Then the question becomes, “Who should think for yourself inside the business?” And I’d hope most companies would say everybody, right? Obviously you have some corporations that you might point to from the outside and be like, “Those people treat their employees like cogs,” but I would assume everybody listening to this show is thinking, “Yeah, I’d like to think for myself. I’d like to come up with better, more differentiated answers and ideas, and I’d like my team and my boss, my peers, my direct reports to do that too.” So, to answer your question, I think it’s everybody’s responsibility to do that in any job and if you do have a creative production-related job, it becomes all that more important. Because now, is it not only about thinking for yourself, it’s also about differentiation in a marketplace full of copy cats.

 

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 Skip the Content Gurus and Trust Yourself appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/skip-content-gurus-trust/

Giving Tuesday: Why You Should Bake Community Betterment into your Business Model

This #GivingTuesday, we’re taking a moment to reflect what it means to give back as a business. We’re proud that community impact is one of our top priorities at Vidyard from our participation in Salesforce’s Pledge 1% to the launch of our community initiative, PlugIn.

As a busy CEO with an equally busy team, I understand that making time for giving back can seem like a nice-to-have versus a critical priority. I strongly encourage other founders to move beyond this way of thinking. For the past few years, we’ve been moving at breakneck speed, but with a little creativity and a lot of heart, we’ve managed to successfully bake community betterment into our business model. This includes donating 1% of our product and of our people’s time to supporting nonprofits in our area. How did we do it? Check out my video for some tips:

PlugIn has been an undeniable win for the community, local business owners, and Vidyard employees. I love this next video because it shows the impact that’s possible. Special thanks to our friends at House of Friendship, Big Brothers Big Sisters and Lutherwood for participating:

Getting your message out isn’t always easy. At Vidyard, we’re also proud to offer in-kind services to create videos for the charities we support and help raise the profile of their work. Here’s a great example (just make sure you have some Kleenex on hand):

I feel motivated to continue our focus on community impact as we grow. It inspires me to see many other companies prioritizing these same values. I’d love to hear about how you or your company are moving the needle for the causes the matter to you and I’m always happy to share what’s worked for us here at Vidyard.

Feel free to share your comments below or find me on Twitter: @MichaelLitt

The post Giving Tuesday: Why You Should Bake Community Betterment into your Business Model appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/giving-tuesday-bake-community-betterment-business-model/

If Your Marketing Team Were Game of Thrones Characters

Even though winter is well on its way in our part of the world, it’s looking like it’s going to be many months before the release of season 8 of Game of Thrones (noooooooooooooo!).

Jon Snow Sad

I don’t know about you, but we here at Vidyard are in some serious GoT withdrawal. To tide us over in the meantime, we’ve imagined what it would be like if we worked alongside the characters from GoT. 

And, as we’ve discovered, some of our favorite Game of Thrones characters have characteristics that would make them uniquely suited for roles in Marketing. Here’s what we would hire each of them for if they decided to apply to work with us!

Cue music! Dun dun da da dun dun da da dun dun da da dun dun…  

(Spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned.)

 

Jon Snow
Resume: Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, The King in the North

What we’d hire him for – CMO

Contrary to popular belief, Jon Snow does know some things. In fact, he’s a natural leader whose sincerity, authenticity, and dedication to those he leads cause people to rally around him in support. Most importantly, he’s not afraid to challenge the status quo and shake things up when they aren’t working. We think his thoughtful leadership style and innovative attitude would make him a great addition to any executive team!

---

Daenerys Targaryen
Resume:  Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons

What we’d hire her for – Demand Generation

If there’s anything Daenerys is good at, it’s traveling the world and rallying allies to her cause. We’re confident she would be just as successful generating leads for a sales team as she was convincing an entire army of Unsullied and a Dothraki horde to pledge their undying allegiance to her.

---

Drogon
Resume: Being a motherf***ing dragon

What we’d hire him for – Content

While we’re not entirely sure how well he’d collaborate with his teammates, there’s no doubt in our minds that everything Drogon creates would be ~fire~

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Arya Stark
Resume: A Girl Has No Resume

What we’d hire her for – Digital Marketing

Adventure has a way of following Arya Stark—making her scrappy and resourceful, two traits we think are essential to being a part of any marketing team. Besides, we believe her time serving the many-faced god would give her an edge when it comes to being able to empathize with a range of different customer perspectives. It’s surprising we haven’t hired her already (probably because we haven’t managed to track her down!).

---

 

The Three-Eyed Raven
Resume: 300 Year Old Greenseer & Mentor to Brandon Stark

What we’d hire him for – Video Production

If there’s anything the three-eyed raven has demonstrated his skills in, it’s visual storytelling. We think his background in sending messages to Bran through visions and dreams would translate well into a video-production role—and his third eye would give him an edge when it comes to recording the perfect shot. (After all, what is a camera but a kind of third eye?) 

---

Like all good GoT episodes we are leaving this one on a cliffhanger—tune in next week to see who took over as VP of Business Development and the battle to claim the title of BDR…

Psst…we are hiring! Interested in working with our marketing team? Check out our careers page.

The post If Your Marketing Team Were Game of Thrones Characters appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/marketing-team-game-thrones-characters/

Do Customers Actually Find Your Support Videos Useful?

Congratulations if you’re among the thousands of businesses that have created a library of customer support videos! Just don’t celebrate too hard—creating them is only the beginning.

Like any product, your videos are targeted to solve a specific customer problem. You can’t know if you’ve achieved your purpose and whether they are measurably impacting your support metrics until you start looking at the data. Data which, if you’re using a video support platform, you should have access to a treasure trove of through your analytics.

Log in and let’s take a stroll through how your customers use your videos so you can optimize them for impact.

How to know if your customers find your videos useful:

Find out what they’re watching and where

Knowing how, when, and where your customers consume your videos can tell you a lot about what they’re seeking. Take location or device data, for example:

• Customers from different countries may have different language preferences
• Urban and rural customers are likely to have different questions
• Mobile and desktop customers are likely to have different viewing habits

These differences can be illuminating, and if you don’t tailor your videos to your audience, customers may not find the answers they’re seeking.

Just consider the phenomenon of the silent mobile video. Over 85 percent of videos on Facebook are viewed without sound. Why? Because most Facebook users are on mobile, most people on mobile are in public, and most people in public don’t want to bother others. If most of your viewers are on mobile and you don’t include subtitles, they probably won’t watch your support videos.

Always collect post-video feedback: Use a pop-up to query customers on whether videos sufficiently answered their questions. Learn more here.

Identify all the location, language, and device characteristics of your customers and review your videos to make sure they’re a match.

Find out who is watching what

Filtering your customers by customer persona can reveal a broad range of viewing habits. You may find that certain complaints are specific to specific industries, such as banks being overly concerned with data security or software startups being ravenous for technical details. You may find that new users commonly exhibit a deep interest in setup videos while long-time users are far more interested in upgrades, workarounds, and patches.

Write down the viewing habits of each persona and compare those to their support metrics. Are videos having an impact on case deflection, first contact resolution, NPS, or average handling time? How might you incorporate them more fully to empower your agents and improve results?

Find out how they watch

Use persona-based viewing data to compare individual videos to each other. Do customers commonly watch some videos all the way through and not others? What’s the difference? Do they seem to find some lengths or styles preferable? Begin a list of best practices and come up with questions for customers.

For instance, what is happening when multiple customers re-watch a particular video segment? Are they finding it so useful they’re rewinding to show others or are they confused and unable to understand?

Here are a few areas you might explore with customer research:

• Ask customers how they feel about self-help videos
• Track how customers find your video. Are they optimized for SEO?
• Track video as a touchpoint in the customer journey
• Ask customers how you might improve their usage of support videos
• Track whether video resolves complaints or serves as a precursor to a support call

With data in hand, you can start to optimize and improve your video library.

Use the data to improve future videos or tweak current ones

With a laundry list of improvements, it’s time to reassess your video library. Is it accomplishing its job? Are these videos garnering relatively high engagement and completion rates or are they just adding more complication to the customer support journey? How else might you improve them? What videos are missing from the library that should add?

Turn these questions into edits, and you’ll be well on your way to optimizing your support video experience to truly serve your customers.

Want to increase customer satisfaction too? Watch our Chalk Talk, Increase Customer Satisfaction and Reduce Support Load with Video.

The post Do Customers Actually Find Your Support Videos Useful? appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/customers-find-support-videos-useful/

Plan 90 Days of Blog Posts in Only 15 Minutes

Do you ever struggle to think of your next blog post idea? Do you ever arrive at your computer ready to write, only to spend the next 30 minutes staring at a blank screen, or straining to produce a few rambling paragraphs you’ll just delete later?

This article will help you to plan your next 90 days of blog posts faster than you probably think is even possible.

But for this system to work, you must first choose the transformation you want your readers to achieve in the next 90 days.

Think of your blog like a paid product. What promise can you make your readers if they do everything you tell them?

You don’t need to share this promise publicly, but having one is foundational to the system we’ll use to plan out your next 90 days of content.

Try to think of a promise that is easy to understand, measurable (readers will know if they succeeded or not), compelling, and doable in 90 days.

For example, “I want to help the moms who read my blog fully potty train their kids.”

Or, “I want to help the writers who read my blog finish a complete book outline.”

What will you help your readers accomplish in the next 90 days? Once you have that figured out, there are five types of blog posts you should start writing.

Type 1: How To

“How to” posts teach readers the steps they need to take in order to achieve a transformation.

To identify the “How To” posts your blog needs, you should start with the 90-Day Promise you chose.

Then, work backward to figure out the steps your readers must take to reach the destination.

For example:

• 6 steps to build your chicken coop in the next 90 days
• 8 steps to improve your ACT practice test scores by 5 points in the next 90 days

You should have at least one post devoted to listing out these “How To” steps. (This will be an extremely valuable article that you’ll link to often.)

Or, if the process lends itself to multiple phases, you could have a post for each stage with the individual steps your readers need to take. It’s up to you.

Type 2: What if

“What if” posts are where you address special circumstances many of your readers will face.

You’re anticipating the questions readers will ask and teaching them how to customize your “How To” posts for their unique situations.

For example, if your 90-Day Promise is to help people lose 10 pounds through healthy eating, your “What If” posts might include: How to follow this diet if you’re a vegetarian, a type 2 diabetic, or if you have picky kids you have to cook for.

Although it’s rare for a “What If” post to apply to every reader, every reader does have special circumstances in their lives. And teaching them how to cope and customize is essential to helping them change their lives.

Type 3: Limiting beliefs

If you’re trying to lose weight, should you eat more broccoli or more ice cream?

If your goal is to get out of debt, should you look for ways to spend or ways to save?

The truth is, most of us already have lots of how-to information in our heads.

What holds us back from achieving a breakthrough?

Limiting beliefs.

I once heard a man say, “I want to be a motivational speaker, but I can’t because I’m an introvert.”

This man didn’t need “How To” content.

He just needed to believe an introvert could speak in public. Until that happened, he would stay stuck.

For this reason, blog posts that help readers overcome limiting beliefs are some of the most transformational posts you’ll write.

Here are some common limiting beliefs you can address:

• I tried this before and failed, so I must not have what it takes.
• Making this change isn’t worth the effort.
• I can’t do this because I have [this obstacle]…

Type 4: Getting started

Remember the way your “How To” content is divided into steps?

You should spend some extra time breaking down the steps you listed into smaller steps, which help people get started and find some momentum.

If your 90-Day Promise is to help people pay off $1,000 of student loan debt, your “Getting Started” post might be “How to create a budget in under an hour” or “How to find the courage to start paying off your debt.”

You can write posts like these for any steps where you see people getting stuck.

Type 5: Staying motivated

Changing your life is hard work. Without encouragement, most people will give up before they reach the finish line.

For this reason, devote some of the posts on your blog to encouraging people to stay focused and consistent.

These posts are also a smart place to talk about habit formation or tips to make following through a bit easier.

It’s time to plan your 90 days of content!

Start listing out your ideas for each of the five categories above, arrange them in a smart order, and decide how often you want to post.

If you end up a few ideas short, there’s a 6th type of blog post you can sprinkle in. I call it Reviews and Quick Wins.

Reviewing books, products, services, or even other blogs that are relevant to your audience is a great way to save your readers some time and give them advice they can trust.

For example, I have a blog that helps people save time and money with food delivery services. So naturally, I wrote a GrubHub Review, a DoorDash Review, and this Caviar Review, etc.

Quick wins are similar. By themselves, they aren’t life-changing, but they’re easy to implement, and readers love them. On my blog, these are posts like a Caviar coupon, a BiteSquad coupon, etc. For a tech blog, this might be a time-saving keyboard shortcut.

If you enjoy this process for planning out 90 days of blog posts, do it again in 90 days! And make sure to leave me a comment letting me know how it goes.

The post Plan 90 Days of Blog Posts in Only 15 Minutes appeared first on The Copybot.

source http://thecopybot.com/plan-blog-posts/

Last Chance to Register for Fast Forward on November 29th & 30th

Fast Forward is less than a week away, and we’re more excited than ever about what our speakers are planning to talk about. From seasoned sales leaders taking their teams to the next level with video, to marketing trailblazers that wrote the book on driving more conversions with video, there’s something for everyone at Fast Forward. Whether you’re new to video, or you’ve been pressing record since before you could walk, this event is for you!

Register Now

Join over 1,500 Marketers at Fast Forward 2017

Register Now

But don’t take our word for it–let’s dive into what our keynotes and panels are going to share with you:

For Sales Leaders:

How Our SDRs Tripled Response Rates with Personal Video Messaging  – Ryan Vitello – Terminus
Video messaging has transformed our outbound prospecting (and our results)! See exactly how we do it, how we trained our team, and what we’ve learned so far.

 

 

 

 

Proven Ways to Use Video Throughout the Deal Cycle to Boost Close Rates – Doug Davidoff – Imagine LLC
When it comes to B2B selling, video is the next best thing to being there in person. Learn how to use video throughout the deal cycle to close more business, faster.

 

 

How We Use Video to Convert 25% of Trial Leads and Accelerate Inbound Sales – Dylan Hey – Leadfeeder
Learn how LeadFeeder uses inbound marketing and video to convert 25% of their sales leads to revenue by enabling sales professionals to build relationships with prospects.

Plan your day

See more Sales sessions and plan your day!

Plan your day

For Marketers:

From Tactical to Strategic: Our Path to B2B Video Marketing Maturity and ROI – Michael Ballard – Lenovo
From YouTube and views, to Personalized Video and real pipeline. Learn how Lenovo’s B2B Demand Gen team has taken video from a tactic to a core strategy.

 

 

 

Just Do It: Video Production 101 for ANY B2B Marketer – George B Thomas -The Sales Lion
Video doesn’t need to be hard or expensive. Join inbound marketing ninja George B. Thomas to see how anyone in marketing can start creating great videos today.

 

 

Storytelling with Video: Creating a Narrative to Disrupt and Drive Action – Michael Margolis – Get Storied
Video isn’t just a new way to tell the same story. Narrative strategist Michael Margolis shares how to create a new narrative through storytelling that inspires action.

 

Plan your day

See more Marketing sessions and plan your day!

Plan your day

For Vidyard Users:

How to Generate Leads from Video Using Vidyard’s Interactive Player- Stephanie Yi – Vidyard
Lights, camera, call-to-action! Get the latest tips on how to use embedded forms and interactive video to generate more leads and accelerate the buying journey.

 

There are over 20 speakers to learn from at Fast Forward, and you’ll be joining over 1,500 marketers, sales professionals, and customer success superstars for 2 full days of virtual video learning. So what are you waiting for? Register now!

The post Last Chance to Register for Fast Forward on November 29th & 30th appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/last-chance-fast-forward-registration/

The 9 Secrets to Making Video Dialog Sound Natural

How can something that each of us spends thousands of hours practicing every year be so devilishly difficult?

We’re, of course, talking about dialog—that simple back-and-forth between human beings that’s one of the trickiest parts to nail in your marketing videos. A dearth of spoken sincerity can cause the whole production to come crashing down and feel stilted, and even multimillion dollar movies and A-list actors are guilty of it (Looking at you, Keanu).   

And just as in Hollywood, lousy video marketing dialog can be an ROI killer. Here are some tips for writing more believable banter:

The nine secrets to making video dialog sound natural

 

1. Read it out loud

Consider this your first line of defense against dialog disaster. You’ve already poured years of practice into the spoken word, and by listening to yourself, you’ll hear what does and doesn’t work. As you say it, rewrite a new version.

 

2. Use contracted dialog n’ such

There’s a pretty big gap between how we write and how we say things. That’s because when people are speaking, there’s a wealth of subtle cues in the form of tone, emphasis, emotion, and body language. “Are you serious?” can be communicated with a furrowed brow. “That’s horrible,” can be said with just a raised upper lip. Replace words in your script with these stage directions.

Also, speed up the rate of which people say things. We talk fast—at 145 words per minute versus 40 for reading. To try and fit it all in, people contract just about everything that can be shortened. ‘Do not’ becomes don’t, ‘cannot’ becomes can’t, ‘it will’ becomes it’ll, and most transitions such as ‘but,’ ‘if,’ and ‘whereas’ merely get dropped. Write for speed and cut the fluff.

 

3. Eavesdrop on real conversations

Curious where to use those contractions? Go back to basics and do some good old-fashioned people watching. Try it right now in your workspace—stop and listen to how coworkers converse with each other. Note how rarely they speak in cliches such as “ace in the hole” or “as luck would have it” compared to how often these phrases show up in scripts. Spend time playing office stenographer, type up conversations, and correct your dialog accordingly.

 

4. Leave out the boring stuff

After collecting reams of real, recorded inter-office dialog, cut out all the pieces that are unnecessary or boring. Real people use lots of, um, filler words and drop into unrelated tangents. For the sake of your marketing video audience’s limited attention span, streamline the script and keep things moving.

 

5. Don’t overuse names

Most of the time, we don’t address each other as anything. We just start talking. According to Angelo Perra, playwright, and author of Making Character Dialog Sound Natural, that’s because “it sounds silly. (Mary, you look great. Thank you, Tom. Do you want to watch a movie, Mary? Yes, Tom.)” Use names only sparingly, if at all.

 

6. Treat it like tennis

Most writing, especially in marketing, is a long, sustained, unidirectional rant. This article, for example, leaves no room for you to butt-in, and though you’re probably writing this way, that’s not how dialog works. It’s more like a tennis match. People trade quick, broken sentences back and forth, back and forth.

 

7. Keep your characters busy

Ever notice that in the movies or TV shows, characters are always doing something like chopping vegetables or fixing a car while they talk? That’s because, in a real conversation, adults rarely stand, hands at their side, taking turns making declarations. Get your characters engaged with something and you’ll relieve the uncomfortable tension of two people acting like human chatbots.

 

8. Weave in multiple threads

In real life, we like to multitask topics. According to the Creative Writer’s Guild, “It’s entirely normal for participants in a conversation to maintain multiple threads of dialogue. They can simultaneously be talking about the meaning of life, what they had for lunch on Tuesday, and how stressed they are about homework—and none of this is a contradiction.”

When writing dialog for your marketing video, get at least two threads going. If the characters are going to talk about how frustrated they are with their budget planning, also weave in something about inter-office politics or a universal frustration, like teleconferencing software. It’ll make things feel less forced.  

 

9. Bury your agenda to avoid the consumers from Mars effect

We have all seen a consumer from Mars: they’re the people on infomercials whose emotions are vastly more potent than the situation warrants. They rave about how a good product like dish soap positively saved their marriage. They sound, as Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. and author of Influence says, “like people not from this world.” Give your characters realistic reactions to the situation.

The dialog doesn’t seem half as daunting now, does it? Just read your stuff out loud, listen to how people talk and keep the conversation going back and forth, sometimes across multiple threads. Do that, and you’ll write more like people speak, yaknow?

And now, here are one and a half minutes of everything we’re trying to save you from genuinely awful commercials.

The post The 9 Secrets to Making Video Dialog Sound Natural appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/make-video-dialog-sound-natural/

Is Your Marketing Ready For The New Millennial-um?

Generals always prepare for the previous war. Cities always build for the most recent earthquake and regulators always prepare for the last big crash. But does our past really predict our future?

Rarely, especially in marketing. Over the past two decades we’ve evolved from snail mail and billboards to handheld supercomputers and AI ads—and the rate of change is only increasing. Any marketers planning for next year based on yesterday’s data are going to miss not only the dramatic channel changes but the demographic changes as well.

Millennials—oh yes—are about to complete their sweep. By 2025 they’ll account for 75 percent of the workforce (read: buyers) and they’re about to upend your marketing like a digital native hurricane.

The future is bright, loud, and interactive

What does the next generation of B2B buyers love? While it’s impossible to say on an individual basis (your marketing tools will have to tell you that), broadly, they’re in love with new mediums: messaging apps, social media, and of course, video. When Forrester asked whether they prefer video content, three generations responded in this fashion:

• Millennials: 71%
• Gen Xers: 58%
• Baby Boomers: 54%

There are several reasons for this. Millennials spend more time on mobile and more avidly adopt new mediums than other generations; however, they’re also chasing a human connection that Baby Boomers and many Gen Xers prefer to find in-person. 

For millennials, video, be it live or asynchronous, is the next best thing to face-to-face. It offers connection but affords them the mobility they value so deeply.

While many companies are adopting video, they’re doing it carelessly and still facing poor results. Some 54 percent of B2B buyers report that much of the marketing materials that vendors give them, including video, is useless. And in a recent study, only 23 out of 60 companies got a passing score for using video to engage their audiences.

What’s the disconnect? Well, it’s that today’s marketers are preparing for yesterday’s market. Luckily, Forrester is here to help marketers adapt before it’s too late.

What’s your blueprint for B2B video success?

To make the most of video, marketers need to unlearn what they know, and get out of their own way. Millennials and the Gen Zers hot on their heels have little tolerance for video done wrong. In an exclusive new Forrester report, the research firm cites three ways most marketers mess it up:

1. They over-complicate video production

Few things say, “I don’t know what millennials want” like using costly 4k cameras and expensive lighting in late-stage funnel content. High-production value video has its place, but most marketers are mired in the past and haven’t adapted to a new world where less can be more. Lower production-value video can have a greater impact because it has much higher perceived authenticity.

2. They create poor-performing content

In Forrester’s words, most marketers “produce a haphazard flood of content” which gets soundly ignored. They fail to target it properly to their buyer personas or adjust content types to different buying funnel stages. On the flip side, this creates an immense opportunity for those marketers who get video right and break through the noise with something targeted and differentiated.

3. They fail to attribute video properly

How does video influence buying cycles? And what videos perform best and where? Most marketers, including those who create an ample amount of video, can’t say. That’s because it wasn’t until recently that the technologies around hosting, sharing, tracking, and analyzing video consumption became accessible. Now that they are, not all marketers are using them, and few are sure how to weigh these calculations.

So, how can you avoid these video marketing pitfalls and preparing for yesterday’s market? Forrester has a plan.

Download their 2017 report A Blueprint for Successful B2B Marketing to learn:

• The perfect content type for each stage of the funnel
• Optimal parameters, like video length
• How companies like KPMG and Polycom dominate with video marketing

With this blueprint, you’ll far better prepared to adapt to the new millennial-um.

The post Is Your Marketing Ready For The New Millennial-um? appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/marketing-ready-new-millennial-um/

Welcome to the Age of Intelligence (and What it Means for Video)

Dreamforce 2017: Through the Video Lens

Last week, the spectacle that is Dreamforce engulfed the city of San Francisco bringing together tens of thousands of business professionals, app developers and members of the tech community. It was another impressive culmination of all things digital in modern customer experience, reminding us how far things have come, and how far we have yet to go, in the evolving worlds of marketing, sales and customer service.

If you’ve never experienced Dreamforce first-hand, here’s a taste of our experience at the event:

This year’s keynote by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff anchored the idea that we’re now entering the fourth industrial age, the age of Intelligence. For those not keeping track, this follows the industrial ages of Steam (transportation and heavy manufacturing), Electricity (the light bulb and a much better way to shave), and Information/Computing (you know – Buzzfeed, Pinterest, Netflix, Emoticons). This new age of Intelligence brings us deep learning algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and other innovations that help to ensure that autonomous driving vehicles stay on the right path.

But what does this have to do with video? Hold that thought.

Salesforce made many announcements around its Einstein platform, which is the backbone of its AI strategy. Einstein Bots to power automated chat services, Prediction Builder for predictive modeling and automated workflows within marketing and sales, and myEinstein to make all of this accessible to us mere mortals. At the heart of all this innovation is one core idea: to help businesses deliver more personalized and relevant digital experiences that create higher engagement, more sales opportunities, and increased customer satisfaction–and to do it at massive scale with hyper-efficiency. But how compelling will these services be if they don’t deliver experiences through the most engaging content medium?

Video must evolve to keep up with the machines.

As we march into the age of intelligence, video content, technologies and strategies will need to evolve to better align with how we do business. Whether you’re part of a production agency, a B2B business or a video technology provider, consider the following implications and predictions for video given what we saw at Dreamforce:

1. Video will need to become tightly integrated with other business applications to make it easy to index, search and present in an automated way. Chatbots, automated nurtures, and triggered workflows will need to identify and surface the most relevant video content to answer specific questions or to engage potential buyers in a fully autonomous way. YouTube no longer cuts it as a video hosting platform for businesses.
2. Video content libraries will need to expand quickly to support this degree of personalization. Whether for marketing, sales or customer service, businesses will need to accelerate video creation to build libraries of content that answer a broader set of questions. Without the necessary content to surface to the customers, automation and AI are all lights but no action. The good news is that most B2B companies are already ratcheting up their video libraries with a 30% increase in video production year-over-year and more than 90% now creating video content in-house.
3. As an extension to the prior point, expect to see new solutions emerge for real-time customization and personalization of video. Perhaps we don’t need 1,000 new videos to address every question; maybe we only need 50 pieces of micro-content that can be merged, customized and personalized in automated ways to effectively give us an infinite bucket of content? When this technology shift happens, you can be sure it will impact what videos we produce and how we create them.
4. Audio transcriptions and rich meta-data will become a critical part of video content management. This type of information is necessary to enable the machines to analyze libraries of videos to identify contextually relevant pieces of content (like surfacing a video on Product X for Industry Y and Company Size Z). Expect video platforms to offer more robust and more automated solutions for transcription, keyword analysis, and tagging.
5. Video analytics will need to connect to customer relationship management (CRM) and other key applications. This connection will help surface additional insights about each video, like how audiences are responding to them (i.e., average engagement time) and how well each video is producing the desired conversion (i.e., new lead generation, influenced revenue, or impact on customer retention). Combining this data with the meta-data described above will help businesses quickly surface the videos that are not only the most contextually relevant, but are also most likely to produce the desired outcome.

Welcome to the age of intelligence. It’s time for businesses to get serious about how they manage their videos, how they connect back to systems of record, and what types of insights and analytics they can capture. Simply put, it’s time to build more intelligent video strategies. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Dreamforce 2017 through the video lens.

The post Welcome to the Age of Intelligence (and What it Means for Video) appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/dreamforce-through-the-video-lens/

Need a Q4 Quota Boost? Better Push The Big Green Button

That button is, of course, video, and like a big homing missile, it can have a devastatingly positive impact on deals if aimed properly.

Only, today, let’s give all the theory a rest. You’re here to crush your Q4 and we’ll jump straight to tips that’ll help.

For example: be there on November 30th. The sales legends John Barrows, Sales Coach, and Ralph Barsi, Global Inside Sales Leader at ServiceNow, will be dispensing end-of-quarter video selling advice live at Fast Forward, Vidyard’s forum for top sales experts.

(Spots are filling up, grab your virtual seat today!)

Here’s a sneak peek at what they’ll discuss:

3 bunker-busting steps for applying video to your Q4 sales:

1. Aim before you launch video within your funnel

Video is a precision instrument and before you apply it, ask yourself where you’re stuck. Do you need leads? To move deals forward? To get signatures? Here’s what to do at each stage:

If you need pipeline, use video to book meetings

Video outreach can act like nitrous oxide for your lead flow. Go for the low-hanging fruit and target closed-lost leads from 6-12 months ago as well as prospects who recently went dark. Record personalized videos for each and send them via email with thumbnails showing the prospect’s name on a whiteboard. These clips often inspire enough curiosity to deliver 8x higher open-to-reply rates.

And if you sell multiple products, use video to reach out to stakeholders from different business units to snare their interest and increase your deal-size.

If this is helpful, then you definitely need to sign up to watch How Our SDRs Tripled Response Rates With Personal Video Messaging at Fast Forward. 

If you have pipeline but it’s stuck, dislodge it with video reminders

Kickstart deals that have stalled out by introducing something new. Give them a good reason to come back to the table, such as:

• A new offering or bundle—Alter your discount and rename it “the end of year special.”
• A new thought leader—Schedule an internal expert to talk to them.
• A reminder video—Restate the prospect’s initial interest and revisit the benefits they had hoped for.

If you have the deals but are losing them, cement a personal connection

Despite what prospects may say, how they feel about your team heavily influences whether they’ll sign with you. Cement a positive impression by sending them videos about who you are and what your company stands for, introductions to their future customer support team, and customer testimonials. If it comes down to a close race between you and a few other vendors, that personal touch may be enough to tip the balance in your favor.

If this is helpful, you definitely need to sign up and watch How To Crack That Key Account With Hyper-Targeted Prospecting at Fast Forward.

2. Fire away with the right videos and content

While repeated practice, training, improv classes, and time spent moonlighting as a Broadway performer will all help you on video, it’s too late for that now. Here are some lightning-fast tips to improve how you present in your videos:

• Choose the right type of video—Use video formats that match your prospect’s funnel stage and interest level. In the early stages, keep it short with webcam videos introducing yourself or highlighting a reason to talk. Other times, like now, it’s better to use a screen-capture, profile-pull, or micro-demo where you can drive home benefits and end-of-year urgency.
• Improve your body language—Breathe deep, sit back, maintain eye contact, smile for real, and make sure your body language says, “I’m trustworthy.”
• Make it personal—Video beats email or phone calls because it delivers emotion. Be personable in your delivery and relatable in your call-to-action.  

If this is helpful, you definitely need to sign up and watch Tips And Hacks For Selling With Video: Reel Stories From Real Sellers at Fast Forward.

3. Adjust to maximize your results, fast

Use prospects’ viewing data to prioritize your outreach. If you send 50 videos and of those, five prospects watch them all the way through, those are your best leads. Call them first. And if they rewatched particular parts of the video, say, where a certain product is shown, talk about that product.

Also, experiment with changes and see how they impact your results. Many reps have tremendous success adding “Video” to the email subject line, drawing pictures beneath the prospect’s name on their whiteboard, and varying the video length.

For a real deep-dive on all these tactics and to blow past your Q4 attainment, don’t miss the boat on Fast Forward! It’s all the advice you need to close out 2017 strong and set yourself up for a quota-crushing 2018.

Reserve my virtual seat!

The post Need a Q4 Quota Boost? Better Push The Big Green Button appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/need-q4-quota-boost-better-push-big-green-button/

Here’s What Video Marketers Are Missing In Their ABM Campaigns

Personalized videos are great for grabbing attention. But account-based marketing (ABM) isn’t just about grabbing attention, it’s about starting conversations with your dream customers.

Recently, I received an email from a sales rep with a video made specifically for me. It started with the sales rep, John, saying “Hey Daniel, I made this video for you about how we can help Drift.”

John was taking an account-based approach with Drift, one of his target accounts and I was his VIP lead. To stand out, John made a custom video so I’d pay attention. I watched the whole video.

But John dropped the ball. He gave me a form to fill out after I watched the video.

Companies that practice ABM are finding new ways to dazzle prospects since both email and cold calling no longer work. Personalized video is great for ABM.

But ABM has a weak spot. And up until recently, it hasn’t been addressed.

While your campaigns might be creative and grab someone’s attention, the bulk of account-based campaigns are still driving their VIPs to lead forms.

Forcing your VIP leads—that your sales team is dying to talk to— to wait for follow-up calls or emails when they’re already live on your site and ready to talk is…ludicrous!

But I came to Vidyard’s blog with a solution for video marketers that are running ABM campaigns and want to level up on conversions.

With Drift ABM, you can greet your VIPs with a personalized message when they reach your website.

 

It’s like rolling out the red carpet for your best leads and your sales rep standing by the door to greet them.

Conversation is the missing element in your ABM campaigns.

Don’t put a padlock on your front door

Your website is probably covered in forms. Gated content, contact us, free trials and so on are on every landing page. If you’re spending a lot of time coming up with content ideas for your VIP targets, they will probably come to your website. But on their terms, when they are ready.

When they do end up on your website, you don’t want to give them the experience of any other visitor to your site. These are your dream customers. You want them to know they’re in the right place and get the VIP treatment.

Putting a lead form between your VIPs–that you’ve been marketing to– and your sales team is like putting a neon “open” sign on your storefront but a padlock on the front door.

ABM is supposed to be a zero-waste approach since you’ve already identified who is a perfect fit for your product. Yet you know your landing pages with forms convert the minority of visitors rather than the majority.

That’s not helping your ABM campaigns.

How conversational ABM works

In short, conversational ABM is swapping out the lead forms, email nurture workflows, and several week shenanigans into a real-time, one-on-one conversation while your VIP is live on your site.

And this works for all your target accounts even if they’re anonymous on your website.

So imagine John, the sales rep that reached out to me, had sent that personalized video in an email, and because I was busy doing whatever I was doing, I never replied to him.

Well if he had Drift ABM set up and I visited his site at a later point – perhaps not even from the email but just Googling the company name – I’d be welcomed with a personalized message from John and presented the opportunity to chat in real-time.

If John wasn’t around to chat with me when I was on his site, a bot would jump in and book a meeting for me with John:

The best part? This is all set and forget. Meaning, after you’ve set it up, it just works. Your sales team’s personalized messages will automatically appear anytime your VIPs reach your website.

This approach is what we call conversational marketing. It’s what today’s forward-thinking marketing teams are doing to put their best leads in the fast lane, straight to sales.

The more personalized, the better

So run your personalized videos and don’t worry you’ll lose a prospect that gets turned off by your eleven field lead form. You can put all the creative juices into grabbing their attention and know that no matter how they end up on your website, they’ll have a direct line to their account rep with Drift ABM.

The post Here’s What Video Marketers Are Missing In Their ABM Campaigns appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/heres-video-marketers-missing-abm-campaigns/

Content Pros: Increasing Sales by Decreasing Content

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 Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing at Shopify Plus, to discuss how business success changes the approach to content marketing. Check out the full podcast:

Here are a few of our favorite moments:

Where do you prioritize your efforts to align content with brand and demand?

Listen, content is a two-pronged thing. Yes, it needs to support the brand’s story, but really, for us, this is the major priority. It’s a demand generator. It’s a lead generator. It’s something to attract people to your business. The way we’re looking at content now is number one, looking at this strategic shift that needs to happen and how we approach content.

For example, when you look at the Shopify blog, it’s incredible the amount of content Shopify has generated and created over the year. The blog is incredibly successful. They’ve got great everything. They’ve got great SEO, great topics, lots of great resources there. As we start to build up the Shopify Plus blog, one thing we want to keep in mind is we don’t want to duplicate the exact same thing, right? We need to change the type of content we create so that it’s more aligned with our personas as opposed to Shopify’s historical personas. We need to start to thinking of the breadth and depth of content that we create.

How do we get the sales team using the content so they can go out and build their own demand and fuel it?

Okay. I have to preface this by saying it’s hard not to be product pitchy with Uberflip because I did it for so many years. Speaking a little bit more broadly to this problem is the content itself is one challenge. You’re absolutely right, Tyler, in that the distribution of content, both internally and externally, in getting it presented in a way where it’s a) discoverable, b) consumable. The thing that I’m constantly saying, I even said this at Uberflip, is that your content has to be organized in a way that’s easy not just for your visitors to find but for your sales team to find, right? Content is probably one of the best tools that the sales team has. One of the to-dos on our list is to work with our sales enablement team to figure out how do we internally communicate this content? How do we actually categorize this content in a way that makes sense for people, sales team and visitors, to find it?

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!

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source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/content-pros-increasing-sales-decreasing-content/