Reclaiming the Inbox: How Video Can Make Business Emails Personal Again

ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations

KITCHENER, Ontario – January 10, 2017 – Vidyard, the leading video platform for business, today launches ViewedIt Enterprise, a business-class edition of ViewedIt, the free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications.

“We all hate getting those phone calls that disrupt our day, or those impersonal emails from automated systems. So we built ViewedIt,” says Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard. “ViewedIt re-humanizes this type of business communication. It helps sales reps and other business professionals quickly create personalized video messages which are then available to their recipient, on-demand. It’s a win-win for all.”

Video creation has been slow to expand beyond marketing departments because it can come with high costs, complexity, and significant time commitments. With ViewedIt, it’s simple for anyone to create a video, share via email, then track its success. Whether you’re prospecting and selling, spreading employee announcements, training, providing customer service, or supporting a new product launch; in today’s workforce, video drives engagement. Customers have used ViewedIt’s simple solution in many unique ways across their organizations, including:

• Inside Sales: Record and send prospecting videos using full-screen webcam mode, or create attention-grabbing product walk-through videos. Humanize communications with prospects by recording personalized picture-in-picture or full-screen captures.
• Field Sales: Send curated follow-up materials like testimonial videos, demos, or campaign videos after your call, along with a personalized introduction. No longer will deals be missed because sales reps didn’t have access to the right content.
• Solutions Consultants: Build and send custom product demos using screen recordings or on-demand product videos.
• Executive Communications: Send weekly update messages to your entire company using full-screen webcam recording mode, or highlight the priorities by sharing a slide.
• Customer Success: Share on-boarding videos, custom how-to content, or getting-started guides with your customers.
• Support: Create custom, personalized support videos that include step-by-step instructions, or send existing support materials that address common problems.
• Product Management: Record demos of new products and features. Collaborate with engineers, designers and QA teams. Capture feedback and quickly send information on bugs and fixes clearly and concisely.

“It’s important for our sales teams to connect with customers on a personalized and authentic level,” says Bob Elliott, senior vice president of global sales at Hootsuite.  “Many of Hootsuite’s sales professionals use ViewedIt Enterprise to create fast, customized personal videos that stand out and bring the human element back into the sales process. ViewedIt makes this process as easy as a click, record, and share.”

According to Marketo, when sales and marketing teams align, they see a 67% improvement in close rates. ViewedIt Enterprise drives this alignment by giving sales teams the ability to record custom videos and access their existing marketing video libraries directly from their web browser or email client. This way, they can easily send video content directly to prospects along with a personalized introduction.

With built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. They can then prioritize leads according to viewing history which is then pushed into existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems and other business applications. Video viewing data appears in context of other prospecting interactions including previous calls, notes, and emails for a holistic view of customer engagement.

ViewedIt Enterprise offers extended functionality to ViewedIt, the free, screen video-recording tool for Google Chrome, that gives anyone the ability to create, send and track video right from their web browser.

 

More Information:

• Get ViewedIt: http://www.vidyard.com/viewedit
• Learn More:  https://www.vidyard.com/blog/introducing-video-email-viewedit-enterprise

 

About Vidyard

Vidyard (Twitter: @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

press@vidyard.com

 

Screenshots:

Record your browser, entire screen or webcam with just one click from the ViewedIt Chrome extension.

 

Create a custom video playlist inside of Gmail by choosing from your personal video library along with videos shared by teams like marketing, sales and support.

 

Create a custom video playlist inside of Gmail by choosing from your personal video library along with videos shared by teams like marketing, sales and support.

 

Get immediate insight on who’s watching your videos with email notifications sent straight to your inbox.

The post Reclaiming the Inbox: How Video Can Make Business Emails Personal Again appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/press-releases/introducing-viewedit-enterprise/

Introducing ViewedIt: Supercharge email conversions with the power of personal video

Click. Trash. Click. Trash. If you have an email account, you know this routine too well. The average business user receives nearly 100 emails per day, and most of that is generated automatically. No wonder click-through rates are now as low as 1-3 percent.

And yet email isn’t going anywhere: It’s far and away the dominant means to communicate in business. What’s desperately needed, however,  is a way for businesses to create messages that cut through the clutter and avoid the trash bin.

Enter ViewedIt. At Vidyard, we’ve created a more impactful, personal way to communicate via email by harnessing the power of video. ViewedIt is a unique tool to create, send and track personalized videos via email — one that’s so easy, anyone can use it in a couple of clicks. And today, I’m proud to announce the launch of our enterprise version.

My quest for a better business communication tool

ViewedIt instantly opens up a world of possibilities far beyond what’s offered by today’s business communication tools, from text and emails to phone calls. Each has its strengths, but also serious drawbacks.  

There’s a reason we still make phone calls, after all: they’re personal and one-to-one, and there’s still tremendous power in hearing the human voice. Nonetheless, people now text each other five times more than they call each other. It’s no mystery why. Phone calls are disruptive and inefficient, and can intrude upon others’ schedules.

Email, on the other hand, enables people to connect on their own time. But, not only are recipients today frustrated with the volume of machine-generated messages, text on a screen just can’t deliver the impact of a face-to-face interaction. No matter how well you write, there’s always something missing.

With video, people can hear your voice, while also seeing your expressions, body language and gestures. It should come as no surprise that 62 percent of millennials prefer to watch a video from a company than read text. But video-calling platforms such as Skype and FaceTime are even more disruptive than old-fashioned phone calls, and uploading videos to streaming sites like YouTube is too time-consuming and cumbersome for one-to-one communication.

An ideal business communication tool would bring together the strengths of video, phone and email, with none of the drawbacks. And that’s exactly what we set our sights on creating.

The power of personal video

With ViewedIt, it’s literally one click to start recording on your webcam, and one click to send the result. It’s even easier than composing and typing out an email. You don’t need to worry about grammar or spelling — you just talk. You can opt to just record yourself or get a live recording of your computer screen, as well, for product demonstrations or how-tos.  

When you drop a ViewedIt recording into an e-mail composer, a thumbnail of the video appears. You can smile, wave or write a handwritten, personal message to show on-screen, letting each of your recipients know you’ve created something just for them.

The payoff of personalization can be extraordinary. We’ve seen that when people customize video messages, conversion rates increase by 450 percent, open-response rates improve by 800 percent and viewers engage 80-percent longer.  

But don’t take our word for it. For businesses using ViewedIt Enterprise, a full analytics package lets you track which videos are being viewed and by whom. Those figures can be pushed directly to your CRM software.

Ultimately, the applications for ViewedIt are as limitless as for email itself. If you’re in inside sales, you can record and send prospecting videos with attention-grabbing product walk-throughs using ViewedIt’s screen-recording function. For your new customers, you can bring them on board with custom-created welcome messages and how-to-get-started videos. If you’re a team leader, you can send weekly video messages to your team and share slides. If you’re in customer support, you can walk clients through step-by-step instructions or send canned demos for common problems.

A new direction for business communications

Above all, we wanted to make it effortlessly simple to create personalized videos and share them via email — so simple, in fact, that it could truly transform how people communicate. To be clear, we didn’t develop ViewedIt so people could make elaborate videos for the masses. That’s why YouTube exists. Rather, we want people to have personal conversations with each other using video.

The deeper reality is that imagery and video are quickly becoming the preferred means of communication today. Businesses clinging to “text tunnel-vision” risk finding themselves left behind. There’s a reason why Facebook has predicted that our newsfeeds may soon be entirely video-based: video is increasingly how people “talk.” It’s quicker, more efficient and more personal than any communication tool out there … and now there’s a one-click way for businesses to get on board.

We’re incredibly proud to have created ViewedIt Enterprise. We’ve made it exceedingly simple, yet packed with powerful features we think can transform how people communicate in business. Ultimately, however, its potential is as vast and as unlimited as where people imagine they can take it.

The post Introducing ViewedIt: Supercharge email conversions with the power of personal video appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/introducing-video-email-viewedit-enterprise/

6 Awesome Sales Call Conversation Starters

One of my favorite things about my team is that we are constantly focused on helping each other do better. After one of us finishes a call that doesn’t progress, someone may say something along the lines of, “Ah man, so close, I could have taken that somewhere!” That’s when we start discussing what happened in the call, and together try to figure out how we could have driven it better.

We do this because we know the struggle is real. Any B2B or SaaS company’s sales team likely battles to either get prospects to pick up, or move pipeline further—or both. The key to success can often be boiled down to good, insightful conversations. Here are 6 tips to help you have conversations that move the needle.

1. Know the person and company on the other end.

Blocking off time to make those dials out and working through cadences is great for SDR and BDR teams. However, there’s a fine line between high activity and good quality activity. Hands up if you’ve frozen up when someone actually picks up the phone after you hit 10 voicemails? That can happen when you get what we like to call “dial crazy”: after countless unfruitful dials, you lose the personal touch when a prospect finally picks up!  

Proper research and profiling can help prevent the “dial crazy” syndrome, but reviewing these notes at each touchpoint prior to making the call will truly be the remedy. Ask yourself: “What am I going to say if this person says now is a good time to talk?” Know the company, their particular role, who they might report to, and what they are like as a person. Most of this information can be found in a matter of minutes just by looking at the person’s social media channels, blog posts or news articles, and, of course, the company website.

What we like to do at Vidyard is use tools such as SalesLoft, Marketo, and Vidyard itself, to get a quick snapshot of each prospect’s journey, like what pages they have looked at on the website, which of your videos they have watched, and more.

With Vidyard, we can even discover how much of those videos—including marketing videos on our site, and any videos our own salespeople personalized for the recipient—the prospect watched. Information like this is incredibly valuable; we know most audiences engage with video much more than they engage with any other content type, and being able to track what each person is watching and interested in—or not interested in!—helps us tailor our conversations for success.

We don’t make assumptions based on LinkedIn bios and titles; our salespeople are armed with individualized information about each lead and prospect so we can truly personalize our approach.

2. Keep in mind all past touch points with the prospect.

Another symptom of “dial crazy” syndrome is forgetting that you already left them the same voicemail yesterday. Or realizing you already sent that email template.

Always know what your touchpoints have looked like, what emails they have opened, what particular links and resources they clicked. Tools like SalesLoft or Outreach can be great for keeping track of your activities.

If you want to go the extra mile and really set yourself up for success, you need something a little more. We all know that an “opened” email doesn’t mean it’s a “read” email, and there’s no way to tell how much they paid attention to your message, so you have nothing to help you follow up. If you’re using a powerful video platform like Vidyard, or our free Chrome extension ViewedIt, you can get detailed analytics and notifications (right inside the CRMs you already use!) on when a prospect viewed your videos, what they watched, and for how long, so you can follow up at the best time, with the very best message. What does that lead to? Better engagement, shorter deal cycles, stronger relationships, and higher quality touch points! (Video also has the added bonus of being much more engaging and personal than text, so your prospects will likely absorb more of your message than if you had sent a boring text email!)

3. Don’t sell.

I sell Vidyard, a SaaS platform that helps companies drive revenue through the use of online video. And sometimes, I let “video, video, VIDEO!” take over my thought process instead of thinking about the prospect’s problem, and how—or if—Vidyard can help. About a month ago, I was reviewing a call with my manager in which the prospect told me that they were quite busy working on a new online community. Nothing they had told me seemed to be relevant to video off the top of my head, but I also failed to ask them more about what they did want to talk about. For all I know, that online community could have a great use for video.

This goes back to the simple 80/20 rule of selling: let the prospect do the talking 80 per cent of the time. Ask the right questions – and “right” doesn’t need to mean “directly related to what you’re selling.” Find that key point that can give you more information, even if it isn’t totally relevant to what you eventually want to sell them. These types of questions are great to get a better understanding of what their priorities are and whether it even makes sense to prospect this company!

A video platform will also give you the insights you need about your prospects on an individual level. When you can see what someone is watching, and how long they’re engaging with each video, you know which questions to ask and what they’re interested in. This way you won’t be selling hard and shoving ideas and products down their throat that they aren’t interested in. Instead, you’ll be help to solve their actual problem with your best solution!

4. Be honest.

The “RE: we met at X event” email subject or the cold call introduction the receiver knows is a sales call probably won’t work. Don’t fib and say they visited your booth when you know they only attended the conference and made no connection with your company.

Be honest right from the start with the value of the conversation. Try something like: “We haven’t spoken before, but I saw your article on the Top 5 Reasons Video is Key for B2B Businesses. This is right up my alley and I was hoping to chat about it for a few minutes.” This call intro got me a great 15-minute conversation!

Be honest when trying to get them on the phone…and be honest through the whole conversation. If you focus on what their problems are rather than just selling your solution and trying to make it ‘fit’, you’ll create happy customers instead of raising your company’s churn rates after selling products to companies who didn’t actually need them.

5. Be human.

It’s okay to pause, to ask for clarification; don’t just smile and nod. Hubspot published a great blog post about statements that make salespeople sound insecure. I especially liked the fourth point in the post that a rep shouldn’t ask, “Does that make sense?” because it puts pressure on a prospect to agree just to avoid any embarrassment. It also indirectly suggests that we can get confused when a prospect is describing their needs. So ask questions!

It’s also okay to have some faint noises in the back…and sometimes not so faint is okay too. Our floor at Vidyard gets pretty loud every time we sign a new logo—a giant bell rings and there’s a lot of clapping, banging, and cheering. Many times, I’ve had to tell a prospect, “Hang on, I don’t mean to interrupt you but the team is about to celebrate for about ten seconds here…okay, I can hear you now!” While it may feel like a noisy interruption to the call, an event like this can actually help you build credibility and relatability with your prospect, and bring them into the excitement of your success. After all, we all know that people do business with people they like.

At the end of the day, just remember both you and your prospect are human, so meet them eye to eye. I called a gentleman in Sweden and didn’t realize the Swedish workday often ends by 4PM. He was at hockey practice, so we talked about Canada and hockey for a couple minutes!

Using video to create that initial or follow-up piece also helps keep the conversation human, showing the prospect that they are not just another number or lead. Video shows them that there is a person associated to that voice on the phone and this person actually cares enough to make them a personal video.

That personal touch using video makes the prospect feel more responsible to respond to your email, even if it is just to let you know that they are not interested. Other times, you may have piqued their interest enough to get them to provide you with a follow-up contact or next steps!

6. Understand when a call is valuable—and when it isn’t.

Yes, they are busy. They have to get back to their job. But you’re busy, too. You have to be able to identify which calls are worth continuing, and which aren’t, because either the prospect needs more information, or the call likely won’t lead to a closed deal. Rather than saying, “I know you’re busy”, cap the call at 15 minutes and say something like, “I’ve got to run into a meeting in a couple minutes here and I know you’re busy too, so why don’t we continue this conversation Wednesday at 10AM?” Always have the next step in mind so that there is no fading murmur like, “I have another meeting so…thanks for this!” This way, you don’t have to spend time trying to justify your product; if they need more information you can send them marketing or sales assets quickly through email, or if you want to get them off the phone you can move on to your next call quickly.

Offer the next step, even if it is just an email follow-up because you want to qualify them out. If it is a next call, be ready to be flexible with the time you offer. I have a two-time rule: if I offer two times to the prospect and neither of them work, I tell them I will send them my Calendly link where they can book a time at their convenience. And then I follow up with them if they did not take action! The next step can even be a personalized video that you create just for them and send through email, which is more engaging and will help you stay remembered. It’s quick, easy, and gets you back to work while helping you move a lot more potential deals faster.

If you learn about your prospects, find interesting and innovative ways to connect with and engage them, and have honest and human conversations with them, you’ll have more calls that are more valuable not just for them, but for you. What sales techniques have you tried recently that have worked for you? Was video one of them? I’d love to hear all about it!

The post 6 Awesome Sales Call Conversation Starters appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/6-awesome-sales-call-conversation-starters/

Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Steve Johnson

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 Steve Johnson, President and COO at Vidyard. Learn where to get the best vegan nachos in Maine, all his favourite travel destinations, and more! Watch the video:

What Didn’t Make The Cut

Steve had way more to say than just going back and forth between business and medical school, so here are a few more of his awesome answers:

What brought you to Vidyard?

I knew of Vidyard probably three or four years ago when they were a partner of ours at Hootsuite. I talked to Michael, really liked him, and it turned out of our mutual investors at Hootsuite is also an investor in Vidyard, OMERS. They put two big thumbs up for Vidyard, but what really drew me to the company was the culture, the team, and the founders, and especially the space.

What I saw was something very similar to the phenomena we saw with social media. Six years ago social media was the hottest content type. Now it’s video. And businesses of all types are struggling with how they manage that video content. If I’m going to leverage video, how do I do it? It’s not easy. And that’s where I see Vidyard playing an important role, and continuing to play an important role in the future.

You mentioned you had started a company in a past life, and it did not go as planned. Any advice for entrepreneurs starting out in today’s economy?

We were a technology in search of a problem, rather than solving a problem. The company was voice automation for applications. There wasn’t a wave, using the software analogy, for voice enabled apps. We just thought “This should be the way you do it!” and did the No Keyboard slogan, like Salesforce has its No Software slogan. We thought there should be no keyboard with software, and you should be able to navigate it with your voice.

The problem was, for that to actually work, you have to know the application really, really well to navigate it. And most people don’t know software applications well enough to navigate with their voice. And then the voice recognition technology at that time just wasn’t good. So we voice enabled Salesforce, Microsoft CRM, Microsoft Exchange, and a number of other platforms, and it just didn’t go. That was a big, big lesson: focus on problems that people are having, not just this great cool technology, and you will do way better in life — and way better in tech — is really what it comes down to.

Want to get your hands on those vegan nachos?

You can find the Frontier Cafe 15 Maine St in Brunswick, Maine. See their menu here. It looks amazing.

The post Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Steve Johnson appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/meet-vidyard-team-video-steve-johnson/

Amazing Account Based Marketing Tactics for Your Entire Funnel

Account based marketing is everyone’s favorite buzzword, but let’s be honest – do you really know any companies doing it well? Experience-backed account based marketing tactics are hard to come by, as everyone seems to be happy to tout results, but not dive any deeper into the real mechanics of how their strategy works.

And that’s what made Charm Biachini’s talk at Viewtopia so impactful. Rather than just tout the amazing blessings of account based marketing — and believe me, there are many — she dove deep into how Marketo uses ABM to drive prospects through every stage of the pipeline, why personalization is the real key to success, and more importantly, how you can apply this strategy to your own ABM efforts. And as Marketo’s Senior Director of Marketing, she knows these tactics better than anyone.

So let’s take a look at how Biachini makes account based marketing work her team:

Start With the Destination

Biachini has been instrumental in bringing together Marketo’s sales and marketing teams around a common goal, but according to her, there’s one unifying success factor of any campaign. “Start with a goal. Any time we have an idea, if we don’t have goals assigned to it, our teams won’t make it happen. Attach a goal to it, and they will. Whether it’s registrations, attendees, or whatever.”

Goals are important, as they help influence the strategy that you and your team choose to execute on. And Biachini was quick to point out that account-based marketing isn’t for everyone:

But switching to an account based model for marketing and lead generation doesn’t just require a change in how your team executes on marketing campaigns. It requires you to flip your entire strategy on its head. Literally. “Sangram Vajre and his team at Terminus have a big movement called #FlipMyFunnel, and a completely different funnel for account-based marketing and it is the funnel we use today. So now at the top of the funnel, you aren’t bringing in tons of leads but they’re going to be much higher quality. It’s more quality less quantity.”

The AMB Funnel

“But those quality leads are going to go through that model and become customers, hopefully become advocates, and buy more. It’s an entire customer lifecycle model that we are using in our efforts.”

Flipping their funnel wasn’t easy, but once Biachini and her team had decided on account based marketing for targeting their key accounts, it was time to build out a plan to turn ideas into reality. And she does it in five easy steps.

Step 1: Choose Your Accounts

In keeping with the theme of point one, Biachini and her team started with a goal in mind. “First off, identify accounts. If you don’t have the right accounts from the beginning, it’s not going to be successful. We spent a lot of time figuring out which accounts are appropriate for this program.” She partnered closely with her sales team and developed three distinct tiers of accounts to target: the Top 20, Tier 1 and Tier 2. Each account would receive a different level of personalization, and thus a different amount of effort, applied to their web experience. Tier 1 consisted of 10 accounts chosen by each of their 40 reps. Tier 2 was 30 accounts chosen by the same reps. In total, they had 1620 accounts.

“For Top 20 accounts, they’re going to see Marketo.com customized with our personalization technology. And we’re going to create 20 distinct journeys for those accounts. That’s a lot of time and effort to understand how those journeys progress, and to do the actual personalization, so we don’t do that for the other 1600. But we can look at the Tier 1 and 2 accounts, and see what shared attributes they have, like industry, CRM or competitive technology, and create journeys based on those.”

Step 2: Gather Your Data

How many times have you received a ‘personalized’ email that had your name spelled incorrectly? Or had your company name listed in ALL CAPS? Personalization is one of the cornerstones of account based marketing, but without the right (or clean) data, you run the risk of alienating prospects rather than turning them into advocates.

Biachini was quick to point out that first name, last name, and title are only skimming the surface of personalization. “Once you have selected your accounts, you can’t just start marketing if you don’t understand them. For example, if I picked GE, they have 80 different divisions. Some of them may be customers already, some of them may not. So you really need to understand how that company is structured, what the financial health of the company is, the business initiatives, and whether they are looking to implement new programs. Whatever you can get your hands on.”

Biachini and her team use multiple tools to gather the right data for their targeting. InsideView and CRUSH Reports allow them to see deep insights on the accounts they are targeting. RainKing gives her team reports that are not only powerful marketing data sources, but useful sales tools, covering products used, organizational structure, and a host of other details. These insights allow Biachini and her team to build the personalization outlined in Step 1.

Step 3 is all about giving that personalization a place to live.

Step 3: Create Your Content

You can have all the data in the world on a prospect, but if you aren’t putting together compelling content, they still don’t have to care. Biachini looks to her segmentation team to build buyer personas, and then lets her content team start figuring out what content will be the best fit for what audience.

“We create content for every stage. For example, one of the verticals in enterprise we go after when we have target accounts is higher education. So at the awareness stage, we created a Frost & Sullivan high-level thought leadership paper. When those people consume that information, we send them an eBook which is all about marketing automation and higher education. Once they’re into the evaluation stage we serve up case studies – PDFs and videos. And then once they’re into the commitment stage we talk to them about the Marketo Marketing Nation event, advocacy programs, and other opportunities to engage.”

Step 4: Work Your Channels

Most marketers are creatures of habit. I’m guilty of this — I like social media, so I run with it. I enjoy writing blog posts, so… you get the idea. But Biachini believes that, much like fishers must fish where the fish are, marketers also have to market where their market is.

“It’s important to use as many channels as possible. But don’t use them all at once. We’ll take three channels at a time and use them for a month. And the next month we will pick three new ones. And the next one three new ones again.” The strategy pays off in multiple ways. First, if your customers only play in one or two channels, you’re guaranteed to hit them over the course of the year. Second, people don’t tend to only consume one type of media, so playing multiple channels means you may hit a person with your messaging two, three, or even four times over the span of six months. And that kind of repeat exposure is the key to building engagement.”

But, Biachini cautions against just trying the same tactics everywhere. “Switch it up! Try new things like videos, try infographics, try white papers, see what works for you. But personalize anywhere that you can.”

Which is an excellent segue to the last step.

Step 5: Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

As Biachini pointed out during her talk, “The buying journey has changed. There are so many messages every day that are delivered, and most of the time, 90% of buyers have decided what they’re going with before they get to your website. 89% of marketers found improved business from personalization.” But Biachini goes beyond just personalizing Marketo’s website, and looks at holistic personalization by funnel stage and content type.

For top of funnel leads, Biachini works with her sales team to heavily personalize outgoing messages. Any data they can provide gives sales a better edge in engaging with prospects early on.

Middle of funnel leads see personalized retargeting ads and the results are spectacular. “We are very personalized in our digital advertising and ABM programs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Our online team tells us that these campaigns have a 3x higher CTR and the enterprise account based marketing LinkedIn campaign we are running is the highest converting campaign we run on this platform.”

Finally, for bottom of funnel leads, her team uses narrowly-focused webinars to bring on key stakeholders and treats any attendee as gold. “Each one of these webinars was very targeted and customized, and had an average registration rate of 30 attendees. But more importantly, being more targeted and giving more personalized content, resulted in over $1 million in enterprise pipeline.”

One of the biggest assets Biachini uses across every funnel stage is video, and they don’t produce any content that is one-size-fits-all. To understand how she uses personalization in her video content, let’s watch another clip of her talk:

The events team at Marketo also uses personalized video for recruiting attendees and their results were spot on. “We used personalized video for Marketo Summit, and wanted to push prospects to attend. Our typical prospect emails for Summit range from an 11% to 15% open rate depending on topic. This campaign resulted in a more than 30% open rate, got 700 views on the video, and about 75 people joined and paid full conference passes to join us.”

Big results from a small video!

Is ABM Right for You?

Biachini opened her talk by telling her audience that ABM isn’t necessarily right for everyone, but if you follow these 5 steps, you’ll have a pretty good platform to start building success on. And after doing this style of marketing for over a year, Marketo has seen some extraordinary results.

“We use Salesforce and have a dashboard that shows target accounts, and ARR. We see a 35% increase in ASP for our target accounts. We also look at target accounts and what percentage of target accounts we’re getting to from our large database. Right now it’s 4%, and that 4% is making up 30% of our pipeline.”

Want to see Biachini’s full talk? Or discover more great insights on account based marketing from Marketo’s award-winning team? Check out the Viewtopia hub!

 

 

The post Amazing Account Based Marketing Tactics for Your Entire Funnel appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/amazing-account-based-marketing-tactics-entire-funnel/

John Deere Gets Down to Dirt in Their New Video Campaign

Every company has a target market, right? Whether it’s selling leather jackets to motorcycle riders, or flippers to scuba divers, knowing your audience is the first key to success. But what happens when you uncover an audience that you didn’t know you had? And more importantly, what happens when your traditional marketing messaging just won’t cut it?

That’s when it’s time to get creative, and that’s exactly what John Deere did with their Get Down to Dirt campaign.

The Backstory

If you’ve never heard of John Deere – well, to be honest, I’m more surprised than anything. Starting out as Deere & Company in 1804, and continuing to this day, John Deere has been manufacturing farming, construction, and forestry equipment for literally two centuries. They’re one of the oldest companies in North America, and just about every farm in the country has a John Deere tractor working somewhere on site.

But John Deere was not content to rest on its laurels – and to understand whether there were any markets they were missing out on, the company’s Canadian office worked with Quarry to create their buyer personas. And what they discovered was simple, but powerful: smaller farms don’t see equipment the same way bigger farms do. So how do you target this new breed of farmer? Don’t tell – show. Or better yet, get real people to show them for you. Thus, “Get Down to Dirt” was born.

“Our persona research suggested there are some key differences between people who are farming at a small scale — especially those who are relatively new to farming — compared to the large, established family farms that you might typically think of when someone says ‘farming.’” said the Dealer Development Manager for John Deere Canada during an interview. “This campaign used our understanding of some of those differences to craft stories that we hoped would resonate with smaller scale farmers. We wanted to communicate that ‘we get you’ in an authentic way. Videos of real farm families, telling their stories and in their own words fit the bill. This also allowed us to validate the research and personas in the marketplace.”

John Deere worked with Nicole Strong at Quarry to build out a revolutionary idea — instead of making marketing collateral to appeal to this smaller-scale audience, what if they put tractors, and cameras, in the hands of these smaller scale farmers, and asked them to tell their own story?

“We know that when you’re buying a piece of equipment like a tractor, often you buy it because there is a specific job you want to do, like dig a hole to build a fence or work up a patch of yard for a garden. What was really cool is that through this program, buyers had the opportunity to discover all sorts of new things that they could accomplish. It was bigger than the tractor and the tasks they could now complete (or complete faster or easier),” said our contact at John Deere. The campaign featured five families, working on everything from smaller hobby farms to larger homestead renovation projects, and it turned traditional vehicle marketing on its head. Rather than simply telling farmers what a John Deere tractor could do for them, they let the families figure it out for themselves. And it worked like a charm. “They started to imagine new possibilities for what they could do with their land — they developed a new outlook on their farm.”

So how did this campaign come to be? And what did John Deere learn from the experience? Let’s dive deeper into the interview, and find out!

Creating “Get Down to Dirt”

At Vidyard, we often preach that the best people to share the story of how your product shapes the lives of your customers is… well… your customers. So for this campaign, John Deere’s Dealer Development Manager and the team took this one step further, and decided to show people who had never touched a tractor before just how much of an impact it would have on their lives.

“We gave each farmer an iPad Mini with 3G connection and a lesson on how to use it. The instruction was focused on video capture: some basics to get good footage, how much footage, and how often we wanted them to shoot. We didn’t tell them what story to tell us, we wanted that to come from them. “

We set the iPads up to automatically upload the video to Quarry daily,” said our contact at John Deere. “Separately, our dealers visited with the customers to determine the best tractor for their needs. Tractors were delivered in the fall and the farmers were able to use them for the entire fall season.”

The program wasn’t just a cool way of introducing John Deere products to a new persona — it also paid dividends for John Deere. “It was also a cost effective way to gather a great deal of footage — we didn’t even have to send out a videographer.”

Now, so far, this campaign sounds seamless and easy, but there was a lot of work on the back-end to make it all work. Nicole Strong, Experience Innovation Consultant at Quarry filled us in on some of the behind-the-scenes details. “We split up the initiative into smaller chunks: the video capture, the video production, and the microsite.” Strong said, “We only had specific times of year when we could capture the footage we’d need to tell these stories, so if we missed a window we could be waiting for an entire year before getting a chance again. So, there was some strategic sequencing of activities required with a keen eye to where we were headed with the whole initiative.”

Strong credits the open communication between Quarry and John Deere for the success of the campaign. “It helped that it was backed by a whole bunch of research — we knew exactly who we were designing for, and what might resonate with this particular persona — but what’s really notable is how much we both really believed in that strategy and stayed true to it. Once we’d hammered out the brief, we were really able to stay anchored it. It allowed us to review designs and content from the perspective of the strategy and this persona, rather than personal preferences. It really facilitated great collaboration.”

Since no campaign should be complete without some measure of success, we wanted to know what the key goals were for this campaign before John Deere and Quarry decided to start handing out cameras and tractors. “On-farm demo sign-ups for farming equipment  are one of our main goals for this campaign although we had no way of knowing how that was going to go. Mostly, we wanted to see what people thought of the content. It was entirely different from anything we’d done before and the market is pretty new. The local food movement has attracted several people to farming on a scale that is quite different from what most of our customers are doing. So this campaign was part of a long-game to build brand awareness with these new potential customers.”

So, Were People Down to Dirt?

Creating an innovative campaign for an audience John Deere had never marketed to before was hard enough, but how did “Get Down to Dirt” perform against expectations? User generated content campaigns tend to do well from a social engagement standpoint, but this one was special. And the results spoke for themselves.

“To date, the campaign is outperforming the engagement metrics we set out for it and demo sign-ups are on par with other online sign-up programs John Deere has run,” our contact said. “The content has performed exceptionally well on social media and is helping our social media team drive content direction within other areas of the company. It is outperforming industry and John Deere benchmarks for Facebook CPMs and cost per engagement.”

And that’s not the only benefit. This campaign is also shaking things up within John Deere. “John Deere is a company of stories. When you have over 178 years of history, you touch a lot of people and they love to share their story with John Deere employees. We already tell customer stories very well with The Furrow and Homestead magazines, so our employees appreciated that this campaign puts even more focus on our customers.”

One employee even mentioned that it made them want to become a farmer, which, when you create farm equipment is a pretty high praise.

Even people who have seen the campaign are sharing their love, with one commenter posting “I love John Deere’s video site with the small agriculture stuff. I would have felt silly pulling into a John Deere dealership for our needs before seeing the ads. Truthfully. I just didn’t know John Deere did much in between large mowers and huge tractors.”

Lessons Learned and What Comes Next

While this campaign knocked pretty much every expectation out of the park, there were some big lessons learned, especially around user generated content. The biggest? You can teach people all the right ways to use your equipment – but that doesn’t mean they’ll listen.

“We covered safe use of the tractor extensively, and dealers also provided a walk around highlighting safety when the tractors were delivered.” said our contact at John Deere, “When you’re working with people who may have already formed use habits, you need to be very conscious of this and over-educate them on critically important topics like safety. There was a lot of great footage we received, which was unusable because it wasn’t quite demonstrating what we can endorse as safe practices.”

The campaign ran until the end of October, the team at John Deere will be looking into what to do next. Marketing towards a new market — in this case younger families who are new to farming — is never easy, and there aren’t many examples of success stories as powerful as this one. The combination of user generated content with the editorial power of Quarry’s marketing team created a one-of-a-kind set of assets that exceeded every expectation John Deere had.

The moral of this story? Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. And sometimes when you’re introducing new customers to your product, the best course of action is to set it up, teach them how to use it, and walk away. Just make sure there’s a camera there to capture all the fun!

The post John Deere Gets Down to Dirt in Their New Video Campaign appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/john-deere-gets-dirt-new-video-campaign/

2017 Sales Predictions from 9 Selling Experts

If you work in sales you know that it’s important to stay ahead of, or at least at the edge of, the curve. Because if you don’t, you risk falling behind! And in sales, falling behind means missing your quota, and … well, you know the rest.

That’s why we sought out some of the top sales experts at the leading edge of sales process, training, technology, and more and asked them what they predict will happen in 2017. Check them out!

The post 2017 Sales Predictions from 9 Selling Experts appeared first on Vidyard.

source http://www.vidyard.com/blog/2017-sales-predictions-9-selling-experts/