4 Tactical Ways Salespeople Can Build Trust with Video

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

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

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

Bridging the trust gap

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

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

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

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

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

Here are 4 tactical applications for building trust with video:

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

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

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

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

Here’s a few of our favourite moments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get The Full Story

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

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Crush Your Support Goals With Video

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

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

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

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

Save Time by Replacing Phone and Email with Video Messages

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

Optimize videos to increase team efficiency

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

Increase Customer Satisfaction with Video

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

Increase Productivity with a CRM Integration

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

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

 

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How to Get Unstuck and Build Your Online Business – Jason van Orden

Episode: 305
Who: Jason van Orden
Website/Blog: JasonVanOrden.com

Do you ever feel stuck or dissatisfied with your business?

Are you feeling like you need a change, but you’re not sure where to start?

Today, I’m talking to Jason van Orden, who has worked with more than 6,000 students and clients over the past twelve years, teaching them about how to monetize their unique brilliance with content marketing, scalable courses, and automated sales systems. In September 2005, Jason co-founded the first ever podcast about internet business and online marketing, which quickly became one of the top business podcasts in the world and one of the most profitable on iTunes.

Listen to This Episode

He’s also the author of the bestselling book Promoting Your Podcast, and his work has been used to teach marketing at the university level. In case that’s not enough for you, he has also been featured on Forbes.com and Entrepreneur.com.

I brought Jason on today because he and I have been chatting lately about a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. We’re gonna talk about changes that are happening and need to happen in the industry.

Jason’s Story

Jason actually has a double degree in Jazz Guitar and computer engineering. He kind of fell into business and podcastings. He says that he didn’t know he wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Jason Van Orden

Jason enjoys programming (he has done it since age 5), but he really did not enjoy working in a corporate atmosphere. Like a lot of us, he was tired of the “Sunday night dread” and hitting the snooze button a million times.

It was long, zig-zagging journey to find his niche. He was opened up to real estate investment through reading books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, for example. It was a step by step process. Once Jason realized he was good at real estate marketing, he started teaching people what was then called “information marketing.” This was around 2004,  pre-social media and pre-online video, and he was looking for more ways to market his seminars.

So when podcasting showed up in 2005, it was intriguing to Jason for a number of reasons. He very quickly set the goal of becoming “the business podcasting guy.”

His podcast, Internet Business Mastery, very unexpectedly turned into a six-figure business and beyond. It quickly became a primary focus for Jason, and continued to be the backbone of his business until he moved into consulting 2 years ago.

Internet Business Mastery Website

Jason calls his journey a “zig-zaggy, circuitious path.” I think will resonate with a lot of us: you go in a direction, and you don’t know where it will take you. You think outcome will be one thing, but you find out that’s not where you needed to go. So you are constantly changing the plan and reinventing yourself.

Taking Your Own Path

Jason very quickly set the goal of becoming “the business podcasting guy.”

Nowadays, it sounds totally reasonable to start a podcast to help your business. But back in 2005, no one was doing it like that! So I want to know what made Jason go in that direction when no one else was doing it that way. It’s intriguing to me because there wouldn’t have been a mentor to lead him toward business podcasting at the time.

Jason says that he had no reason to think podcasting was going to take off the way it did, except that he had a gut feeling about it. So he followed his gut. And of course, there was a little bit of luck involved. But when I ask him why he went that way, Jason answers,  “I almost didn’t, honestly!”

Thankfully, his wife really encouraged him to go for it. She had helped him to process the fear of quitting his engineering job back in 2003, and now she was helping him face the fear of going into podcasting. As Jason emphasizes, it is hugely important to have those advocates in your life, whether it’s your spouse, your mentor, or your Mastermind group.

Making a Change

About three years ago, Jason needed to make some changes. The industry was really starting to  wear on him.

Jason needed to make some changes. The industry was really starting to wear on him.

He was living in Paris at the time with his wife and daughter. This was the pinnacle of his lifestyle dreams: he had always wanted to live in Paris, even before he went to college. And he says that he was “loving it.”

But there was a big “but”. All of a sudden, the business he had built wasn’t fulfilling him the way it used to. Keep in mind that his job was advising people to choose their niche carefully because it needs to fulfill you and can’t just be a money maker. But suddenly, he felt like he was not being fed by his work. He wasn’t enjoying it.

Jason says he felt like a fraud: what would his students and customers think if they knew that he didn’t actually enjoy the work himself?

This led to a prolonged period of soul-searching. Jason kept asking, “Why do I feel this way? What’s out of alignment?” He needed to discover what it was that had to change.

His wife stepped in again and recommended taking a retreat. He says that she recognized some of the stuff she had seen over a decade before when Jason wasn’t satisfied in his job as an engineer, and she knew he was avoiding really digging into “the meat of the matter.”

Would Jason say he was depressed at that time? Yes: he says that it “absolutely was the beginning of depression”.  He uses the analogy of a frog sitting in boiling water: the feelings of dissatisfaction were slowly eroding “all the things that I depended on as an information-based business owner.” He had to stop ignoring it and putting it off in order to recognize depression.

Give yourself space to get out of your usual element, and to give yourself time.

Now, when you’re a podcaster, you have to show up and perform on a weekly basis. When I turn on my microphone, I know that I have a mission to complete. But when you’re feeling a lack of fulfillment, it must be difficult to show up.

Jason agrees that it took a lot more energy to podcast when he was feeling depressed. He hasn’t gone back to listen, but he’s sure people noticed that the tone of the show was changing. He was mustering energy rather than being excited to share new things.

Jason now realizes that his momentum had ceased. He had been doing same thing for ten years and had gotten complacent. He uses the image of a shark to explain what he means: sharks need to move through water in order to get oxygen through their gills. They’ll suffocate if they don’t move because the water isn’t bringing them that oxygen. That’s how Jason was feeling: stuck and suffocated.

He figured out that he needed to give himself space. When we find ourselves stuck, it can be easy to isolate ourselves. We might be feeling guilty, or shameful and, according to Jason, we ”isolate ourselves from the very input that we need.” Talking to others helps you get “unstuck.” If you’re feeling suffocated, Jason recommends giving yourself space to get out of your usual element, and to give yourself time.

So after he took the retreat his wife recommended, Jason realized he needed more time and took a sabbatical. This allowed him to learn that his drive was gone because he wasn’t being challenged, wasn’t pushing self to master new things. It was time to change some things up, and he had gone too long without listening to those needs.

Getting Unstuck

When he came back to New York City in 2015 to speak to his business partner, Jason was worried. How is the business supposed to survive if they don’t show up and create the content?

Luckily, his partner was feeling kinda the same way. He was very supportive and suggested that they come up with a creative solution to give themselves some time to rejuvenate the business.  

In the end, they found a way to just show up to do the podcast and hire someone else to do the rest. This started as a 3-month break, but it became 18 months. Jason continued to make the same money as before, but he only had to work about 4 hours a month. This wasn’t sustainable longer term, but it gave him the room to figure out next steps and reinvent the business.

His advice when you’re feeling depressed, dissatisfied, or stuck?

1. Don’t isolate yourself.

Sharing how hard things have been or how down you’re feeling will help you to unlock and process this stuff.

2. Get out there and have conversations with people.

This should be people you trust as well as new people. You never know who will spark an idea.

3. You're not the only one.

Remember that you’re not the only one that goes through these things (even though it feels like that in the moment). Every entrepreneur has these struggles from time to time.

4. Don’t neglect your mental health.

Our minds are a part of our products, and if your mental health is suffering, so is the value that you create. You’ve got to take care of yourself, too!

Jason also recommends asking yourself questions like these:

• What would be fun to try right now?
• What fascinates me?
• Where do I find my curiosity pulled?

The answers can be hard to find when the market seems to pull you in a particular direction, or when “everyone” is doing the same things. For Jason, moving into one-on-one work was a total change of direction, but it was exactly what he needed to do. He enjoyed it so much that he still does it.

Jason says that if you pay attention to where you get energy and ask yourself what you enjoy, you’ll find what feeds you as a content creator.

It’s easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing. But just because everyone else is doing it, that doesn’t mean you have to do it, too. It goes back to Jason’s start in podcasting: he started because it was interesting to him, not because it was what everyone else was doing.

Changing the Industry

So I want to know: where does Jason see things that need to change? Or things that derail us and distract us from what’s really important?

He’s got a few ideas! These apply to the  industry as a whole, but Jason says they apply to individuals, too:

“The noise floor has just gone up and up and up as more people have come online” trying to sell or establish a brand.” – Jason Van Orden

First of all, we need to realize that marketing is always going to depend on these very sexy stories about the one thing that makes a difference or the story that seems like the overnight success. According to Jason, “the noise floor has just gone up and up and up as more people have come online” trying to sell or establish a brand.

Because of that rhetoric, it’s easy to get caught up in the feeling of “OMG I gotta go and do that. I can’t miss out! #FOMO!” Jason finds this really aggravating. Everyone feels like there’s only one or maybe two ways to do it “the right way.”  

That’s just not true, Jason says. Things have become more homogenized online, but there are so many ways to share your voice, show up online, and share your products. We need more innovation in how we create and deliver value.

This isn’t just helping us feel more fulfilled, by the way. The audiences that we’re trying to reach are shifting, too. They are looking for a fresh voice and getting fed up with what’s been done for the last 5 years.

So how do you break the cycle? Here are Jason’s suggestions:

1. STOP Comparing yourself to others.

If that means unsubscribing, do it. Go on a social media fast if you need to, or at least unsubscribe from anyone on Instagram who triggers feelings of anxiety. You do not need to follow everyone in order to “do it right.” Filter out the stuff that doesn’t feed your creativity. 

2. Go back to fascination, curiosity, and fun.

Give yourself the space to hear your own approach. If there are hundreds of ways to get where you want to go, you might as well choose the journey that excites you, rather than going with what someone else says because they want you to buy their program. The bar has to be raised because the noise level keeps going up. You can chart your own course.

3. Don’t buy the hype.

We don’t do a good job as human beings to looking back and seeing all the variables that affected us on our journeys. So be wary of anyone saying “this ONE THING made all the difference!” That might be their impression, but it’s probably not true.  

I’ve gotta interject for a minute here: this is all crazy talk! I mean, I agree with all of it, but it goes against everything we’re taught when it comes to online marketing.

I believe in everything Jason is saying, but I also have an online course and a membership site, and an ebook. I teach people to blog in a particular way. How do you balance that kind of structure with the knowledge that everyone who goes through a program is a unique individual?

Find a thought leader that you resonate with, that you share values with, that you enjoy listening to, who also has authority, expertise, and experience.

Jason says that he continues to look for answers to this question. We all understand the appeal of a blanket digital course, but evergreen passive income doesn’t really exist. Yes, you want a scalable business and a successful business, but only if it empowers you more and more to pursue your “why”.

Digital courses by nature, end up being created for the “common denominator”: what is the methodology that will work best for most people? Jason has gravitated toward one-on-one work for this exact reason: it allows for more nuance in teaching.

What does this mean for you as a consumer? Find a thought leader that you resonate with, that you share values with, that you enjoy listening to, who also has authority, expertise, and experience. And then understand that there may also be part of what they teach that isn’t wrong, but doesn’t resonate with you or isn’t right for you.

Jason says that he used to be very prescriptive with courses because he wanted people to have the greatest chance of succeeding. Now, he realizes that you also need to make space for people to experiment and make it their own, otherwise they won’t be as successful and fulfilled as they could be. And we need to make clear, as teachers, that that is part of the process.

Frameworks vs Formulas

Keep a healthy balance between teaching a system and making room for individuality.

Jason has a great model (which he borrowed from a friend) for keeping a healthy balance between teaching a system and making room for individuality.

Think about the difference between frameworks and formulas.

A formula says, “just do it the way I did it, and you’ll be fine.” It doesn’t allow for creativity or change.

But a framework is something that can be applied to a number of scenarios that still has room for leeway and nuance. It accounts for a wider range of learners and needs.

So take a look at your content: are you offering formulas or frameworks?

And look at who you’re learning from: are you getting prescriptions (formulas) or flexibility (frameworks)?

Building a Business Model

Jason has some final tips for anyone looking to adjust their business model to help shake things up.

1. Think about positioning.

Find your voice and figure out your ethics. When you read or listen to something online, think about how you would’ve said something similar.

2. Find the best channels to communicate that positioning.

The audience for this podcast is mostly interested in blogging, but challenge yourself to branch out, too.

3. Look at packaging: how do you want to present your knowledge and perspective?

There are alternatives to the digital course model. Everyone right now is talking about funnels and scalables, but that’s all about creating a customer journey.

Those aren’t the only paths. Think about maximizing the value to and value from each student or customer at every point on their journey. Just as there are lots of different customers, there are lots of ways to set up a customer journey that delivers maximum value to them, and therefore maximum income to you.

Remember: there are lots of ways to snap all these pieces together. Jason says that if you’re feeling uncomfortable making a change, remember that  it’s not square peg/round hole situation because there are infinite shapes that your business can take. You might have a dodecahedron-shaped business, and that’s great!

Want to know more?

The best places to find Jason are at www. jasonvanorden.com or the Jason Van Orden page on Facebook.

Resources Mentioned

• Jason Van Orden website
• Jason Van Orden Facebook page
• Internet Business Mastery
• Books:
  • Promoting Your Podcast– Jason's best-selling book
  • Rich Dad Poor Dad

Infographic

How to Get Unstuck and Rejuvenate Your Blogging Business

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RJGM Power Build Update For 8/28/17

The Top 3 Trends in Customer Service

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

Customers Want Support on Social

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

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

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

Customers Want Faster Support

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

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

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

Customers Demand Better Experiences

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

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

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

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Your Go-to Guide for Video Marketing Is Here!

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

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

Define Your Video Marketing Goals and Strategy

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

Use Emotions to Drive Action

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

Understand Performance with Video Analytics

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

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

Take the Leap!

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

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

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Meet the Vidyard Team, Video Style: Greg Bowen

Meet the Team is our monthly chance to introduce you to the fabulous, quirky, talented people who work at Vidyard, using our favorite medium — video! For this episode, we caught up with Greg Bowen, Systems Analyst at Vidyard. Learn why he didn’t become a police officer, and the hardest thing about playing the bagpipes by watching this video!

What Didn’t Make the Cut

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

What is your favourite video on the internet right now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to Grow a Blog That Will Have an Impact

Are you a blogger who's trying to have an impact in the world?

Wondering how to stand out in a world where there is so much noise?

In this episode, I lay out a step by step game plan to help you rise above the noise, grow your blog and have an impact.

Show notes coming soon!

The post How to Grow a Blog That Will Have an Impact appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

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Copywriting Then and Now Is Like Chalk and Cheese

Millions of advertising and marketing campaigns solely depend on copywriting. History clearly indicates the power of copywriting and its role in brand positioning. From stories to billboards, to print advertisements, to soap operas, to TV commercials, to web series, to social platforms, crafting a copy for various collaterals has come a long way. Copywriting is exploding in an unprecedented way leading to new metrics. Read this before you write another copy.

Gone are the days, where a bunch of creative and talented folks sat together and broke their heads to flex the muscles of their vocabulary and make their ideas more glamorous. Word gamblers saw huge success through their stylish and more sophisticated works in earlier days. Copywriting was considered an art then. As exponential masters of the language, copywriters had their power. Their works were more formal and got heads turning – ears flapping too.

This culture is slowly turning upside down. ,

Copywriters today are forced to go with the consumers. The scare to get denounced and to be tagged as an obsolete is eating many today. Don’t mistake this to copywriting apocalypse. Getting closer to digital excellence is a task that gets tricky many times. Today, there is a purpose to have a clear vision to tackle the trend and to achieve copywriting excellence. This calls for a refinement in strategies and mastering new skills that can boost your performance.

“The purpose of advertising is to sell. That is what the client is paying for and if that goal does not permeate every idea you get, every word you write, every picture you take, you are a phony and you ought to get out of the business.”
William Bill Bernbach.

Stop being creative at your risk

Creativity and spontaneity have taken a different approach in this digital age copywriting profession. With the arrival of the internet, social media and search engine optimization, there is more to copywriting than to merely being creative. The ways content are created and shared are different today. Traditional media forms have digital versions now. Media evolution is taking place all over the world. Brands need to hold this thought and act.

So, what are those powerful changes an online copywriter is expected to employ today to interweave with the innovations but still carry out the human touch?

First and foremost, copywriters need to understand that copywriting today demands a different set of skills in terms of creating, optimizing and delivering. You need to learn to deliver personalization today. With thousands of options set before them, customers look for that so called “personalized touch” to give a nod to your brand.

You can understand this better through the journey of a top beverage company in the World – Coca Cola

Coca-Cola Innovates New Spaces Quickly and Boldly

Coca-Cola, the most admired and the best-known brand has been making people associate with the brand generation to generation. The Company continues to make changes by evaluating its progress across the experiences that it has been creating, the process, technologies and above all with the people and data. Right from its launch in 1886 where it came up with a unique style of using Spencerian Script logo, the brand has been creating millions of moments through its marketing campaigns every year and every time it came up with a new promotion.

Whether it is for advertising or another form of marketing campaign, the company has never failed to connect with the audience. The brand has consistently moulded its copywriting strategies to accommodate various forms like prints, hoardings, radio ads, television commercial, blogs, newsletters, emails, white papers, e-books, podcasts, video productions, audio clips, webinars, Power Point presentations, social-media content, webpage content, mobile content and much more to come.

From “Delicious and Refreshing,” tagline of the 1890s to the revolutionary jingle of 1971 that read, “I would like to buy the world a Coke,” the company has stood unique in presenting itself to the public. Its advertising budget surpassed $100,000 back in the 1900s which became a big talk in the market. The company saw yet another ground-breaking response in 2015 when it tipped off the “Drinkable” ad campaign to launch Coke Zero. This campaign removed all barriers. It’s first ever 30-second holiday commercial on television back in 2016 for its, “Taste the Feeling,” campaign made the season special for all its evangelists.

It is a privilege when customers coin a new name to your brand. This happened with Coca-Cola. The name Coke was created by none other than Coca-Cola fans. Coke continues to teach every marketer even after these 130 years. The company is re-inventing big way by generating real-time content all 365 days. This helps in innovating new spaces and going in line with consumer’s taste.

“Taking into account shifting user trends and emerging technologies and tools at our fingertips, we’ve doubled down on visual storytelling—original video content, photo galleries, infographics and more—over the past two years. Now, roughly half of the dozen pieces of content we produce and publish each week include video, said Jay Moye, global editor-in-chief, Coca-Cola Journey.
From tagline to a billboard, Coca Cola has shown its excellence consistently sharpening its saw of copywriting.

Yes, with changing times, copywriting has undergone various changes. Today the focus is on the distribution of creativity, greater connectivity and consumer empowerment.

Re-work with some unconventional ideas

• One of the vast and much-explored opportunities of digital copywriting today is to follow SEO.
• So, provide the search engines with the clarity of what your content is all about.
• Involve in market research
• Infuse data and analytics
• Inculcate the idea of using psychology
• Be short and different but authoritative and relevant
• Take advantage of Video technology
• A third of World’s entire population is going to get hooked to social media by 2020. Understand how online information is shared via social platforms.
• Understand the influencers

Future of Copywriting is Predictable

The race for an exciting copy will still continue. Today, you have a chance to prove your existence by being SEO and mobile friendly. Tomorrow, there can be another dominating method. Automated content development technologies and automated editors are in the race for future strategies. Such innovations can help in getting a raft of variables; permutations and combinations to one single idea which is slightly not possible with humans given the limitation of time for each project.

Future technological innovations can still have serious ramifications over copywriting. But, there cannot be any hindrance to creativity. With each innovation, copywriting can get stronger. Thinking can get bigger. Harness the innovations and confidently craft your ideas, carpentering words and phrases that suit to this era. Persuade the audience into taking a specific action. You can surely make empathic leaps. Let your creativity evoke emotions.

Original post: Copywriting Then and Now Is Like Chalk and Cheese

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4 Cold Calling Tactics you can Only Learn from Improv Comedy

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

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

Improv: Your Cold Call Secret Weapon

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

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

1. Yes, and…

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

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

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

2. Don’t be entertaining, be honest

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

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

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

3. Give offerings

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

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

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

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

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3 Different Ways to Do Keyword Research

One of the most important, highly valued and high return activity in the SEO field, keyword research begins by just entering a word in the search query box. Essential to a website’s success, keyword research can prove to be a boon if implemented correctly and can lead your site to higher ranking success.

In this article, we will be quickly covering 3 different ways to go about doing keyword research. So, let’s get started:

1. The Usual Way of Keyword Research

It’s now extremely easy to find out the right targeted keywords for your website using Mondovo’s Keyword Research Tool . You can retrieve search volumes, suggestions, and generate combinations quickly.

You can narrow down based on the global results or on the basis of countries. In fact, you can even retrieve the search volume for every keyword in a particular city or country.

Once the results are generated, you will see the full list of keywords along with the related terms, Google & Amazon auto suggestions, Facebook, Quora and Twitter search for that particular keyword as well as the latest Google trends. You can even export these keywords in CSV or XLS format.

There’s also a difficulty checker in the tool which can help you gauge the approximate difficulty for a certain keyword. Apart from that, you can also view a breakdown of the strongest and weakest sites competing for that keyword.

And lastly, you can optimize your keywords better through smarter targeting. There are inbuilt user intent parameters – terms that are commercial, e-commerce related, questions, positive or negative in sentiment.

2. Keyword Research by Finding Out Competitor’s Keywords

Another smarter way to approach keyword research is by finding out the keywords your competitors’ are ranking for. This is made easy using Mondovo’s Competitor Keywords.

To get started, you only need to enter the website URL, select exact page or across the domain, select the country and click on Search.

Once the report is generated, you will see the number of organic keywords the site or a certain page is ranking for.

Using the filters available, you can then filter the keywords based on current position, previous position, search volume, CPC and traffic.

You can also see the adwords keywords, if any, along with the ad copies.

Using all this data, you can then optimize your own website, your own content, blog articles etc. to rank for some of the most competitive terms and beat your competitors at their own game.

3. Keyword Research Through Search Volume

We all are familiar with Google Keyword Planner wherein we can get search volume data for a set of keywords. However, the problem lies with Keyword Planner showing the data in ranges wherein as a search marketer, the ideal solution would be to have the exact search volume data.

This problem is resolved by the Bulk Search Volume tool. You can now get to find the exact monthly search volume as well as the CPC cost.

Apart from that, you can also get the exact search volume for keywords for any language and in any country. There’s also the difficulty score that can tell you how easy/difficult it is to target a particular keyword. And lastly, you can also get to know the related keywords for a particular keyword entered by you.

So, if you’re running an advertising campaign or if you’re looking for the right set of terms for your website or for a blog article, using the bulk search volume tool is indeed the right choice for you.

Original post: 3 Different Ways to Do Keyword Research

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How to Increase The Chance your Content Will Rank Well in Google

As website owners, we all want to create quality content that not only is interesting and engaging to our audiences but often, also serves to promote and ideally sell our affiliates products. Your website can be big business and mean big bucks if you know how to use it.

Ok, so now you might be wondering, is there a way that it is possible to stack the odds in your favor when it comes to ranking on Google? Ranking on search engines is important; when was the last time you visited the second page of a search engine query?

Well, the folks over at Content Refined, a content marketing service seem to think so. Is creating content feeling like a shot in the dark? Are you frustrated with wasting time and money on having articles written that just don’t produce results in terms of ranking in search engines? Below, we share some of Content Refined’s tried and tested strategies on how to increase the chance your content will rank well in Google.

1. Targeted and Relevant Keyword Research, Which Creates Interesting and Engaging Article Titles

Content Refined is a start to finish content marketing service. This means that they will do your keyword research, create titles, write your articles and then edit and publish your articles to optimize them for your website.

Content Refined utilizes a keyword research tool call SECockpit to complete keyword research for their clients. The way Content Refined is different when selecting keywords for your article is that they filter keywords to fit specific sets of data. For Content Refined, that metric is a keyword that is searched at least 500 times per month but has less than a 30% competition score.

The fun doesn’t stop there however. Content Refined will also analyze what other sites are ranking for a given keyword. Even if a keyword is statistically right for use on your site, the team looks at what other sites are ranking for the keyword. This way, they ensure that they aren’t pitting their clients against massive, domain authority sites that they will realistically never be able to outrank.

2. Already Strong Writing Enriched Using MarketMuse To Ensure In-Depth Coverage of A Given Topic

Content Refined only uses native English speaking writers to create their articles. This is a good first step to ensure proper flow and grammar for an article. However, Content Refined goes the extra mile to ensure that not only are the articles interesting with good readability but also that they cover topics in depth. The best way to ensure in-depth coverage of a topic? There is a tool called MarketMuse that Content Refined uses. Users can plug an article title into the program and get back a variety of relevant information about the selected keyword. Not only will MarketMuse produce a list of relevant keywords that should be mentioned or touched upon in the article, but it will also yield the current content score of an article along with the average content scores of competing articles and the overall best content score for a selected keyword from the competition. In addition, MarketMuse will supply its customers with a list of competing articles, so that you can scope out the competition.

Data analysis has shown a moderate to strong correlation between a high MarketMuse score and a good ranking in search engine results.

3. A Statistically Driven Standard That All Articles Ideally Meet

Ideally, Content Refined articles meet a specific benchmark in terms of data and their team believes that articles that fit this criterion are likely to rank on search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

For Content Refined, that standard is a competition score under 30% and a MarketMuse score of over 40. In a real life scenario, this should result in a quality, well-rounded and in-depth article that features an interesting topic with a keyword that isn’t dominated by big, established domain authorities. Content Refined has uncovered that articles that meet this metric have between 80-90% chance of ranking on the first page of a search engine. Combine this with the fact that the service also only uses keywords that are searched at least 500 times a month and you have the opportunity to create some really fantastic, relevant and useful content.

The Content Refined process is based in finding out what people are looking for that isn’t necessarily being extensively or properly covered on the web. The method is to create useful content that is backed up by researched data, instead of using what we call the “spray-and-pray” method, which involves peppering your sites with heaps of articles, some of which may interest your audience and much that may not. The problem with the “spray-and-pray” is that you can end up losing readership if you post too much content that is useless or irrelevant to your audience and “spraying-and-praying” can also end up being very expensive.

To conclude, we all want to make money off our websites; that’s why we have them. However, it can be difficult, time consuming and costly to work out the exact metric for your site. If you are tired of creating content that doesn’t provide predictable results, the tips and tricks of the trade mentioned in this article may be able to help you rank on Google with a higher degree of certainty. Content Refined openly shares their process because they believe knowledge is power and that nobody should be deprived of the ability to create an awesome niche website.

If you don’t have the time to manage all these different tools on top of your singular or multiple websites, you can also take advantage of Content Refined’s start-to-finish content creation process by checking out one of the many available packages here: http://ift.tt/2vJJCeg. With a variety of packages available, you are bound to find something that suits your specific needs.

Original post: How to Increase The Chance your Content Will Rank Well in Google

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4 Types of Messages you Must Replace with Video

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

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

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

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

Any email longer than 300 words

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

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

Walk-throughs, setups, and onboarding

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

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

Secure partner communications

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

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

Anything that could be improved with a human touch

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a few of our favourite moments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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