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Do Customers Actually Find Your Support Videos Useful?

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

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

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

How to know if your customers find your videos useful:

Find out what they’re watching and where

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find out who is watching what

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

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

Find out how they watch

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

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

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

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

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

Use the data to improve future videos or tweak current ones

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

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

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

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

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

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

Register Now

Join over 1,500 Marketers at Fast Forward 2017

Register Now

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

For Sales Leaders:

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

Plan your day

See more Sales sessions and plan your day!

Plan your day

For Marketers:

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

Plan your day

See more Marketing sessions and plan your day!

Plan your day

For Vidyard Users:

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

 

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

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

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The 9 Secrets to Making Video Dialog Sound Natural

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

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

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

The nine secrets to making video dialog sound natural

 

1. Read it out loud

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

 

2. Use contracted dialog n’ such

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

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

 

3. Eavesdrop on real conversations

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

 

4. Leave out the boring stuff

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

 

5. Don’t overuse names

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

 

6. Treat it like tennis

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

 

7. Keep your characters busy

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

 

8. Weave in multiple threads

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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Is Your Marketing Ready For The New Millennial-um?

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

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

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

The future is bright, loud, and interactive

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your blueprint for B2B video success?

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

1. They over-complicate video production

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

2. They create poor-performing content

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

3. They fail to attribute video properly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreamforce 2017: Through the Video Lens

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

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

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

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

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

Video must evolve to keep up with the machines.

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

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

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

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

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Confession: I Don’t REALLY Care About Blogging

Yes, you read that correctly. I don't really care about Blogging.

I know what you're thinking. This blog is called Become a Blogger. I HAVE TO care about blogging.

If that's what you're thinking, don't worry – I understand. But I'm going to encourage you to listen to today's episode.

Listen to This Episode

In the episode, I get kinda personal and share the journey I've been on for the last few weeks.

There are certain things changing in my life, and I'm happy to share a little bit of my story with you.

This is not one of my typical episodes, but I hope you get a different kind of value from it.

Enjoy!

– Leslie

Here's the video I referred to in the episode:

 

The post Confession: I Don’t REALLY Care About Blogging appeared first on Become A Blogger by Noemi M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Aim before you launch video within your funnel

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

If you need pipeline, use video to book meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Fire away with the right videos and content

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

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

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

3. Adjust to maximize your results, fast

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

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

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

Reserve my virtual seat!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Conversation is the missing element in your ABM campaigns.

Don’t put a padlock on your front door

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

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

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

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

That’s not helping your ABM campaigns.

How conversational ABM works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The more personalized, the better

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

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

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Content Pros: Increasing Sales by Decreasing Content

Teaming up with the team at Convince & Convert, Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard hosts the Content Pros Podcast. For this week’s episode, Tyler is joined by Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing at Shopify Plus, to discuss how business success changes the approach to content marketing. Check out the full podcast:

Here are a few of our favorite moments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Content Pros: Increasing Sales by Decreasing Content appeared first on Vidyard.

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Vidyard Named One of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50™ Companies

 

KITCHENER, November 9, 2017 — Vidyard, the new generation video platform for business, was recognized for rapid revenue growth, bold innovation and its entrepreneurial spirit with a Deloitte Technology Fast 50 program award. The Fast 50 program honours the 50 Canadian technology companies with the highest revenue-growth percentage over the past four years.

Vidyard ranked 16th with a growth rate of 2140%.

The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 program winners are made up of public and private companies in the technology sector that have transformed the industry. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the program augments the broader Deloitte North American Technology Fast 500™ initiative with winners automatically eligible for this elite ranking.

Vidyard’s CEO, Michael Litt, credits the company’s growth to a focus on innovation, culture and customer centricity. “We’ve always put our customers first,” Litt said. “We thrive on innovation and have an incredible engineering team, but we always focus on solving real customer problems and delivering the best possible customer experience.”

“New technologies have disrupted various industries in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago,” said Erica Pretorius, Partner and National Leader for the Technology Fast 50™ program at Deloitte Canada. “Fast 50 winners have led the way and I can’t wait to see where they take us next.”

To qualify for the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 ranking, companies must have been in business for at least four years, have revenues of at least $5 million, be headquartered in Canada, own proprietary technology, conduct research and development activities in Canada and invest a minimum of five percent of gross revenues in R&D.

 

About the Deloitte Technology Fast 50™ – The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 program is Canada’s pre-eminent technology awards program. Celebrating business growth, innovation and entrepreneurship, the program features three distinct categories including the Technology Fast 50 Ranking, Companies-to-Watch Awards (early-stage Canadian tech companies with the potential to be a future Deloitte Technology Fast 50 candidate) and the Leadership Awards (companies that demonstrate technological leadership and innovation within the industry.) Program sponsors include Deloitte, Aequitas NEO Exchange, Bank of Montreal, Bennett Jones, CBRE, OMERS Ventures and Wellington Financial. For further information, visit www.fast50.ca.

About Vidyard

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

Media Contact:

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

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Why Personalized Video Excels At Breaking Through To Buyers

If the average B2B buyer today were a superhero, they’d be Captain Selective Hearing.

Their attention shifts faster than a speeding bullet. Their willpower is stronger than a locomotive, and they’re able to leap over countless ads, emails, and messages in a single bound. They have the superhuman ability to ignore practically everything. Some 86 percent of them exhibit banner blindness and only two percent of emails they receive are ever opened.

If they stood in the center of a crowded stadium with all the marketers on earth shouting at them, they’d likely hear next to nothing.

For marketers, these buyers can be formidable foes. In order to break through and be heard many are turning to personalized video—and are overjoyed to find that it can be more effective than a truckload of kryptonite.

Buyers don’t really ignore you, they ignore things that are irrelevant

Just remember, it’s nothing personal. Buyers are bombarded with as many as 2,900 messages each day. The only way to process it all is to develop a subconscious filter for everything that sounds irrelevant. That could include the phrase “Dear Sir or Madam,” pop-ups, unknown URLs, and lavish offers from Nigerian noblemen. Filtering allows buyers to stay sane and only consciously engage with the messages that matter.

So what messages matter? Ones from friends, family, colleagues, and trusted influencers. As a marketer, if you want to break through that superhuman filter, be like your buyer’s friends and create a personal connection. There’s no better way to do this than with video.

Personalized video is your kryptonite for every stage of the funnel

Video is an inherently engaging medium and when you personalize it, it becomes doubly so. We’re social and animals who like to watch stuff—including each other—but when you show buyers a video that includes them in it, they’ll be awestruck. They’ll wonder how you did it and you’ll have both their attention and interest, for as Dale Carnegie reminds us: “A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

Here’s a taste of that sweetness:

Personalized video is a devastating weapon for breaking through subconscious filters and achieving awareness. Properly applied, it can:

• Increase click-throughs by 4.5x. Just as people scan social media looking for photos and mentions of themselves, you’re offering them the same dopamine hit in a B2B context.
• Keep viewers watching for 35 percent longer. Once a buyer’s attention has been captured, video is a fantastic medium for communicating a lot of information in an interesting way. It has a higher informational throughput than text, audio, and images alone because it combines all three.
• Increase the chance that late-stage prospects buy. When buyers are shown personalized videos that demonstrate a solution, they experience it viscerally, increasingly comprehension. The marketing team at Salesloft found that 75 percent of late-stage prospects who received personalized videos became closed won deals.

Video is your key to getting heard by buyers with the superpower of selective hearing.

But wait, how does it work?

Indeed, how do you personalize videos at scale without spending a ton of time? What results do companies like Marketo, Reltio, and Influitive see with it? And where can you test drive this to see a video that’s been personalized just for you?

Great questions. It’s all in our new ebook, How to Drive More Sales Ready Leads with Personalized Video.

Read it and you’ll learn all the secrets video can offer for you to finally be heard and to capture a superheroic level of attention from your prospects.  

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What We Took Away from Success Incubator and FinCon – with Serena Appiah

Don’t you wish you were at FinCon with me?

In this episode, I’m coming to you live from Dallas, TX, where I’m attending FinCon 2017! With me is Serena Appiah of ThriftDiving.com, who is joining me for a fourth time on the podcast.

We’re here to share the action steps that we have gained from this conference and we’re planning to implement in our own businesses with you! It’s almost like actually being here…almost.

Intro

 

Listen to This Episode

This year is Serena’s second time at FinCon, and she says it’s just as amazing as last year. I always say that the best learning is what happens outside of the sessions, and Serena is finding that to be true. You get so many tips and tricks to take back to your business just from people you’re having conversations with in the hallways, during the coffee breaks, or at lunch.

By the way, we went to The Clutch for lunch. It was my first time ever eating bacon. That wrap was SO good!

Serena’s #1 Tip

Serena’s top tip comes from the keynote by Darren Rowse of problogger.com. He spoke about knowing who your audience is.

Sure, we hear this all the time, but Darren said something really new and really profound.

He said that once you know your audience and you know what their struggle is, you then have to figure out where you want to take them. It’s not enough to think about where they are right now. You have to imagine where they’re going to be.

The first step is to figure out who the person is. Draft an avatar and ask: what is their pain? What is their problem?

Once you, as a blogger, transform that person, how does the avatar change? What do you want them to look like after?

Actually draft your “before” and “after” avatars. Who will your audience become as they engage with you?

What’s extra cool is once you do that work, you will have a clear vision about what you should and should not take on. So if someone approaches you to promote a product, think about your avatars and remain true to them. If something isn’t the right fit, even if it’s a lucrative opportunity, turn it down. Stay true to your audience.

Leslie’s #1 Tip

My number one tip actually comes from Success Incubator, which took place before FinCon. The tip is about your homepage:

Instead of having your homepage focused on who you are, have it focused on who your audience is and what value you’re going to provide to them.

When I come to your blog, quite frankly, I don’t really care about you. Your audience isn’t worried about who you are — they’re looking for what this blog can do for them.

Take a look at your homepage and think about whether you’re really demonstrating what the value of your blog is to someone who is visiting for the first time.

Darren Rowse actually lists the problems he’s trying to solve on the homepage. He identifies the problems and gives people one-click solutions. If you scroll down on his homepage, you’ll see a section titled “I Need Help To…” followed by a series of problem areas: grow content, build a community, make money, and so on.

Darren Rowse identifies the problems and gives people one-click solutions on his Homepage.

His site is like a roadmap. It says, “Click here to see how you can solve your problem.” And that makes it really easy for visitors to find what they need.

More Tips

Call your audience on the phone

Another tip Serena is going to take home is the idea of calling readers on the phone. Pat Flynn calls about ten of his readers every month. A real phone call makes people feel so special and helps you really build a relationship with them.

Plus, the amount of information you get from a phone call is really different from a survey. For example, in Serena’s niche, people often say that they don’t do DIY because they don’t have enough time. But when she talks to people, she finds that a lot of people are actually lacking in confidence rather than time, and that’s a separate problem.

I loved this tip from Steve Chou’s session. So, he has a lead magnet, and people opt in when they come to his page.

The great part is that Steve tries at that point to get them to evangelize. His thank you page tells the visitor that if they click and share the content on Facebook, they’ll get an additional free resource. You get something extra when you share the content. How smart is that?

Steve Chou allows his audience to access more content if they click and share his other content and infos.

But how do you know that someone has shared? Steve coded his himself, but Thrive Themes has an option for this. There are also a number of plugins that will allow you to unlock content automatically if your audience shares content in a particular way.

This is a great way to leverage your thank you page and grow your list even more.

Serena is also planning to go home and ask herself, “What are your money blocks?” She picked this one up at the Internet Marketing Party, an independent get together here in Dallas.

She was talking to Denise Duffield-Thomas, author of Lucky B*tch. Denise always asks, “why are you not earning the money that you deserve? Why are you not getting more passive income?” Those are your money blocks.

One of Serena’s blocks is that she’s afraid people aren’t going to take her seriously or think she’s worthy of paying for her skills. We tell ourselves that earning good money means we should be working hard, and if we’re not working hard we feel like we don’t deserve it.

Have a tough conversation with yourself. What is holding you back? What are your money blocks?

Drip Email Marketing

Kim Sorgius hooked me up with a much more advanced trick. Depending on which email marketing service you’re using, you may not be able to do this, but I really recommend trying it if you can!

Say you have an email list of 1000 people, and you send an email to all of them. If 200 people open that email, you have a 20% open rate. So Kim uses Drip lead scoring to be able to determine who is always opening her emails. She can actually tell which email addresses belong to her most engaged list members.

But wait! It gets better! Once Kim determines who really engages with the content, she will automatically set Drip to email those people first. That first email gets a 90% open rate, or even higher.

Then, half an hour or 40 minutes later, she sends the same exact email to everyone else.

Why? By sending to your hot leads first and getting that high open rate, the email servers see your email as a high-quality message. They’ll then prioritize that email when you send the second set, which makes it more likely to land in priority inboxes.

Kim currently has 100,000 subscribers. When she started doing this, she was getting about 30,000 opens per message. But her open rate has increased significantly over the time that she has been using this trick. This then puts more and more people on the hot engagement list, which makes the tip work even better!

Even More Tips

One more thing that I am re-learning at this year’s FinCon is the importance of keeping your thumb on the pulse, riding the waves, and getting in on the trends.

For example, a couple years ago when Snapchat was first on the scene, I made a comprehensive Snapchat tutorial to help people get started on that platform. It was super popular and really successful because people were already searching for help with Snapchat.

The Ultimate Snapchat Tutorial

Keeping on top of trending topics gives you an extra boost.

How do you find these trending topics? Know your industry, and follow news sites that are important for your industry. Another great tactic is to go to conferences! There are often new products being previewed or launched that aren’t yet available to the general public.

Serena recommends going to any conferences in your niche. You don’t have to restrict yourself to blogging conferences!

Another great tip, even though I can’t remember who this one is from: look in Google Analytics and determine your top five posts.

Optimize your top posts.

Then — and this is the important part — spend one day on each of those posts and optimize the bejeezus out of it.

• Optimize the images.
• Make the SEO perfect.
• Update it to add more resources.
• Add a lead magnet.
• Put in some affiliate links.
• Create a pdf version, or a checklist or infographic version that they can download and take away.

Final Tip

If you’re listening to this podcast right now, Serena and I want you to pick one of these tips and make it a goal.

Over the next days, or weeks, or months, do this one thing to help move the needle on your business just a little bit. Make this happen!

If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’re going to be successful.

You can learn more about what Serena is up to over at ThriftDiving.com and on all the social media platforms @ThriftDiving!

Resources Mentioned

• Success Incubator
• Darren Rowse's Blog – Problogger.com
• Serena Appiah's blog – Thrift Diving
• Pat Flynn's blog – Smart Passive Income
• Steve Chou's blog – My Wife Quite Her Job
• Kim Sorgius's blog – Not Consumed
• Internet Marketing Meetup
• Drip Email Marketing
• Become a Blogger Resource – The Ultimate Snapchat Resource

The post What We Took Away from Success Incubator and FinCon – with Serena Appiah appeared first on Become A Blogger by Noemi M.

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Chalk Talks: Using Video to Accelerate and Close More Sales Deals

If you’re like many sales reps, you can’t be in front of your base as often as you would like to be. So how do you cut through the noise and keep prospects and customers engaged at each stage of the sales cycle?

This episode of Chalk Talks is presented by Jesse Cournoyer, the Manager of Sales for North America and EMEA at Vidyard. Covered in the session, we learn how video can shorten your sales cycle, improve customer relationships, and help you close more deals. You can check it out below:

Chances are you are facing some of these challenges throughout your sales cycle:

 

Relationships	Trust	Showing Value	Buying Groups
It’s challenging to build strong relationships when we’re not in front of our customers as often as we’d like to be.	If we’re not speaking to our champions in a personalized and humanized way, how are we to build trust with them?	Demonstrating value is more powerful than showing so why aren’t we leveraging all the tools at our disposal to demonstrate the goods?	Multiple stakeholders are often involved in buying decisions. It’s important we’re reaching the right people, with the right message to avoid a broken game of telephone.

Types of video to use to help overcome these challenges

Personalized video. Create quick, easy, personalized messaging that you can send out using your laptop video camera as easily and seamlessly as you would an email.

Custom screen captures. Make sure that you’re sharing the relevant information that a customer wants to see while still remaining a part of that shot.

Off-the-shelf marketing videos. Chances are your marketing team is creating all kinds of great content that you can leverage throughout the sales cycle.

Custom sourced videos. Questions and concerns often come up throughout the sales process. Being able to source internal subject matter experts to create quick videos to address challenges quickly and in a way that a customer can really understand can make all the difference.

When to use video throughout the sales cycle

Early in the sales cycle, everyone’s looking for that silver bullet. How do you get the message that you want to convey across? Customers are inundated with stuff coming at them a mile a minute. Personal video outreach is your silver bullet. It’s that compelling call-to-action that everyone’s talking about and it’s got a personalized message behind it that a customer can’t wait to hear.

If you’re like many organizations, chances are there are going to be pass offs throughout the deal cycle. Personal intro videos are a great way to create a warm introduction to that next person in the process, for instance, from a BDR to an account executive.

As you move through the sales cycle, you can continue to use video at every step of the process. Think about sending a video before a call to outline the agenda. Then after the call, create a summary video addressing any follow-up questions or deliverables.

Presentations and demos are crucially important and making sure you’re conveying the right message to the right people in the organization is pivotal to moving the deal forward. Why not create a video with the right message that can be shared throughout the org to avoid that game of telephone?

Sadly, we’ve all been to the point where we think we’re about to close the deal, and all of a sudden, the customer goes dark. Well, video can be a great way to revive the sales cycle. If email and phone aren’t cutting it, why not try something totally different and send a video message to different people that you’ve communicated with throughout the organization?

At the end of the deal, executive sponsorship is often key to actually bringing it over the line. Having your CEO or an executive within the organization create a personalized video, sending it out to one of their executives, creates a more personalized connection and can ultimately help win the business.

3 Tips for using video in your sales cycle

1. It has to be easy. There are so many sales tools out there that you can purchase, but if it’s not easy for people to use, it’ll ultimately fall by the wayside. The good news is tools like GoVideo are so simple to use that many people actually prefer it to writing an e-mail.
2. Be authentic. If you were in front of a customer, you’d be yourself. Strive for the same on video. Don’t be scripted. You’re a sales professional for a reason. You’ve got a great personality and video is just giving you the medium to showcase it.
3. Create shared video libraries. Create playlists of related content for your customers to engage with. Leverage existing marketing videos that are at your disposal–customer testimonials, product, and solution demos.

The post Chalk Talks: Using Video to Accelerate and Close More Sales Deals appeared first on Vidyard.

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Sales Engineers: How To Sleep Through The Demo And Still Win The Deal

All the best sales advice out there, from Entrepreneur to Sales Hacker and HubSpot, tells you to have a plan. Create a process. Stick to a strategy. But what about when a rigid structure starts to hold you back?

In today’s sales ecosystem, teams copy each other extensively. Salespeople all read the same blogs, attend the same events, and mimic each others’ tips to the point where executives bemoan “receiving the alligator email again.” Amidst this clutter, a firm process may only ensure that you get ignored just like everyone else.

As a sales consultant, help your reps and be bold—think differently—and try sleeping through a demo.

Not every customer needs a full-fledged demo

No, of course, we’re not actually advocating sleeping on the job. We’re suggesting you do less work and allow customers to consume the information whenever they please, with asynchronous video.

While your customer watches your pre-recorded custom demo, you could be anywhere, like focusing on more important demos. Which begs the question, if this works (it does), then why do we give everyone big, full-length demos anyway? For the same reason, Americans are stuck on the Imperial System or why Australia’s Supreme Court wears powdered horsehair wigs: it’s just how things have always been done.

But, as any seasoned sales consultant will tell you, not every customer needs a full-fledged demo, just as not every lead needs to be grilled by a junior SDR. Often, salespeople’s processes put prospects through the ringer and leave them exasperated, wanting to buy but unable to accelerate things.

 

Today’s customers, who are unequivocally overloaded with messages and short on attention, demand a more personalized sales process. They don’t want to suffer endless emails to coordinate a demo time any more than the sales rep wants to push the sale back another week or you want to perform a demo that you’re not sure the customer needs.

In these moments, you can grant everyone’s wish with asynchronous video. And if the customer bites and is intrigued, they can schedule a full demo, and come to it prepared with real questions and a real agenda. And if they don’t bite, and don’t need a full demo, and move on through the sales cycle anyway, everyone wins.

Asynchronous video, used as a pre-demo qualifier, can:

• Speed up sales cycles
• Better qualify prospects
• Save time for everyone involved
• Free up sales consultants to focus on more important tasks

And here are a few ways to use it:

4 types of micro-demo video content

1. Micro demos

Micro-demos are exactly as they sound: miniature demo recordings. Prepare for them by having the salesperson ask, either on the introductory call or in an email, what features the customer would like to see. Customers don’t always know the answer to this, but it gets them thinking and forces them to do some pre-work. On occasion, however, it will lead you to strike qualification gold.

For example, if a prospect confesses, “This is actually to help convince my boss,” you can record a highly persuasive clip for that express purpose and allow them to pass it along, penetrating the account much more quickly than if you had performed a demo, learned about the recalcitrant boss, and then scheduled a second “executive” demo.

Record a miniature demo that strikes a balance between answering their questions and leaving them wanting more.

2. Webinars

If your customers need a high-level conceptual demo of something that’s been covered in a marketing webinar, chop up the webinar and send the customer a truncated version. Add custom recordings of yourself explaining why you selected these clips. Tell them beforehand why it’s relevant, add explanations in the middle—perhaps jumping to their website and highlighting features—and then end with a summary.   

3. Customer service tips

Is the prospect’s concern less about the technology and more about the level of service they’ll receive? Do what you’d never do on a demo and have someone from the customer service team record it with you. Together, you can deliver precisely what they need to hear directly from the person who will be taking care of them.

4. Team downloads

If your customer is primarily concerned about technology, security, or your roadmap, rope in experts throughout the company. You need not even be present for these—if everyone’s using a simple video recording tool, you can solicit 1-2 minute segments from a variety of people throughout your organization, including executives or sales leaders, and combine them into one, powerful, company-wide micro demo. And perhaps best of all, you can save these clips and rearrange or repurpose them for future deals.

Lead with personalization, not process

Not every customer needs a demo and not every sales consultant needs to give a live one. Help your salespeople stand out and better utilize everyone’s time with micro-demos. If you perfect them and use them to weed out unnecessary demos and all the scheduling headaches that entails, you may find yourself working so efficiently that there’s nothing left to do but slip away, book a conference room, and take a much-deserved nap.

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