Why I Chose Vidyard: A Story of a CMO, The Video-Enabled Business, and Culture

If you’re lucky, at least once in your career you will have an opportunity to work someplace truly special. For me, Vidyard is that place.

As a chief marketing officer, one of my core tasks is to communicate stories that engage people.  So much has been written on the power of storytelling and how buying decisions are made by a magical mix of emotional and rational factors.

Storytelling

I experienced firsthand the impact of video storytelling when I produced my first “2 minute explainer” video about eight years ago. I was able to communicate both the complexity of a business problem and my company’s unique solution in a short video that left viewers energized and motivated. My partners on the sales team loved it. I was hooked! Video was a better solution to the old way: a 10-page whitepaper that left readers exhausted and uninspired…  So this was the start of my “video for business” journey.

Inbound

Then came inbound marketing. As the power of inbound marketing became a proven way to cost-effectively attract, engage, and convert prospects, companies realized they needed to become publishers and create lots of content to feed the inbound beast. The result was a rising flood of whitepapers, case studies, webinars, ebooks, and blogs competing for attention.  

Since I knew video was so effective at storytelling, I started thinking about how to use it for inbound marketing. It became clear to me that video cuts through content clutter, and has the power to accelerate every stage of the buyer’s journey. For instance, a short video is great “top of the funnel” content to attract prospects and is perfect for social media sharing and amplification. A chalk-talk video that shows how a solution works is great for the middle of the funnel and a customer testimonial video can seal-the-deal at the bottom of the funnel.  Take a look at the 12 Types of Video infographic to learn what works best at each stage of the B2B sales cycle.

Inside Sales

Then came the rise of inside sales, business development reps, and account-based marketing.  Virtually every B2B company relies on hard-working sales people to engage with prospects and close business. With their main tools, email and telephones, it may require eight or more touches before a connection is made with all the noise on those channels.

What if there was a way to cut through the noise and get more prospects to engage with less touches? Video is quickly emerging as the new secret weapon for sales for exactly these reasons.  With simple screen-recording and webcam video technology like Vidyard’s ViewedIt (give it a try, it’s free), sales teams can enhance their outreach by including personalized videos that drive 5x increase in email opens and 8x increase in click-throughs.

More than YouTube

So it’s clear that the power of video to engage audiences makes it ideal for marketing, sales, internal communications, and customer support applications. This is where Vidyard comes in, and why I’m so excited to be part of this team.

You see, since YouTube was launched in 2005, video solutions have largely focused on video hosting. These solutions address the very important problem of how to store, access, and stream large quantities of video. But modern organizations need solutions that go beyond video hosting. They need solutions that make it easy to create and personalize video, and that make it simple to share video across email, web, and social media channels. Modern organizations need solutions that enable video to be “monetized” by capturing leads, that increase engagement and accelerate the buyer’s journey, and that feed audience engagement information to marketing automation and CRM solutions so that sales teams can focus their effort on the most promising prospects.

Vidyard is the new generation video platform, and is leading the way to power the video-enabled business (see Forrester’s Online Video Wave Report).  We’re hard at work inventing the technology and best practices that will enable organizations to better engage with audiences and accelerate business results. Vidyard is 100% focused on video for business innovation and utilizes the latest continuous integration and deployment techniques to relentlessly deliver new features to the market. And on top of amazing technology and people, Vidyard’s founders, Michael Litt and Devon Galloway, have built a one-of-a-kind culture focused on customer success, teamwork, transparency, and community involvement.   

As I evaluated the opportunity to become Vidyard’s CMO, I spoke with many people including customers, partners, and industry analysts. Without exception, they spoke in glowing terms about Vidyard.  Not only did they love the product, but also the integrity and customer-success focus of the people.

These are some of the reasons I chose Vidyard – and I couldn’t be happier.

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