How to craft a disruptive narrative that drives action

In May of 2018, Michael Margolis received a LinkedIn invite from a stranger. He accepted, then noticed that he and the man had grown up in the same tiny Swiss town.

“Small world!” Michael messaged Ayhan. Over the next forty-five minutes, they went from strangers to friends.

Their bond was no accident: –in sharing their stories, they’d grown closer, and as CEO of marketing agency Get Storied, Michael helps companies like Marketo, Facebook, and Bloomberg reproduce the uncanny feeling of kinship in their marketing.

Your videos need a real story

“Customers today are constantly barraged by strangers,” says Michael. “They need a reason to relate, or you’ll lose them.” Yet the products most marketers sell, especially in tech, are about as tangible as cotton candy dunked in water.

Racoon attempts to wash cotton candy in water and sees it melt before its eyes

Stories give prospects something concrete to hold onto. Our brains are biologically hard-wired to understand and remember our world in terms of heroes, villains, conflict, and resolution. But while “storytelling” has been a buzzword for decades, it takes more than colorful anecdotes or relatable analogies to drive prospects to buy. In truth, many salespeople and marketers get it just plain wrong by peddling fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Fear makes prospects resistant to new ideas because it drives up their cortisol levels

“Fear makes prospects resistant to new ideas because it drives up their cortisol levels,” says Michael. “That’s the last thing you want. Instead, marketers need to elicit the so-called love molecule, oxytocin, which makes people curious.”

You can do that with real stories. Here’s how.

Michael’s 3-step storytelling method

1. Provide context

Whenever prospects watch your videos, they ask themselves questions such as, is this relevant? Do I belong in this story? And, do I trust the person who produced this? These questions are an attempt to determine your intentions in order to decide whether or not to believe your message. Or, as Michael puts it, “Are you trying to sell me sh*t or do you give a sh*t?”

You can make your good intentions public by sharing your story. Good stories reveal the underlying motivations of the characters involved, like how readers of the Harry Potter series learn that Harry is an orphan trying to find his place in the world, or that Darth Vader is a really a good guy gone bad that goes good again.

Discover your own backstory with a hack Michael calls superhero origins. Like a caped crusader, ask yourself four questions:

Where were you born or raised?
Who were your parents?
What have you studied?
What has influenced you?

If this is for a company, talk about why the business was founded, the impact it has on customers’ lives, and its mission, as if it were a person. Write down your answers–that’s your origin. Share it at the beginning of your videos to give prospects enough context to know your intentions are pure and make them comfortable watching further.

2. Evoke emotions

Once prospects know why you’re producing your video, they want to connect. This is where the oxytocin comes in: Our bodies release this chemical when we’re around others and we realize that we are more alike than different.

According to neurobiologists, this is the reason we ask seemingly banal questions such as where people are from when meeting strangers at parties: We’re fishing for reasons to relate. When we find commonalities just as Michael and Ayhan did, no matter how superficial they are, we consider that stranger part of our tribe and we like them more.

Bring prospects into your tribe by telling them what you intend to do in an emotional way. Describe not just the effect it will have on their company, but how they’ll feel. For example, don’t say you’ll improve their ABM results–say you’ll give them peace of mind. And don’t make them a more effective speaker–help them look like a rockstar just in time for their annual review.

Tell stories about people, conflict, and how you helped them resolve it, and let prospects know that your journey is their journey, and you’re headed to the same exciting place.

3. Offer evidence

Notice that so far, we haven’t mentioned data. According to Michael, narrative trumps data, which is why stats come last. If you were to start your video out with a disembodied list of statistics, prospects would only question them and your methodology, and your story would be dead on arrival.

In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Prospects need context and an emotional connection before they can have a relationship to the data.

But once you have that, lay out the numbers. Share case studies and testimonials about how you’ve impacted similar customers and–most importantly–what that 75 percent higher ROI meant to the individual who earned it. Aka, they got promoted, earned street cred with the sales team, and got to speak at their company’s summit.

Great stories drive next steps

Do Michael and Ayhan, the man from the Swiss town, keep in touch? We don’t know, but we’re curious, and that’s the sign of a good story: It’s memorable and leaves audiences wanting more.

When used in your marketing, stories leads prospects down the funnel to become more educated, more interested, and more likely to buy. Great stories drive action and with context, emotions, and evidence, you can make yours even more effective.

The post How to craft a disruptive narrative that drives action appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/disruptive-narrative/

Why are 58% of marketers still flying blind?

Broadly, there are two types of marketing measurement strategies: The kind LinkedIn personalities evangelize and that everyone knows they should use, and the kind marketers actually have time for.

Because let’s be real: Reality is messy. Some marketers are stuck with legacy equipment, managing disorderly databases on paltry budgets. And for those whose titles might as well be Director of Extinguishing Other People’s Fires, sometimes tracking performance comes last. Or for five percent of marketers, doesn’t happen at all.

Demand Gen Report conducted a study on the state of marketing measurement. Here is what they found.

1. Over half of marketers struggle with measurement – and growing

Measurement is both a top priority and a top challenge. Eighty-seven percent of marketers say they prioritize measuring their marketing performance, but 58 percent say their efforts “need improvement,” or worse. And their competency is declining.

Fewer marketers reported they had “excellent” measurement skills this year and more marketers reported that their efforts were inadequate.

Why the decline? It may only be relative. There’s greater awareness in the market this year that measurement is a must. Marketers who may have considered themselves average last year have now laid the foundation for analytics and discovered problems they didn’t know existed.

For example, some have realized, for the first time, that pipeline velocity isn’t the same as average deal length. Others have found that multi-touch attribution is harder than it looks. Either way, they’re on the right path, and we can probably expect measurement maturity levels to rise in the near future.

How marketers rate their measurement skills:

2. Marketers lack measurement resources

Of all factors, inertia holds marketers back the most. Their past decisions around budget, headcount, and analytics systems hamper their ability to measure going forward. Their top challenges this year are: having too few resources, messy data, the wrong reporting software, and being unsure of what KPIs to measure, in that order.

A lack of resources creates a negative resource cycle. Marketers can only manage what they measure and when 45 percent don’t track the middle of the funnel and 70 percent don’t conduct any attribution analysis, as is currently the case, the resources they do have don’t always go to the right places.

How can marketers escape the resource tailspin? Lay off of experimenting with new tools and channel your efforts into getting full-funnel tracking set up. It’s only when you can see what’s working that you can maximize what resources you do have.

The top challenges to marketing measurement:

3. Deeper metrics are top of mind

If marketers could wave a magic wand—what some of us call budget—lots would change. They’d track their impact on pipeline and revenue, show an ROI on all their investments, and improve their alignment with the sales team, in that order.

They’d also set up tracking for their pipeline opportunity, deal size, pipeline velocity, and profit margin, and iron out kinks in tracking across channels or funnel stages—something half of marketers still struggle with.

Marketers’ metrics wishlist:

4. 52% of marketers are still stuck in Excel hell

Marketers with money to spend would do well to pour it into buying better analytics. Demand Gen Report found that only 15 percent have a dedicated analytics suite and 52 percent still manually export data to—don’t cringe—Microsoft Excel.

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via GIPHY

Excel is probably not most marketers’ favorite place to be, but without a proper analytics system to summarize all their data, they’re left cobbling together information from web analytics, marketing automation systems, and their CRM.

Marketers interested in moving from average to excellent should invest in an analytics platform that can consolidate all, or at least most, of their data. The cost may be worth it to short-staffed time-poor marketers who need to make more profitable decisions.

5. ABM is a priority, but the balance is unclear

Account-based marketing (ABM) is an increasing priority for marketers. Twenty percent already have adequate ABM tracking in place and 48 percent plan to have it by next year.

Yet when they do get tracking set up, there’s still the big question of what’s the right balance between tracking ABM versus demand-gen. Most marketers still practice both, but half of marketers tracking ABM aren’t sure if they’re still tracking inbound funnel metrics.

The proliferation of ABM-specific marketing roles over the past two years may only exacerbate this intra-marketing silo. Marketers who want to measure so they can manage would do well to call a meeting of the revenue team and get these metrics sorted out.

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from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/flying-blind-marketing-measurement/

How Video is Changing this Marketer’s Inbound Game Forever

To say I’m passionate about inbound is an understatement. Whether it’s creating inbound marketing content, enabling my inbound sales team, delighting customers or building new relationships in the community, HubSpot and Vidyard have become two essential tools in my marketing stack.

Video has really always been a part of my life. My mother’s a photographer and was always capturing some moment of our family life on film or video. Back in the summer of 2015, video started coming up more and more in my inbound marketing discussions. It seems that at every conference or webinar I attended folks were preaching the gospel of video. And rightfully so. We began dabbling in it ourselves as a team. We even hired a company to produce a couple of videos to summarize some research we produced and found it to be an obvious way to summarize complex information.

When I was introduced to Vidyard and one-to-one video, the penny dropped

In the fall of 2015, I happened to meet up with someone from Vidyard at an event. We’d been talking about using video more seriously for inbound at the company where I worked at the time. It was during that discussion that I was introduced to the concept of using video to build one-to-one connections. That’s when the penny dropped for me. I could immediately see how video, purposely-created to speak to an individual, could provide that missing personal connection so essential for establishing rapport.

As one of my friends, Marcus Murphy from DigitalMarketer, recently said to me, ‘Everyone says cold calling is dead. But it’s really thoughtless outreach that’s dead.’ Marketing has become a rich and technical thing. We just have too many resources at our fingertips to do thoughtless outreach. When you use video—when someone can see your face, hear your voice—trust grows. Plus, you’re probably not going to create a whole personalized video message to someone without doing at least a little research beforehand.

After that Vidyard conversation, I started using GoVideo almost immediately, mostly for internal communication. It was handy for walking my team through processes, for sales enablement, and for creating alignment. I also began chatting with people in my company to get them to buy into video, and presented Vidyard as an option. We did a trial. We put one video on the website and tracked its performance.

Then I joined IMPACT. Here, everyone was very excited about video’s potential. We were already doing a ton of marketing videos and live video but hadn’t really tapped into the 1:1 videos. It didn’t take long though! In short, from the moment our team got its hands on GoVideo, the company embraced video as an engagement tactic and along with it, the Vidyard platform.

We use everything Vidyard has to offer. We upload webinar recordings to the platform. We create videos for our landing pages. We use it for webinar promotion and for follow-ups. Recently we were promoting an upcoming live event where we were giving away a certain type of TV/computer mount. I happened to have one, so I did a GoVideo at home while hanging out with my dog. The thumbnail is a shot of me petting her head. Am I above bribery with puppies? Nope, I’m not. I mean hey, it worked. The thumbnail matters, people!

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Creating a higher level of engagement with video

As the Director of Audience Engagement and Community for IMPACT, I’m responsible for managing communications between the company and our audience, from their first touch through their entire lifecycle as a prospect, partner and/or customer, in both directions. I’m passionate about maintaining a high level of engagement in a way that faithfully reflects IMPACT’s vision and values.

I’m sure others who do a similar job feel the same, but it’s easy to feel a bit limited by the options when you are managing a community. You have Facebook, Slack, and maybe an extranet, but that’s about it online. Video is a way to bring an entirely new element into your community-building strategy while conveying emotion and tone, something that is very important when building trust and authenticity. It is also virtually impossible to duplicate in any other medium.

In our community, we use Zoom to host a weekly hangout and host a Facebook Live show every other week, and every month I push out an email update with a rundown of activities over the last month. I now incorporate video into that email, summarizing the news in 60 seconds or less. When people reach out to me with questions or concerns, I try now to always respond using video. It allows me to share more about myself and I find it builds engagement and trust.

Here are just a couple examples of these outreach videos:

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When you are building an online community, people can be harsh. They’ll hide behind the screen and say things they wouldn’t if they were speaking to you face-to-face. With video, we’re all a bit more vulnerable on camera. It creates a bond like no other, and I find it brings a level of civility, respect, and decorum to community conversations.

I’d love to see more of our community using video as a means of communicating, so I’m leading the way with Vidyard’s help. Video sets the tone. It tells people you can trust me and that I’m real and vulnerable. It reminds them that there’s a real human being out there. Our community members respond warmly to it and I really believe you can see that they behave differently as a result.

In closing I’ll leave you with five tips when incorporating video into your inbound activities:

Test, test, and test again – I love to say that “best practices are test practices.” Your video message needs to work for your community and for your industry. One size does not fit all. It’s likely your first video won’t be a home run. Or if it is, the next one might be a flop. Try different formats, approaches, and lengths. Play with it and find your groove.
Start with a smile – I mean, who wants to click on a thumbnail of a grumpy face? A calm face and a smile might establish the right tone for your video. A grin and a wave works too! It not only invites people to listen to your message, it helps you in recording your video by setting yourself up to have a positive attitude and setting the right tone. It says to others, I’m here to help. I’m here to educate.
Pay attention to the basics of video composition – it’s not rocket science, but good lighting and good sound matter. This doesn’t have to be a Hollywood production, but remember to turn on a light (crazy, I know), and use a good headset or microphone.
Pick an interesting background – a cool background can add a lot to your message and set your video up for success. Backgrounds I’ve played with include the Chicago skyline, a flower garden, the layers of glass that divide our working space. Consider using a background or props that relate to your message. Remember when I used my dog to promote a TV? When our community hit 3,000 members, I recorded a video on top of our building overlooking the city because I wanted to literally “shout our news from the rooftop.”

Use video when you are celebrating numbers and milestones – speaking of shouting good news from the rooftops, video conveys emotion like no other. Numbers in print are just…numbers. So if you are hitting a big milestone for your business (or your community), consider using a video to tell the world of your accomplishment. When HubSpot hit 15,000 users, they shot a video of them dumping 15,000 orange ping pong balls over the balcony in their office. Between the concept, the footage, and the music – it still gives me goosebumps to watch.

The post How Video is Changing this Marketer’s Inbound Game Forever appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/video-changing-inbound-marketing/

Why Sales Should Aim for Quality, Not Quantity Featuring Tito Bohrt

Welcome to this edition of Modern Sales Point of View. Today we hear from the terrific Tito Bohrt, Founder & CEO of AltiSales. Tito discusses what’s changing in B2B sales, what sales tactics are working, and why being targeted in your outreach will get you better results than trying to play the volume game.

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What’s changing in B2B Sales?

In Tito’s mind, sales development today is much more difficult than it was five or ten years ago. “Everybody’s getting blasted with hundreds of emails every day,” says Tito. “It’s pretty hard to break through that noise and get a prospect’s attention.”

What’s not working in B2B Sales?

“What’s not working is playing the volume game rather than the quality game,” says Tito. If he can tell he’s just being spammed without any care put into the outreach, he automatically deletes those messages—and he knows he’s not the only one. Instead of trying to hit higher and higher numbers in terms of email sends and cold calls, Tito recommends salespeople focus on quality and personalization. By showing the prospect that you’ve done your research, you demonstrate that you understand their business and can help them improve. “Be very targeted,” says Tito, “show me why: why me and why now.”

What’s working in B2B Sales?

Tito’s answer is simple: providing value. Though it may seem obvious, it’s incredibly effective. People appreciate that you’ve put in the effort to understand their company and challenges. “If you can show within the first two or three minutes that you understand what they do and how you would amplify or improve that with your offering,” says Tito, you’re going to be successful.

Let’s play sales word association!

As a little bonus, we played word association with Tito using sales buzzwords. Stay tuned to see if you can relate!

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We’d love to hear what’s working (or not working) for you in your sales development efforts. Sound off in the comments below.

The post Why Sales Should Aim for Quality, Not Quantity Featuring Tito Bohrt appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/sales-quality-tito-bohrt/

4 Tips for Building Your Brand on Social Media

Between shooting selfie videos for LinkedIn, crafting Instagram stories, and replying to Tweets, it’s easy to get overwhelmed building a social media presence. Whether it’s for my own personal accounts or brands I’ve managed, I rely on four principles to guide my social media decision making:

Quality
Consistency
Access
Vulnerability

These four concepts are meant to be simple. You can use them as a guiding light when you need to take a step back from your publishing strategy. They’re also applicable whether you’re posting to Twitter, LinkedIn or Snapchat. And for the most part, like a good personalized video, they’re meant to humanize your presence.

In this post, we’ll look at examples and lessons from a wide variety of accounts including, National Geographic, Tom Hanks, HubSpot and The Rock. So whether you’re an aspiring thought leader, celebrity, or B2B brand, there’s something here for you. Let’s dig in.

Quality: Cater to Your Audience

You need to know your audience and cater to their needs and appetite. Quality isn’t objective. Don’t have an audience yet? Figure out who you want to target and create for that audience. It’s a bit of an ‘if you build it they will come’ scenario.

In a world of mass scheduled content, a social feed that is low in quality is usually lacking thoughtfulness. And like real-world relationships, it’s much easier to connect when you’re being thoughtful.

Consistency: Regularity Over Volume

When I talk about posting consistency, most people’s minds immediately jump to publishing volume. What’s the magic number of Tweets? How often is too often?

It all depends on how much content you can create or curate.

Let’s consider two very different examples: social media management platform, Hootsuite, and America’s sweetheart, Tom Hanks.

Hootsuite consistently tweets 20+ times per day. That’s a lot of Tweets! But, that volume is matched by the amount of content they produce. Drawing from a large list of blog contributors that include in-house writers, freelancers and partners, Hootsuite can afford to post that often and doesn’t depend on endlessly reposting the same content.

Comparatively, Tom Hanks posts infrequently with one photo gracing his Instagram every couple of weeks. He doesn’t need to be posting often and if anything scarcity makes his posts that much more special.

Tom Hanks on the set of Henry IV via @tomhanks on Instagram.

What’s important to note is that both of these accounts are consistent in their publishing. You won’t see either account disappear for weeks or suddenly post 100 times in a day. It’s not about total volume. The focus should be on regularity. A good-quality post will pique a viewer’s interest but seeing an account’s consistent history of sharing good content will earn a follow.

Access: Why Should I Follow You?

What makes you or your brand unique? Every person or brand has a unique perspective and place in the world. Use that to shape your social media storytelling.

As an online video platform for business, Vidyard has access to world-class video marketers and sales professionals. And that’s exactly what you’ll find on our Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, content authored by experts relevant to our industry.

More than 89 million people follow National Geographic on Instagram because they capture parts of the world that are completely inaccessible to the average person. Their Instagram bio describes their account perfectly, “Experience the world through the eyes of National Geographic photographers.”

American photographer Ryan McGinley sums it up well in his Commencement Speech to the Parsons School of Art and Design. His photography advice is easily adapted to social media and sharing your unique perspective:

Find something to be obsessed with, and then obsess over it. Don’t compete; find what’s uniquely yours. Take your experience of life and connect that with your knowledge of photographic history. Mix it all together, and create an artistic world that we can enter into. If you only like shooting cell phone photos, then do that. If your dad works at a construction site that looks cool, use it. If your mom breeds poodles, then put them in your photographs. Use the camera to take what you know that others don’t, what you can access that others can’t, and the people or things you connect with, to construct your own world.

Vulnerability: There’s a Human Behind That Brand

While a polished social media profile has its benefits (I’m looking at you travel bloggers), you shouldn’t feel the pressure to present a picture-perfect presence every time. In fact, showing vulnerability can establish trust and humanize accounts. In the same way recording a Vidyard GoVideo makes you more vulnerable than a cold email, social media provides opportunities to share your or your brand’s vulnerable side.

It reminds us that behind that Tweet or Instagram photo, there’s a real, live human being. This empathy and understanding can be valuable when it comes to dealing with support issues, PR crises, or customer experience issues. I’m not saying you need to write about your relationship with your parents in your next LinkedIn post but there is value in sharing your opinion or something near and dear to you.

We can find a great example of this in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Part of what makes Johnson’s social presence interesting is his access. He can take you with him on the red carpet and behind the scenes of his latest action flick. But arguably his most engaging and most popular posts are his video posts where he speaks off-the-cuff directly into his phone. Here he shares what how his failures inevitably have led to his successes:

Sometimes the goal we’ve worked our ass off for years is never achieved. Then years later we look back and realize, it’s the best thing that NEVER happened.

A post shared by therock (@therock) on Aug 9, 2017 at 8:19pm PDT

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But how do you do this as a brand? Be fearless in how you present your company. The primary objectives of Vidyard’s Instagram account is to showcase Vidyard’s culture and help with recruitment. We want to provide an honest, balanced view into all the wonderful, weird and sometimes wacky things that make up life at Vidyard. If you want a Vidyardian’s perspective, check out our company hashtag #VidyardLife.

So the next time you’re wondering, should I post this? Consider your account’s unique quality, consistency, access, and vulnerabilities. Happy social media-ing!

The post 4 Tips for Building Your Brand on Social Media appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/4-tips-social-media-brand/

Video tips, tricks, news & how-to’s

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Hey everyone, Hannah here with your weekly blog recap of the latest and greatest articles from Vidyard. I’ve also included some awesome industry news that’s all about video!

Don’t have time to read it all? No problem check out my TL;DR video above that quickly highlights what we talked about this week.

Like always share it if you like it, and leave a comment below letting me know what you loved, and what topics you can’t wait to see us cover on the blog.

Happy Reading!

Fresh from the Vidyard Blog

Camera shy? Here’s how to banish your fear of being on camera
- To help build more personal connections with her accounts, a top Account Executive at MediaValet recently introduced video as part of her selling process. She’s had great success so far including helping to close a large deal for MediaValet. Read More
Unleash your creative genius by visiting our new Video Inspiration Hub
- Ever find yourself wondering what to put in your video? Curious what else is out there? Wonder no longer! We just launched Vidyard’s Video Inspiration Hub. Read More
Use Video to Turn Your Sales Fails into #Wins
- All too often salespeople bombard their prospects with impersonal and irrelevant messages. So how do you avoid the pitfalls of sales fails and create outreach that wins? Vidyard’s Shikha Bindra sat down with Terminus’ Morgan Gillespie and J.Barrow’s Morgan Ingram to discuss. Read More

Industry News

Mobile video consumption on smartphone to grow by 16%
- Mobile video time in the UK is expected to grow by more than 16% as smartphones sales increase and platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram expand their user bases.
Kapwing is Adobe for the meme generation
- Need to resize a video for IGTV? Add subtitles for Twitter? Throw in sound effects for YouTube? Or collage it with other clips for the Instagram feed? Kapwing lets you do all that and more for free from a mobile browser or website.

The post Video tips, tricks, news & how-to’s appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/weekly-blog-recap/

The Three Ingredients of a Killer Customer Story Video

Nothing persuades like a customer story. Rather than telling prospects how great you are, let your customers gush about the time you helped them earn $125 million in pipeline. (True story.)

Showing, not telling, is key to sounding credible, and it’s what moves deals forward, says video marketing agency Hed Hi Media founder Tim McManus.

Tim himself is something of a living testimonial for testimonials–his team has filmed hundreds of videos for companies like Marketo, Amazon, and Equifax, and he has some ideas for making your testimonials even more potent.

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What’s in a video testimonial?

Testimonials are simple on the surface–a customer appears on camera to champion your product and share their story. Eighty-nine percent of marketers consider them the single most effective tactic and they’re the cornerstone of most marketing strategies.

But the most effective testimonials always involve a non-trivial amount of planning and production.

“You can have the world’s best soundbite delivered by the world’s smartest CEO and it’s useless if the mic pops or the recording is too quiet,” warns Tim. Unlike sales videos or fireside chats, production quality matters. Testimonials need to be visually appealing, concise, and even-paced.

Before you begin filming, ask yourself three questions:

Who should you interview?

The person you place in the interview seat should help you accomplish your mission. That is, they should be able to quickly convey the value of your product or service in a way that guides your prospects down the funnel.

They should be:

Credible: Select someone who your audience will identify with. Often, that means an individual whose title suggests power and influence, such as the head of a department or an executive. But it could also mean a teacher or purchasing manager, depending on who you sell to.
Believable: Select a customer that’s had some quantifiable successes so they can come prepared with statistics and empirical evidence that your product works.
Capable: The person you interview must have the internal clout to help get the testimonial approved internally. There’s nothing worse than crafting an entire video only to have it shot down by the customer’s legal or PR department.

When and where should you film your customer story?

Broadly, there are two places you can film testimonials. Each has own pros and cons:

At your events: If you film at summits and conferences, you have a captive audience and can capture up to dozens of testimonials. But there are downsides. You’ll need to pull dedicated staff away from your event to manage the filming, and your testimonials may lack depth. You’ll never get as much time as you’d like with each customer, nor interview multiple people at each firm.
At the customer’s offices: If you send your video production crew to the client’s offices, you get to tell a deeper story. You’ll talk at length with multiple stakeholders who may talk more openly because they’re feeling less pressure to perform. Some marketers report that filming onsite is a useful marketing touchpoint and helps them deepen client relationships. The downside, however, is the time investment–you’ll likely only capture one testimonial in an entire day’s worth of filming.

Is it better to film at events or offices? It depends on whether you’re more concerned about quality or quantity. But if you have the luxury, do both and test.

How can you prepare for production?

A single outstanding sound bite can sometimes take tens of hours of interviewing, footage, and edits to produce. The more you plan and prep, the greater chance you’ll give your team of asking the right questions, eliciting the right responses, and getting to that sound bite faster.

First and foremost, find a strong interviewer who can guide your interviewee to the right conclusions, but who also deeply understands your product. They’ll need to:

Put the subject at ease
Keep the conversation flowing
Ask product related questions
Tie the dialogue back to the larger narrative

Get your logistics questions resolved well ahead of time. Identify all the people and equipment you’ll need, and don’t skimp on what might seem like trivialities. Hair, makeup, and professional lighting help make prospects look good – literally – and can help ensure they don’t resist approving the video because their face looks shiny.

Deploy multiple cameras to capture multiple angles. This gives your video editors more material and gives you plenty of backup equipment in case things break. And of course, great talent is a must – an experienced producer, director, and post-production team can help you create great videos faster.

Once you have the footage, don’t rush the post-production: “Boil it down, cut it, boil it down, and cut it,” says Tim. Take your time and “distill the video to its most essential parts.” That means not skipping the sound bite edit, where the video editor clarifies the timeline, or the creative edit, where the editor adds B-roll, product shots, and overlay graphics to make the whole thing flow.

Showing off your customers

Video testimonials are the cornerstone of most marketing strategies. With extra know-how and planning, you can make yours unusually effective.

Simply slow down to ask yourself the right questions before you begin filming: Who should we film? Where should it be? And, what do we need?

Answer those, and you’re well on your way to persuasive snapshots of your product’s greatest success: your happy, gushing customers.

The post The Three Ingredients of a Killer Customer Story Video appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/killer-customer-story-video/

How Industry Leaders Are Beating Video Benchmarks

Each year we do an analysis of all the data in our system, over 600 different companies, to create video benchmarks that help us understand what they’re doing with B2B video. We look at how many videos they are publishing on a monthly basis, what sort of trends we are seeing in different industries, how long the videos they publish are, how long people are actually watching.

Through all of this data, we find some interesting tidbits of knowledge and we share them with you, the rest of the world, in our Video Benchmark Report. To help you understand what different people are doing with video, and to understand what benchmarks you can be looking at as you plan out your own video strategies.

We recently hosted an interactive, entertaining, and educational discussion focused entirely on the findings of our 2018 Video in Business Benchmark Report. We were lucky enough to be joined by Rene Lego, Director of Video at SolarWinds and Daniel Sendecki, the Director of Brand & Creative at Uberflip.

Together with Tyler Lessard, VP of Marketing at Vidyard the discussion covered all the benchmarks you need to know about, and how to put key insights from the data into practice within your organization to drive your marketing, sales, and overall video strategy forward in the years to come.

Check it out in the video below;

Don’t have time to watch the full discussion? No worries here are a few of our favorite moments:

Are you seeing things accelerate in terms of how much video you’re using, and if so, where’s this growth coming from, what types of B2B video are you putting out there?

“We’re seeing a lot of increased production on our end across a wide spectrum of things. The real driver is that we’ve started to really shift our focus to more of an ABM approach. Which has the interesting causal effect of us creating more videos and more personalized videos that are more targeted to the accounts that we identify.” – Daniel Sendecki, the Director of Brand & Creative at Uberflip

“At SolarWinds, I know there’s a big demand for video, so it just never stops. At any given time we have probably 50 to 60 video requests in our queue. The biggest uptick for us has come in social, and customizing video for social. So we will make a video specific to Facebook, and then we’ll make a separate video specific to Instagram or we’ll make a video only for Instagram, and then we’ll make a video and only release it on LinkedIn, and make something specific for Twitter, so that’s definitely a trend that’s different for us than had been in previous years.” – Rene Lego, Director of Video at SolarWinds

What’s the best approach for B2B video creation? Outsourcing vs internal, and what’s the trade-off that companies tend to look at there?

“Well, for us it’s important to remain agile, so what we focused on is developing relationships with a couple of key agencies that can help us move the dial when it comes to larger production needs. But we’re also improving our in-house capabilities as well so that we can be self-service. So ensuring that we have the right hardware and software to be able to empower the rest of the company to join us in video creation!” – Daniel Sendecki, the Director of Brand & Creative at Uberflip

“Depending on whether it’s a featurette or a product release we create it. It really works from an in-house standpoint. Whenever we have gone out externally it’s become a little dicey, we’ve had to micromanage that external production house, or freelance team because they didn’t understand our product, or us. So for us in-house works, for others, a mixture.” – Rene Lego, Director of Video at SolarWinds

Where is the B2B video demand coming from and how are you using video across your different programs?

“I would say email, e-learning, specific QA nurture program, whether that nurture program is a combo of email and landing page, or sales and support those would be the biggest. And then second would be any new landing pages that are driving our SEO specifically.” – Rene Lego, Director of Video at SolarWinds

So it’s clear that the debate about whether or not to use video is dead–90% of marketers already do. Instead, companies are asking themselves, “How can we use it better?”

Discover how businesses on the cutting edge are leveraging video in the 2018 Video in Business Benchmark Report and learn how you can take your video strategy to the next level.

Have additional questions of your own? Sound off in the comments below.

The post How Industry Leaders Are Beating Video Benchmarks appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/industry-leaders-b2b-video-benchmarks/

Use Video to Turn Your Sales Fails into #Wins

“The hardest part of the sales process is getting to engagement,” says Trish Bertuzzi. All too often salespeople make the problem worse by bombarding their prospects with impersonal and irrelevant messages. So how do you avoid the pitfalls of sales fails and create outreach that wins? Vidyard’s Shikha Bindra sat down with Terminus’ Morgan Gillespie and J.Barrow’s Morgan Ingram to discuss.

Use video to turn outbound fails into #wins

Think about how many emails you get on a daily basis. How many of them do you actually read?

Your prospects are in the same boat—a boat tossed in the waves of a sea of information that is, for the most part, useless to them. Are there a few pearls in there? Probably. But it’s nearly impossible to pick them out of a seemingly endless ocean of banality.

Imagine instead you got an email with a subject line saying someone had recorded a video just for you. I don’t know about you, but I would be intrigued!

Both Morgans have found that using video has allowed them to stand out in their prospects’ inboxes. People are much more inclined to watch a video than read yet another prospecting email—and since they’ve crafted unique messages to each person’s role and pain points, prospects are that much more likely to engage with what they have to say. By the time they make that first phone call, the conversation is already warm.

Download GoVideo Free Today!

Why not give video selling a try?

Download GoVideo Free Today!

Tips & Best Practices

This all sounds very good in theory—but how do you actually go about creating a video prospecting message?

“A video is a virtual voicemail—don’t overcomplicate the process,” says Morgan Ingram. He and Morgan Gillespie recommend keeping prospecting videos short and to the point, or as Morgan G. likes to say, “be brief, be brilliant, and be gone!”

One structure they’ve found useful for their own videos is as follows:

Hook (15 seconds)
- - Get your prospect’s attention—you can talk about their role and the challenges they might be facing or use something you’ve found on their LinkedIn or social media profiles to make a personal connection (ie. their alma mater, a favorite hobby, etc.).
Value prop/pitch (30 seconds)
- - Give a brief, personalized pitch of your product/solution, making sure to touch on how your solution will solve a challenge facing their industry or create a new opportunity for their company. Keep it brief and leave them curious to find out more.
Call to Action (CTA) (15 seconds)
- Direct your prospect to an ideal next step—that could be reading a blog post, booking a meeting, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, you’ve managed to break through the noise and capture their attention, so make you don’t let this opportunity go to waste!

Most importantly, don’t forget to smile! If you seem friendly and engaged, your prospects are all that more likely to be interested in what you have to say.

Getting started

Still not sure how to start? “Make a video,” says Morgan Ingram. “It’s the same advice I give for: ‘how do I get better at making cold calls?’ ‘Make cold calls.’”

He and Morgan Gillespie recommend taking the value prop you’re already getting wins from in your email or cold call outreach and repurposing it in your video. From there, it’s just growing your confidence on camera and practicing the structure we discussed above.

Already using video to get #saleswins? Looking forward to it? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Use Video to Turn Your Sales Fails into #Wins appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/sales-fails-wins/

Unleash your creative genius by visiting our new Video Inspiration Hub

Brands today are creating some truly awe-inspiring video content. It’s a full-fledged film renaissance and at Vidyard, we get to watch the Michaelangelos of sales and marketing paint their motion picture masterpieces with selfies, explainers, and screen captures.

But what about your team? Ever find yourself wondering what to put in your video, or curious what else is out there? Well, wonder no longer. We just launched a new site where you can fill up on all the inspiration you need, and then some: The Vidyard Video Inspiration Hub.

Here are some examples of the videos you’d find in the Video Inspiration Hub:

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Get inspired with the Video Inspiration Hub

The Vidyard Video Inspiration Hub is a place to go to get inspired and to inspire others. It’s a nexus for video innovation–a digital water cooler where the B2B world can gather to celebrate and ogle the newest video masterpieces.

Visit the hub and get inspirations for your next videos:

Promoting events
Booking new meetings
Running themed campaigns
Sending product updates
Building culture
And many many more!

Explore the outer reaches of what you thought was possible with video and get inspired to go out and create them yourself.

Want to have your video featured?

Have an outstanding video? Don’t keep it all to yourself–let the world watch. Share it with community@vidyard.com. Just include a short word description with some context and we’ll do the rest.

If you’re selected and featured, we’ll promote your video to the Vidyard community and the world, and help you earn thousands of extra eyeballs on your amazing work.

Here are the types of videos that are trending on the hub right now: