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I had the honor to present at the 2016 Salesforce Connections conference in Atlanta.
Attending Connections feels a bit like coming home for me, as the first Connections event was hosted by ExactTarget (the first company to acquire Pardot) and soon thereafter we got acquired by Salesforce. This year, the Connections event was top notch. I had a blast connecting with former colleagues, B2B trailblazers, and I made a few new connections... hence the name of the event!
For my session, I presented "5 Disruptive Marketing Trends and How We Use Video to Fuel Them All" as my company, Terminus, is a customer of Vidyard. There's a ton of information to support why integrating video is an essential part of an effective content marketing strategy, and a few key findings from Vidyard's research include:
72% of B2B buyers watch videos throughout their path to purchase
Videos doubled click-through rates
Videos increased page conversions by 80%
Videos have a 41% higher click-through rate for search
Surprisingly, less than 10% of the marketers are using videos as an integrated part of their content marketing programs. The question is why?
I would venture to say that it’s the fear of the red light that starts pointing at you when you face the camera or feeling like the brand is vulnerable when you put it out there in a video. The truth is, the only thing more real than a video is a face-to-face conversation, so unless everyone you want to talk, market, and sell to lives in a 10-mile radius, you better get going on videos.
If you’ve read my work before here on the Salesforce blog, you know I'm all about challenging the status quo of B2B marketing, and that's why I'm such a huge champion of account-based marketing. As we look to elevate our marketing techniques and tactics to an innovative level, we must understand that our buyers today need every piece of content we send them to actually matter. B2B marketers can't just keep blasting emails at thousands of people like we used to do with traditional lead generation. We have to become "smarketers" marketers who are aligned with sales on the type of message, the context, and the right channel to deliver to a contact to further them down the sales pipeline.
One of my favorite ways to do this is using video. Here's why:
As B2B marketers, we can use video as a means of keeping the momentum going with our content. Videos are one of the most creative ways to do content marketing; it boosts engagement, and we see higher conversion rates and more velocity in stage-based progression.
Here are the 5 ways I've used video to enhance my content and personalization efforts for account-based marketing.
One big misconception is that videos have to be perfect, but like the saying goes: perfect is the enemy of good. When I first realized how to flip the funnel with account-based marketing, I was so excited about it I wanted to get this on video:
Little did I know where we would take #FlipMyFunnel from here! From this one video, we went on to do thousands of more videos. Seriously. What we started to realize is that the people we were sending these videos to, they didn't mind that we shot them on a cell phone. The quality was far from perfect, but we were talking directly to them about something they cared about.
For some reason, people seem to like my "Sangram Here" greeting. My friend and colleague, Katharine Mobley even wrote about "Sangram Here" for the Huffington Post. I don't mind recording "Hi (first_name), Sangram here" over and over again because I want my audience, that one person I'm sending the video, to know I made this video just for him or her. It's all about the personal touch. Here's the video I made for Jill Rowley inviting her to present at our first-ever #FlipMyFunnel conference in Atlanta last year.
And it worked! Jill was able to come and present, along with about 95% of the other B2B marketing and sales leaders who we sent these too. The beauty of using scrappy and short videos is that I can record a bunch of them in the morning at our office, then send them out by the end of the day. Time is the only real expense for making these personalized videos.
Vidyard helps us to personalize videos at scale. By scale, I mean personalized videos for thousands of people. For our #FlipMyFunnel events, we send personalized videos targeted at contacts in key accounts and companies that we know we want to attend our conferences.
Vidyard helps us personalize a video to every contact in our Salesforce database. We can segment out who we want to target, and personalize a video for each person in our target account. Depending on the event, location, role, and any other criteria, we strive to make sure our videos are communicating at a 1-to-1 level. This brings me to my next point.
Our video testimonials from our customers are awesome. You can check more of them out here on our blog. This one from Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared, talks about how the importance of being able to do account-based marketing at scale.
For me, I'd take watching a customer video testimonial over reading a .pdf of a case study any day. Wouldn't you? There's just something so much more impactful to see and hear the customer's own voice. We filmed a bunch of these at our #FlipMyFunnel San Francisco conference, which brings me to my last point about getting disruptive with your videos:
I'm a sucker for a good montage. There's something about those short cutaways and slick edits plus a good "pump up" track, that just gets me excited. Our #FlipMyFunnel San Francisco montage by Consume Media is one of my favorite videos we've done in 2016.
In the five techniques, I laid out above, you can see how it isn't that hard to get going on video marketing. The most important thing is to truly care about the content and message for your intended audience. Videos are by far the most important marketing technique which B2B marketers are especially missing out on. Since we all like to write so much, maybe try a week of no writing? Instead, create one scrappy video to see how far it goes. I'll bet you won't be disappointed. The best thing is that once you have the video, you can transcribe it and still write that blog. Are you up for that challenge?
The best thing is that once you have the video, you can transcribe it and still write that blog. I'd love to know your thoughts on what disruptive hacks you're using at your own company, especially when it comes to video. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section or Tweet to me @sangramvajre.
