Ari Plaut, Product Marketing Manager at HubSpot

My name is Ari, I am a Product Marketing Manager at HubSpot. HubSpot is a software company based in Boston and our mission is to help small and medium sized businesses around the world to grow better. And what we mean by grow better is that there's always been this narrative that you need to grow a company at all costs, even if it means leaving behind the customer experience. And we simply don't believe that. So we want to create tools that help companies grow with their customers, that help companies create better experiences for their customers. And we have a free CRM that helps to support that. And we also have marketing, sales, and service software that stack on top of the CRM. All integrated into one awesome solution. And one other thing that we're really excited about, especially this year, is the growing platform ecosystem that we are building out. We integrate with over 400 other best-of-breed software companies. HubSpot is rooted in the concept of inbound. And inbound, the idea of inbound is that you want to match the way that you as a company, the way that we as a company sell and market with the way that our customers and our buyers shop and buy. And unquestionably, we've seen that shift. Towards video in the last few years. I saw a stat, I think maybe it was last year, that people, consumers these days, watch six hours of video every day. Like, that's maybe a little bit sad, but kind of crazy. And as marketers and salespeople, we would be insane not to take advantage of that as a medium. And I think the other piece of it is that it's not just that people are watching video. It's that consumers these days, especially the newer generations, there's so many different brands out there. So many companies competing in the same spaces that what people crave, what consumers crave is personality and authenticity. And video is the best way to make those personal connections. It's as close as you can come to a one-on-one conversation is to have a video where you're just looking at the camera and it's just the camera that's between you and your customer. So think for HubSpot for product marketing. That's why it's important. People are watching video and it's the best way to be personal and people crave personality these days. So video. Is is ingrained in everything we do at HubSpot. So from internal communications, Kip, my CMO sends out a weekly video to the whole team. We love Slack, but Slack just doesn't do justice. It's less, less efficient and less personal than video. So a lot of internal marketing gets done via video product launches. Just in the last few months, we started doing a product spotlight where we highlight the features that we've launched in the previous month for our customers. We do HubSpot. Accounts. We do HubSpot. It's free education for our customers and for the market and our prospects as a whole. And that could be anything from a two minute long, you know, lesson of a video to an hour and a half long certification. We have, I think 150,000 people have been certified through HubSpot Academy. What else? Inbound. We have a big inbound event every September. Inbound has really nicely produced videos that go alongside the keynotes there. The list goes on and on. We use video everywhere and everything we do and even more every day. So on the product marketing team, we're in charge of launching new products to the market and we use video in a number of different ways. And I think it's kind of changed through the years. It used to be that video lived in the hands of our video team and our creatives. And so the videos that we would produce would be tend to be longer form, more kind of storyboarded out, less product specific, and they would take longer to execute. So there would be a lot of planning involved. And over the years, we've done a lot more experimentation. We've done a lot more experimentation with shorter form, less formal, explainer videos, product demo videos. And we've found that those have really clicked well with our customers. They just want something that's to the point. They don't need it to be super polished necessarily. It's okay if the lighting isn't perfect. And if somebody like, you know, my face is in the corner dictating it along the way. So I think we've tried a number of things, but the thing that we're experimenting with especially now is the shorter form, informal, quick cut product videos. There's a couple of keys when I think about making a really great product video. A lot of them are just are almost common sense. It's like you want to make it professional, but not so professional that it feels stuffy. You want to make it just long enough that it gets your point across, but not so long that you start to bore people. And I think the best product videos tell really good stories. So. We talk all the time in these spaces about Simon Sinek, the start with why concept. People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. And to me, maybe that's a bit of an overused concept, but the idea comes through in videos. People don't just want to see here's this widget that we just released. Here's where you drag and drop and you point and click. They want to know what problem it solves. They want to know what pain it'll impact in their lives. They want to know how it'll get them promoted. Like you have to really get at the emotion behind it. Otherwise it's not going to be effective. Video data, and I think any data when it comes to marketing is, I think the most important thing. Like without video data, you don't know what to do next. You have a video, maybe you saw it got some views, but you don't know like how that impacts your actual marketing. You don't know how that impacts your strategy moving forward. So the idea with data is that we want to do a thing and then we want to figure out if that thing worked or not. So what we should do next time. So an example might be in video. We might have a short form video. And then a longer kind of story form video. And we might look at the data from video, not just the view data. I think that's a misconception and that's something we need to leave behind. But which are people watching more of? You can see where people tend to stop. You can see how many times they watch the video. And then you can actually, you don't just see that to optimize your video strategy. You can actually use that to optimize everything else you do in your business. So you could use the fact that somebody watched 80% of your product video to score them for your sales team. And maybe the sales team would prioritize folks who watched more of a product video versus more of a top of funnel, you know, social video, something like that. Or you could use it at HubSpot. We're often using videos in emails so you can embed a video or at the very least a gif into an email. And in order to figure out if that works, maybe you're measuring your open rates. I guess they're already in the email. So you're measuring your click through rates to see did the email with video work better than the email without video? And how is that actually driving conversions? So I think there's a lot of things that you could do with video data, especially with the technology that's out there today. But the important thing is that you're always measuring. Attribution, I think, is important for two reasons. One is that attribution is how people get credit for what they do, especially in the marketing world. I'm a marketer. You know, we build a blog post, we make a marketing video. We want to be able to say that that thing that we did drove a marketing qualified lead or even better, drove some kind of a closing. And so the first thing is credit. And then I think the second thing is, like I was saying before, optimization of strategy. So if you know that, for example, right before somebody becomes an MQL, the thing that they tend to do most is to watch this video that's about a certain part of the product. From traffic into leads, video is so much more interactive these days than it used to be. And so one of the examples is that you can actually embed lead gen forms directly in a video anywhere you want. Yeah. So at any point in the video, it could pop up with a quick first name, last name, email collector that brings in the information. And with integrations with a marketing automation tool or a CRM like HubSpot, you can then action that in any way that you want. So you pass that lead over to a HubSpot. You can score leads, you could automate, and you can adapt your website based on a certain action that was taken. So maybe somebody watched a certain video and then you could show them a different thing on your website the next time they're through because they watched that video. That's powerful stuff. And then lastly, visitor to lead. You can put a form into a video. But I think after that, throughout the funnel, there's a number of things that you could do. Like at HubSpot, we use video a lot, very personal video that the sales team uses. They make it on their own time with their own personal setups. They send out videos with their prospecting emails. And those convert better. So that kind of takes somebody from a qualified lead and converts them towards closing as a deal. We put videos into our nurturing emails. They get to that point. That gets folks from a lead to a qualified lead. So at every point in the funnel or at HubSpot, we're talking a lot about the flywheel these days. Video can help to move people through that journey with your company. Just to try it out, I think we're moving towards a world where video isn't – we'll always have video experts. We'll always have specialized equipment and really amazing, powerful things we can do with technical talent and all that kind of thing. But for somebody like me, I'm a marketer. I know a little bit about video but not a ton necessarily about video. But there are so many tools out there these days that make it easy to get started with video. And I think that our customers more and more are learning not just to expect but to love the more personal, less formal videos. Video is scary. Getting in front of a camera, putting yourself out there is a really scary thing. So the advice is just brave it. Try it. It's okay if it's not perfect. It's okay if you hiccup or if your phone goes off or whatever it is because people appreciate the personality. They appreciate the authenticity.