View transcript
And it's those channels that are visual that are going to win. And video is definitely one of those. When it comes to images, I mean, we process images 60,000 times faster than we do text, and it's the same for video. Making sure it's visual is really important. The other thing is that video is going to become an important stage of the buyer cycle. Every good video starts with a good script. And if you can take those scripts, shorten them down, condense them, turn them into a piece of video, I think that's the first step in leveraging what you have instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. And I don't think there's any more excuse around not tying pipeline or revenue or some sort of customer lifetime value metric to your content. So whatever marketing automation platform you're using, they all have a very similar capability to do so. We were talking earlier about some of the journeys which are taking place inside of businesses in terms of their understanding of where video is going. And we talked about the journey where people understand they even need a video hosting solution. Habitually, people put their content on YouTube and Vimeo. I'm definitely not saying these solutions are wrong. I'm saying they are solutions for a time and a place. And when people are on your site, you want to be measuring and engaging with them on your terms, not on the terms of the third party which isn't in your interest. So what I think is happening now, 2018 and video, a blended strategy. It's really important the team that are in charge of social have the right mix of content marketers, those who are focused on acquisition and those who are focused on monetization. So that content team is hugely responsible for coming up with educational videos or creative videos and videos that are true to the brand as well. So having that right mix, that someone who can create the video and then someone who can promote it across the right channel is really important. Using external platforms like Vimeo or YouTube or all these kind of things to host on your site is a problem. If you dig into your analytics and you open up your analytics and your YouTube channel analytics is showing that you're getting something from your .com, it means that all that traffic has been driven off your hard work acquisition to your YouTube channel. And then the next thing that happens is they're showing something by a competitor and they, this bit. So it's very important to have an owned player. Probably one of the biggest mistakes is people aren't tracking video in appropriate ways. And I mean, if you're not tracking, you can't measure. And if you're not measuring, you can't improve. So when you're measuring video, one of the key problems is the wrong metrics. So it's about identifying where in the sales funnel you are and then choosing metrics that go with that. So have you got an awareness problem at the top of the funnel? Do you need people to engage more in the middle or do you need them just to convert and buy stuff? So at the beginning, people should be talking about metrics like view rates and brand awareness uplifts and those kinds of things. And in the middle, it's like, how long are people watching? What, how many multiple videos are they watching? And at the bottom, which is like sales, it's like, how much are you selling? So it's like, I think the mistake is to use views as a general metric when it's completely irrelevant. Did they re-watch it? Did they share it? The sort of metrics which actually show real engagement. I think that's what's really important for marketers employing video in 2018. I have two dashboards. I have one from my team, which is a lot of engagement metrics and the Google Analytics time on site stuff. And I see who's there, who's engaging, if we're attracting the right audience. And I have a separate dashboard for the execs of the C-Suites that actually show conversions, revenue-driven, customer lifetime value. And then the video falls somewhere between that, between completion rates, we look at views, of course. View through rate is not something we really pay attention to because we don't have ads yet. Well, probably the most important is marketing's impact on revenue. That's probably number one for us. Other ones are just measuring pipeline progression. So from the MQL stage through to the sales ready account stage, and then how that translates to conversions too. If you have a video and you have a link and they watch the video, click on the link, track that, did they convert? Do you retarget to them if they didn't convert? Do you put them into a nurture trial? What do you do? So I think it's all about mapping that journey. But video is certainly something you can't avoid any longer. So many people are uncomfortable about being on video. And then the more you do the video, the more you just start to get excited about it. It's just like blogging for the first time. I was scared to death in my first blog, and it's terrible, it's a terrible blog. But once you put yourself out there, get a little traction, get a little feedback. Video in 2018 is definitely gonna still be around. I think it's likely to get very personalized. I think it's likely to get very individual. I think it's gonna get more targeted. I think mass comms, like the big hero stuff, is likely to suffer from budget cuts, and it's gonna get more sort of delineated into smaller chunks. And also brands are starting to do it themselves more. It's interesting because I think the conversation around video to a lot of maybe B2C folks, a little bit tired, like maybe they haven't figured out. But I think the conversation around video for B2B marketing is specifically on LinkedIn. What does that look like? What does success look like? I don't know what the answer to that is quite yet. We have some beta customers who are doing quite well. Some members who are leveraging video quite well. So it's gonna be interesting to see what video holds for our members, especially in the B2B space for 2018.
