Doing Video in Companies: What You Can Learn from the Best

VideoDays, TwentyThree Video, WebinarDays, TwentyThree Hello everyone and welcome back to VideoDays, TwentyTwentyThree. Some of you might be tuning in from the previous session where we had a really informative and dynamic discussion about how video can help humanize your digital transformation. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then please catch it on demand. For those of you that are just tuning in for this session, hi and welcome so much to VideoDays, TwentyTwentyThree. This is our annual two-day gathering of some of the world's leading video marketers, video producers and video practitioners. The purpose of VideoDays is actually quite simple. We want to help companies of all sizes up their video game. So VideoDays is brought to you by TwentyThree. TwentyThree is the software that video marketers use when they want to become professional with webinars, when they want to power videos on their website, and when they want to enable their organization to do video and make video and share video just as easily as they would with any text-based content. For those who don't know or have just joined in, hello, my name is Amelia Holmson. In my day-to-day, I work here at TwentyThree as part of the marketing team. Today, I will be your host for this two-day event. We are going to take you through some really great and exciting video content both live and that you can access on demand. If you have to run or you can't catch the next session of today or tomorrow, please find us on demand. I also want to encourage you guys so much to engage with the speakers. We have a question feature. So if you have a specific question to the speaker, please feel free to write it in the question features. We will share it on screen in the Q&A part of this session. And it's a golden opportunity to get your specific question answered by the speaker. If you want to engage but you don't have just the right question in mind, you can also use our reactions features and throw in some thumbs up or some hearts, some clap emojis, something that will engage with the speakers and let them know that you like their content. And I think without further ado, we are ready to jump into the next session. In this session, we are going to learn from Simon Croft from Big Button. Big Button is a UK agency with its top 50 strategic video agencies. So it's actually one of the best ranked in the world. They are specialized in producing video for businesses and their work is very thoughtful, it's creative and it's award-winning. Most importantly, they focus on delivering a defined and measurable results within what they do because video becomes a wasted opportunity if you don't fully capitalize on the opportunities that you're creating for yourself. We are lucky enough to get insights from their high-level strategic perspectives as well as some examples of how their clients have applied these perspectives to their own business. So without further ado, Simon Croft, I would like to introduce Simon Croft. He is their video marketing strategist and he helps clients all around the world. And today, he is tuning in live from New York, the Big Apple. How are you today, Simon? I'm fine, thanks, Amin, yeah. Thank you for the introduction. Of course. We're super excited to have you here. We're so glad that you guys could take the opportunity to join us live. We're really excited about the presentation you have for us here today. So I think without further ado, I'm just going to let you kick it off. And when we're wrapping up your presentation, I'll hop back on and we will run a Q&A session from the audience. Great, sounds perfect. I'll crack on. And I'm in Boston at the moment. I fly to New York as soon as I finish this session. So beautiful Boston. If you haven't visited, I highly recommend it. It's lovely. So thank you so much, everyone, for joining me today. Sorry that I haven't got a fancy set up like Amelia. I am, as you can see, in quite a dull hotel room. This is exactly what we tell our clients not to do when they're shooting user-generated content. But I'm afraid it's the best I can do. But hopefully you can all see my presentation and hear me clearly. That's the most important thing. Amelia has already done a great introduction. But just one really quick slide as to who Big Button are. So you've got a little bit of context. We are a strategic video agency. So as most of you all sure know, what we do isn't just about making pretty pictures anymore. We need to be creating content that's effective. And that's what we help our clients do. We do that all over the world. So we have an office here in Boston and an office in the UK. But we work globally. And this year alone, I've been to Australia and California and pretty much everywhere in between. And the reason that we're doing that, I think, is because clients now really are demanding better content and more success from their content. And so if they find an agency that's able to deliver that, then they're willing to use that agency worldwide. And we'll talk a little bit about the benefits that that kind of continuity can bring around the world. So that's enough about us. If you want to find out more about us, you can go and visit our website. That's not what I'm here to talk about today. So we're going to be talking a little bit about some of our clients and what they're doing to create effective content. Some of the things they're achieving here, some are maybe less obvious than others. Obviously, a few years ago, all people were after, when it came to effectiveness, was views. And as now most of us are starting to catch on, that views can be quite an empty metric, maybe even a vanity metric. We all want those million views, right? But the more enlightened clients realise that effective video is about more than just views. And it can be anything from dwell time, say how much time people are spending on your website and using video to help increase that, to clicks through to the website, or even measuring the sales or influence revenue that's been generated through the video content that we're making with our clients. And we all know about the effectiveness. There's the Holy Grail, right? And we see the statistics online that tell us how effective video can be, but many of us are still trying to get to that. And we're not necessarily seeing those results that we see published in all these reports from the video content that we're making. And it can be a bit of a trap, right? So we all think, you know, we see the stats telling us how effective video can be. We all assume we can do that. It's not the case. It takes some hard work. We're going to talk a little bit about the processes that we go through to achieve that. To start off, one quick example. 24 Asset Management is one of our clients, not to be confused with 23. And we created some animated content for them. We've been working with them for many years on a number of different types of film. But when there was the Credit Suisse crash, probably less than a year ago now, everyone started wondering what AT1s were, and people were Googling it and trying to find it. And the Financial Times actually used that video as an example of best practice, a great example of what an AT1 is, which was great for a client. Obviously, straight away, you've got lots of traffic coming to the website, which is awesome. The reason that they found it, though, I would suggest, is that if you Google what is an AT1, which I'm sure most of us would have to do, it's the first organic result when you Google it. And that's because that video is embedded on a web page. And if you use a platform like 23 to embed video on your website, then it's going to significantly increase the rankings of that page. And you can see here it is the first result. So that's just one quick example of maybe the less obvious ways that video can create success for your business. It's not necessarily about people watching those films. It's about using that tool to help draw traffic to your own channels where we can do lots more with our audience and our customers. So how do our clients do this? Well, we have this VSP, we call it, which is basically the process that we encourage all of our clients to go through to create effective video content. This is very much best practice, and it can't be achieved on every project. I'm sure anyone out there that's created video or creates video for their clients will have those occasions where someone will come to them and ask them to create a film and they need it in a couple of weeks, and you just have to crack on and make it. And sometimes we have to do that. But it's not necessarily the best way to create effective video. The most effective films that we've created where we've achieved millions of views and increased dwell time on websites or increased spend for our clients have been when we've spent a lot of time the whole way through the process, all the way from that planning to come up with a great idea, which we'll talk about shortly, to great production, and then importantly, distribution and measurement, which is something that often gets forgotten. And again, 23 is a great platform for allowing you to look at those analytics and dive deep into those analytics to understand what it is that's working for your audience and what it is that isn't so you can learn from those mistakes. So obviously, I haven't got much time today. I used to run the Consulency Video Strategy course in London, and that was a full-day course on this. And we haven't got a full day. I don't think 23 would be very happy if I spent all day on here. So we've only got a few minutes, so I'm going to really just rattle through some of this quite quickly. But obviously, if you've got any questions, as Emilia said, feel free to ask, or you can contact me afterwards, and I'm happy to answer questions that people have. So the most important part of a successful production, and I'm going to talk shortly, so Big Button worked with clients, some big clients. So we've worked this year already. Postman is one of our big clients. We've worked with WhatsApp or Meta and PayPal, and I can show you a couple of those examples shortly. And the reason that they're achieving success with the content is because they're following this process. We have a great client at Postman, and they allow us to spend the time to think about and develop this content. But it all starts with the objective. The objective will inform what the film looks like, but it will also inform everything else, like how much time you take to make it, where you're going to place that content and distribute that content, and how you're going to measure it. It all comes back to those objectives, not key messages, and that's the important thing. You don't want to fill a film with hundreds of key messages because no one will watch. You have to concentrate on that objective, and what key messages do you need to include to ensure that the video achieves that objective? Just a quick question there about slides. I'm sure we can share the slides. I'll share those at 23, and hopefully those will get out to everyone. So, yes, prioritise those key messages. We've all been asked to make a film with a list of key messages. It's that long, right? And it ends up with a film that's far too long that is targeted at everyone and no one watches it. Instead, concentrate these messages down to specific audiences and break that content up. So, those clients I've talked about, the work that we're doing where we're filming with PayPal in California, we're breaking this content up so that we all have different films for different audiences because everyone wants to see something different in the films they're watching. For example, with our tech clients, we may produce a film that's more targeted to the business audience, the people that are paying for the technology, and we may produce an edit that's targeted more towards developers or the people that are using that technology because they have very different motivators and we have to be aware of that. That all starts with those objectives. So, how do you understand what those objectives might be? Well, the research is really important. And actually, whether it's chicken and egg, really, do we do the research first and then use that to inform our objectives or do we have an objective and then do the research to find out how we're going to approach things? It's a little bit of both and it really depends on the project. And I would suggest that the researcher you do should inform all the content you make moving forward anyway. But the important thing to remember here is that we're producing content for our audience and not for us, not for our key stakeholders within the organisation. We need to be creating content for the audience. And the only way we can understand what they want to watch is by doing some research, not assuming we know that audience because we've worked with them for many years because that audience is probably constantly evolving. So, that can range from a desk exercise, looking at analytics, understanding what time of day, as you can see from this graph, people watch content, what day of the week they watch content, and using that to understand the context in which they're watching, are they going to be on a train, are they going to be in the office, are they going to be at home, all those things, to really finding out whether the messages that we're trying to communicate resonate with our audience, whether they're interested or not. And if they're not, then maybe we use a slightly different approach so that people do find it interesting and want to watch it and share it and discuss it. Question there about fully... I know we're going to cover some questions at the end, but I just find that one interesting about fully AI-generated content. How far off? That's a really interesting lot. I can do a whole session on that, obviously. I think it's very close, but I think there's always going to be some kind of, at least in the near future, some human elements. And this research is a good reference to that. AI can look at data and interpret data, but at the moment, AI still lacks some of those nuances that we're able to add as humans to understanding and interpreting that data. And we'll talk about that in a second, actually, when we start looking at duration, how long a film should be, because if you look at data alone, it doesn't necessarily give you all the answers. We're all being told to make sure it's a content at the moment. And that, I would suggest, is not necessarily always the way to go. And actually, long-form content can work much better for many of us. And we'll talk about that shortly in a second. Okay, so we are sort of having to fly through here. Hopefully, there's enough there to make it interesting for you, though. The creativity side of things, obviously... I'm getting some thumbs up from some people. That's good. The creativity, obviously, is the thing that everyone gets excited about when we're working with these clients, especially when we can get distracted when we work with big brands all over the world. Pension Bee is another one of our clients who are a big B2C organisation in the UK, one of the biggest pension providers. And there are some very exciting ideas that we all have when we're coming up with ideas for films. And it can be very easy to get distracted by that. And again, looking at the audience, understanding the audience and what it is they want to see is really what should be driving that creativity. I would say that it's easier... So we work a lot in financial services. It can be easier to create content that stands out there, because obviously people have certain expectations when it comes to financial services. However, there are lots of restrictions when you're working in financial services, so it makes it harder. So I hate the term to think outside the box, but we really do need to do that. It's ironic because I'm in a box at the moment, right? But you have to think outside the box and challenge what you're making and the people that are producing the content for you. Make sure that they have some space to go out and come up with new ideas and do things a little bit differently. That can take more time and more money, but I would suggest that it's better to create fewer films that are more effective, because you've spent more time on them and more money on them than just sending out lots of bad content that nobody wants to watch. Sometimes we kind of put our heads in the sand and we don't measure content because... And we know from the research we've done, about 20% of people don't measure anything when it comes to video. And I would suspect they do that because they know that if they do measure it, the results aren't going to be great. And that's no reason to do it, really. You need to make sure you're measuring these things so that you can improve. That's the only way we're going to do it. So remember, get people into a room. We are all creative. Maybe people aren't used to being in creative sessions because they tend to come up with ideas that are much more different to what you would usually create. And then you can use that and interpret it in your own way and make sure when you have those people in the room, you don't spend the whole time telling them the reasons that we can't make what they're suggesting because we haven't got the money or we haven't got the time. It just brings the whole room down. So try to avoid that if you can. OK, so one of the questions I get asked the most, and this certainly applies to the content we've been making with Postman over in the US, is how long should my film be? And it's a difficult question to answer. And there is no easy, simple answer. I guess the closest I can get to that is that we found from the data that we've got one and a half minutes, and it has been that for a long time, it still seems to be the magic number. But as I've said, we're getting pushed all the time, especially when we're working with social agencies to create shorter films that are 15 seconds or five seconds. And that's because you get much higher completion rates then. Of course you do. And the ultimate short form content is a still, right? Because it's one frame of a video and you'll get 100% completion rate every time, but it doesn't make it an effective video. If you look at the data on these graphs, hopefully you can see this, you will see that almost half of all the videos that are being made, and this is data from SEMrush, is still a minute or less. But the other graph demonstrates that if you create longer form content, you significantly increase the amount of times people spend watching your content, which means longer dwell times on your website, which means better rankings and also better familiarisation with your brand. And I would say that's much more important than just ticking a box that you've got great completion rates on your films. And even completion rates and view-through rates and in the engagement levels that you've got, the retention levels you've got with these films, they're all measured different on different channels. LinkedIn, for example, Impressional LinkedIn, counts if someone sees your content for 300 milliseconds. 300 milliseconds. So should you be paying that much attention to that data? Maybe at the top of the funnel. That's right at the top of the funnel where maybe shorter films are better. And as we move down that funnel, we're probably going to be looking at longer form content where we really need to help people make a right decision. They may be looking to invest millions of pounds with you or spend lots of money on your products or service. That's where they're willing to spend a bit more time watching your content. At the top of the funnel, maybe it's shorter. But just remember that graph. You know, when... And you can see from that graph, the bottom line there represents a 20-minute long film. At the end of the 20-minute long films, 25% of the audience is still watching. So that represents a huge amount of time that's spending watching your content as opposed to five seconds. So that all ties into the objectives, which I talked about at the start. But it's quite interesting, I think, personally. The measurement side of it, like I say, we see a significant number of people saying they don't measure things. The SEMrush data says 11% of people aren't measuring anything when it comes to video. From our experience in our webinars that we've run, it's a little bit higher than that. And I think that number hopefully is continuing to be rising. And sometimes it can be very hard to measure. But imagine if you can measure the return on investment from your video. You can... And we've done this for Rackspace, one of our big clients, an IT, global IT company, who we produced some content, ran it in stream ads on YouTube, and we were able to measure that journey of the audience all the way through to the purchase of a product or their service. Which is awesome, and that's where we want to be. But it can be a little step back from there, so implement revenue. So is the content we're making helping to generate or pushing people in the right direction to spend more money with our brand? We can do all of these things. And if you are working with an agency, ask them about that, push them. You know, the trouble is a lot of the time when brands ask companies to make films for them, especially B2B, a lot of the time they're just... The brief is just, this is the film we want to make, how much is it going to cost? The brief really should be about the objective. This is what we'd like to achieve with film. Can you do it? How are we going to do it? What will film look like? And how much is it going to cost? And leave that to the agency, they're the experts on these things. Don't be too prescriptive, that can really constrain creativity, but also it's just going to mean you could keep failing if you're producing the same content. Audit, look at what you're already making, look at your channels you've already got, the analytics behind it, to see if the films you're making are working already or not. And if they're not, then you can start to try and understand why and dig in a little bit deeper and again work with an agency to help you with that. Great, so we're flying through. So, the whole point of this webinar, how long have I got, Amelia, in minutes? Oh, okay, I've got a little bit of time. Great. So, the whole point of this session really was what can you learn from the best? And I guess the best is quite subjective. And it really depends on what it is you're trying to achieve for your video content. But there are some sort of common features that I can pull out. And I've got a few slides on the kind of top tips that we've learned working with these organisations that are willing to put more time and money behind the content that we're making for them. So, we've mentioned there being consistent worldwide. So, most of our clients now are global organisations that are producing content all over the world and need that content to be consistent. And that takes time. So, we've just done a video brand guidelines document for one of our clients that's over 20,000 words long. And that's just about video and the guidelines for that video content that they're producing around the world. Over 20,000 words. And believe me, those 20,000 words came out quite easily because as soon as you start and you start to understand all of the things that we need to take control of or influence in some way in that organisation when it comes to producing content, you realise what a big job it is and you start to understand more why it's hard to create consistent content around the world. Because even if you have guidelines, like brand guidelines, if you share those with agencies, video agencies around the world, they're all going to interpret those guidelines slightly differently. Down to, do you have a logo at the start? Where do you put the lower thirds? What kind of music or tone do you have? Are you going to use subtitles or not? Are you going to put captions on? What languages are you going to use? All those different little things start to add up. And just if you make differences, then you won't recognise that content in different regions, even though it's coming from the same brand. So, that's really important. Make sure you spend the time, rather than just thinking about individual videos, thinking about your video strategy, putting something together so that whoever you use around the world to make your video, hopefully big button, has got a good idea of exactly what that content should be looking like and why. And it also is useful internally, just to get buy-in from internal stakeholders. So, they understand why you're spending money on video and what you're expecting to achieve with that content. So, as well as the brand guidelines, we also help with strategy playbooks. And they're very useful as well. Gives everyone in the organisation an understanding of where you're going with video and why you're doing what you're doing, what video content you should make and what you shouldn't. Especially if you've got internal teams. Most of our clients have an internal function where they're making video internally as well and we work with them. They're seen as an internal free resource. And so, people just keep constantly chucking video, asking them to make video constantly because they think it's free. It's not the way to go. And a playbook, strategy playbook, helps that part of the organisation determine what should be made, what should be outsourced to agencies externally, what should be made internally and what you should say no to. So, that's really also a really useful top tip, I think. Those clients are using all of that and then planning individual videos very carefully. So, you can see there's a thumbnail there from the shoot we did with PayPal. That was... It took three or four months of planning. We usually save four to six weeks to make a video. But actually, if you're producing content globally with big brands that have... You can imagine working with an organisation like PayPal. There's a lot of stages you have to go through to get signed off, to get into their building, for example, and film in that building. And so, making sure that when it comes to the shoot day, everything goes smoothly. And the reason that's important is because you don't want your interviewees being stressed on the day. It needs... As soon as you arrive, as soon as I got into that building, I was chatting to the people that we were going to be talking to on film, making friends with them so that hopefully once they sit down, and I'll show you a short social edit of that film shortly, they're going to be relaxed and they're going to give you a nice, authentic delivery. And that's some of my other top tips that are coming shortly. We'll talk about how we get that delivery from PayPal. Follow best practice. It's very tempting sometimes just to do things the easy way. And making sure you're doing things the right way takes more time and more money sometimes. And so, it's important to, again, maybe if you can't do it properly, just don't make that video and wait for the next one. Giving the right amount of time and budget to do something properly. It does make a difference. We ask our clients, what's your budget for this film? Some clients are a little bit shy about telling you because they're worried you're going to use it all, but we probably will because the more money you spend on video, the better it will be usually. Obviously, we can be very creative and come up with some great solutions on very low budgets. But if you know you've got a bit more money to spend, maybe you can have an extra camera on location. Maybe you can have better lighting. Maybe you can spend more time in post-production. Maybe you spend more time in pre-production planning it to make sure that everything's right. Maybe you've got more locations you can shoot in to make it more interesting for the audience. Maybe you can distribute it better and pay for some advertising. So, it's important to think about that and work out how you're going to allocate those funds as well. And then they continually develop. So, with Postman, we're developing the customer advocacy content we're working on with them, doing it slightly differently each time so it evolves and gets better and more effective. That's essential as well. So, I was going to show a couple of films here. So, I think through the magic of 23, hopefully, we're going to be able to play these full screen for you rather than me playing them through my presentation. So, let's see what happens. Hopefully, someone's... PayPal has a long history of offering production services or API. We move billions of dollars using these APIs. So, dropping a transaction is not a choice for us. We have thousands of developers using Postman. Postman is able to take any suite of APIs, pull it into their system, and showcase it in a way that a developer can play very quickly with APIs. It also allows you to interact with a bunch of APIs at the same time. Postman is doing a great job of thinking about an API-first approach and it'll be exciting to see where the future takes us together. Great. So, that was just one. I think we can kind of... We don't need to show the next one, so that's absolutely fine. PayPal has a long history... Make this work. There we go. Modern technology, eh? PayPal has a long... There we go. So, it's all going so well. I hope you can see that was just a social edit. One of the top tips is that we don't make one film anymore. We never make one film. We make multiple edits for every project we work on, whether that's for different platforms. So, you saw there... The film you just watched was 16.9, but we did one by one and nine by 16, lots of different aspect ratios, so that we could... Because obviously there's still lots of issues around LinkedIn having native on desktop 16.9, native on mobile 9.16, and all these things are constantly changing as well. So, producing multiple aspect ratios is important, and you have to think about that before you start making the content. And then obviously as well, the fact that with the postman content, we were targeting different audiences, and so we produced multiple edits for different audiences. So, they have to sit through the bits of a video that don't interest them. They just see the bits that are relevant for them. We talked about audiences, captions on everything that we make, just because we've got to consider accessibility, but also it helps with SEO. And we know since the pandemic, research has shown more people are using sound on their videos or watching videos with sound, and we know that sound makes video more effective, more engaging for an audience, but obviously some people still aren't. The interesting thing is we know that more people are watching content at home on Mondays and Fridays, the more they use sound on Mondays and Fridays, and so that can influence things like your distribution strategy when you're running ads and that kind of thing, and where you're going to have sound on. But I would suggest captions are really important. Whether you use open or closed captions is down to you, but we always make recommendations based on what the usage of that video tends to be closed captions, because that works better with most of these platforms, especially LinkedIn. We've talked about duration. Don't be pushed into creating content that's super short just because your social agency is telling you that without giving you a good reason, and a good reason is we'll have higher completion rates. What does that mean to my business? So make sure you ask questions when people make recommendations and ask to see the data and find out what it means to you and your business and the content that you're making. And that kind of covers the database approach. Don't forget call to action. That usually... So the postman videos you just saw, there's no call to action video because you consider the context in which the video is used. So where is that video going to sit? Where is the best place to put the call to action? We know putting a call to action at the end of a video is not a good idea because most people don't get to the end, even on the most effective films. So use the platform that it's sitting in and make sure there's a clickable call to action there. It's another reason not to... worry too much about completion rates because if your objective is to drive more traffic through to the website and have more sales, who cares if they watch the whole film or not? If they've watched five seconds of it and clicked it, that's success. The accessibility side isn't just about captions, it's about colours, audio description, all those things. And again, those are the things that would feature in your video brand guidelines. And I noticed that Paul's kind of commented that, you know, few even have style guides, let alone 22,000 words, video brand guidelines. This is very much an example of best practice and how the big... That's the point of this webinar, right? This is how those that are doing it are smashing it are doing it. And the problem is, like I said at the start, we all expect to have success with video because we keep reading about how effective it is. But that's because it's being done right by some people. Many people out there are doing it wrong and having no success at all with video. And you have to remind yourself of that, otherwise you'd waste a lot of time and money producing content that's ineffective. CTA earlier, what does that look like? So, yeah, so the call to action really, as I say, I think the stat is 95%, so is where majority of people switch off on a video, even if it's successful and people watch most of it. It's rare that people watch 100% of a film. There are exceptions to that. It's running as an ad and you have to watch it all before you watch the next thing. Obviously, that's not your choice. I'm talking about where people get to choose how much of that film they watch. They will usually switch off near the end. Now, that's probably because at the end, there's just a logo and people switch off there anyway. But making sure that that call to action is accessible. So imagine you've created a really strong emotional response in your audience, which is what we should be trying to do with our video, I would suggest. And they want to act upon that emotional reaction. They need to have that opportunity to do it when they want to, not wait till the end of the film or whatever. So if it's sat on LinkedIn, for example, make sure that the post has a clickable call to action, they click on all the time. If it's on Instagram or Facebook, for example, Facebook's another good one. People tend to put these calls to action in the comments directly below the video. That's pretty much become best practice now, hasn't it? So make sure you're thinking about that. If it's on your website, the call to action might just be filled in this form. Subscribe to our webinar, for example. So make sure that's accessible to them straight away. Hopefully that's answered that question, but we can do some more Q&A at the end. Authenticity is crucial. I ran a... I was involved with a strategy session here yesterday in Boston. We had about 10 financial services brands coming on to that. And we talked a lot about whether you should use an auto queue. The problem with an auto queue is unless you're very good at using it, it doesn't work very well. And so that film I just showed you, the films that we're making and where we're filming with PayPal and WhatsApp, when we're doing Q&A. So we are not scripting any of these things. And it's difficult. You can imagine with brands like that, big global brands, their compliance teams or legal teams want to know what's going to be said in the videos. And so it takes work for us to convince them that we don't want to script them. And hopefully from that example you saw, it was very relaxed, very genuine. That will convince your audience that what is being said is true and I should trust them and I want to buy their products or service or whatever it might be. So it's really important. The quality side of it, we know from the stats that pro content is still more effective than UGC. There are exceptions to that and we use UGC in a lot of our content, but it takes a lot of work to get that right. 90% of it's not very good. But 10% of it is pure gold. So it's worth doing, but again, it takes some time and lots of preparation and planning and that's a whole separate webinar which I haven't got time to do, which leads me on to don't underestimate the work involved. Don't expect to get success with video without putting a lot of hard work in the back end. And that's why at Big Button I'm so glad we've got such an amazing team. You know, from the pre-production, the PDs that are working on all the planning, our production director is awesome and just has like a head like, I can't even understand, that knows exactly what's going on on all of our projects all the time. And that's what makes the magic happen essentially. And then there's me just waffling and talking. So letting them do all the hard work in the background. And the hook, so logo animations. This can be controversial. I didn't realise this was controversial, but I had someone I spoke to the other day who didn't agree with me, so we had a good chat about it, but don't put a logo fade at the start of your film. Big bad idea, right? We know the first five seconds is when people decide whether they're going to keep watching your film. And if those first five seconds are just the logo of the company you already know you're watching a film for, is animating on screen, no one's going to be interested in that, they're going to switch off. So ignore that, but instead put a hook in there, something that's going to make people want to keep watching. Already talked about the multiple edits. Don't just create one film. It's much more cost effective as well to create multiple films, but those films will be more effective if they're more targeted. OK, so we're just coming to the end now, then we'll move to Q&A. So if you want to know more about this, on the Big Button website, bigbutton.tv, we've got a resources page. There's tonnes of free stuff to download there, white papers, and you can see all the data that's kind of informed all the things that I've said, that I've talked about. So, Amelia, are you there? Can you hear me, Amelia? Yes, I can hear you and I'm right here with you. Thank you so much for all that great insight. I just want to highlight one comment in the chat from Katerina, where she emphasises on the great quality of the content, both talk and webinar-wise. So thank you, Katerina, for your very nice comment. We appreciate that. I think you raise so many interesting points, and I think Katerina is completely on point when saying that this is the best quality content and you really come with some high-level insights here. I think one of the things that you mentioned that is kind of sticking with me the most is when you talk about making video for a specific target group. We have to understand that even though we love to hear our own story and our own perspectives, it's very easily done to do video from an internal perspective and kind of for your own purpose. But we have to make sure that we're always keeping the audience in the centre and keeping them in our thoughts when we're building this. I have a question. With the rise of this short-term video content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels and social media, how can businesses adapt their video marketing strategies to effectively reach and engage with their target audience but through these platforms that are otherwise so loud and so distracting in so many ways? It's a great question and it's something that we talk about a lot. We were talking about TikTok yesterday, actually, and some of our clients are using TikTok because they know their audience aren't there yet, but the people that are using it will be their audience in five or ten years' time. So it's a great way to access your future audience and start influencing their thoughts and attitudes towards your brand. As I've said, it can be a bit of a distraction. So you have to have a solid strategy when you start to look at using these channels that maybe aren't traditionally associated with B2B, for example. So financial services, the question I was asked yesterday is, should we just use LinkedIn? And no, people in financial services and some other of these big B2B verticals, don't just go to work, look at LinkedIn, then head home, then go to sleep. They use Netflix, they use Amazon Prime, they might use TikTok and Instagram and Facebook. So let's access our audiences wherever they are and that's where that research is so important. Let's find out where our audience are, come up with a strategy. Are we going to try and target an audience in the future, in which case, where are those people now and how can we target them? But I would say if you're creating 15-second, five-second pieces, understand how you're going to make that effective for you. Is it just about brand awareness? Okay. But if it's more than that, then let's use it to drive traffic through to somewhere else where they can find out more about who we are and what we do. I think that's a great tip to basically use it as a place as your initial call to action and begin a customer journey because as consumers, we've learned that we spend more and more time on social media in our spare times. And I definitely think businesses have a huge potential to engage with us in our spare time, capture our attention there and then bring us on a journey that is more than just brand awareness, but bringing us down the funnel. I can see in the chat here that we have another question about social media. So here it reads from Cicil. Hello, Cicil. Thank you so much for engaging with us today. How can businesses leverage user-generated content and influencer collaboration in their video marketing initiatives to enhance brand awareness and engagement? So now we're talking about different formats, being on social media. Is there space in this also B2B world for influencer content? Do you have any takes on that? Yeah, absolutely, sir. Again, these are very common questions and we covered all of this yesterday, so it's good, it's fresh in my mind. People were talking a lot about influencers. And again, I think there's an opportunity. B2B is catching up. Ten years ago, everyone assumed that B2B communications had to be dull and then B2C stuff was exciting and fun. I've always maintained that's not the case. These are the same people we're trying to reach and actually in B2B there's an opportunity because people aren't necessarily doing things in such an exciting way. We did a film for Seagrow, who are a FTSE 50 company in the UK, and we managed to create something that achieved over a million views, which is a big deal in B2B space. And it's because we did something a little bit different. When it comes to influencers, I always... So we produce something for... Go Cardless is one of our clients, a global fintech. We filmed over in Oz for them a few months ago. And they've engaged influencers in some of their films. We made a film with them and a company called Nude, who are a finance company, and they got an influencer involved with that film. And the great thing about that is that the UGC that they're producing is next level, right? Because these influencers, everyone assumes that they can be an influencer. It's easy, I just get a webcam, right? But you don't realise that a good influencer, they're amazing on camera and they understand the technology very well. So unlike me, filming in a dark hotel room, they're going to have lights and mics and all those things to make that content look great. And they can present in such a genuine way. So that worked really well. And if you go to the Go Cardless website and look at the new customer story, you'll be able to see that where we've used an influencer to create that, to help create that content. And the big benefit then obviously is that you can use their channels to help distribute that content. You just need to be careful, because there's so many legal implications to having people recommending your brand, that you just need to be careful. But obviously most B2B organisations have a great legal team that will be able to check through everything. And again, I'd suggest you do that before you shoot the film. Come up with some kind of storyboard so you've got an idea of what's going to happen and what's going to be said without scripting it, so that compliance can check that everything's going to be okay. I think hopefully that answers that question. I think it very much does. I think you have some great ideas here on how you can adapt to these trends that are happening. You can be on these channels and still maintain that brand identity and that brand voice by collaborating with the right influencers or allowing certain employees, maybe from the C-level suite, to actually get some face time with their consumers. I think it builds a lot of trust and transparency to an otherwise very distant brand. But speaking of video in the different parts of the funnel, I really want to share a video with our audience. I want to take this opportunity to say thank you so much to you, Simon Kroft, for coming on and sharing so many insightful tips and tricks on how you can really hands-on adapt and get the most out of your video efforts. I see endless potential in some of the points you made with... If you choose to do video, that's fine, it's going to be difficult, it's going to be complex, but you can use it in so many different ways, shapes and forms and for so many different objectives throughout your business strategy. Thank you so much for your time. It was great having you with us. We hope that you will join us next year as well. Thanks for having me. Enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Now for the online audience. At 23, we take our events very seriously. So this fall, we attended Sassiest in Sweden and there we conducted a very interesting interview with Tom Boston. He's a brand awareness manager at SalesLoft and he spoke about how he was using video throughout the marketing and sales funnel. He actually has a quite interesting story because he was handpicked from the sales team by marketing because he was being so successful with his video efforts that they decided they needed him in marketing. So without further ado, here is an interview with Tom Boston from SalesLoft. Yes, so my name is Tom Boston. I'm the brand awareness manager at SalesLoft. So right now, a huge trend and it's something that I've been working on myself for a few years, I think is humour in video content, right? Where we're seeing it more than ever on LinkedIn, the influence of things like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, where this short-form video is doing really, really well. B2B has started to pick up on that a little bit and we're seeing, especially at SalesLoft, huge engagement and interaction from these shorter forms of video content. It's a trend that I see right across the market and something that really excites me because maybe five, six years ago when I started in the B2B world, if you were going to see a video on a B2B company, it's probably going to be about five, six minutes long. There might be some bar charts in there or some graphs, but I feel, luckily, we've now moved away from that. And, yeah, brands are trying to make entertaining content, right? Content that people love to consume. And as we've learned from an event like this, we are all on that human level. The conversations happening behind me are probably not going to be about data points. They're probably going to be about the exciting conversations that they've heard happen or the things that excited them about the talks that we've already had. Things that spark that excitement, they're the things that you remember. And we see that with video content all the time. So it's a really interesting one, right, because I started in sales and video was a daily thing for me, but that was direct to prospects. So I was making video just for my prospects to try to make them smile and, hopefully, book a meeting. But with my role that I'm in at the moment, I've managed to take that and also use it in other aspects of the business. So I now sit within the marketing team, but I feel very lucky that I get to pair with lots of different members of the team, right? So even the C-level team have been involved in my recent video series, which I've really, really loved, right? Getting them to be involved, enjoying the humour and kind of bringing the sales loft story to life. So we very much see it as everyone should be involved in it, right? As a company, we understand that, especially on social, which, you know, I love, video is going to win. So as an organisation, yeah, I feel like everyone gets it, which I think is just great. Well, that's the big question, isn't it, right? And it's a question I get asked a lot. How do you know if this works? So we look at things like vanity metrics, as they call them, right? The metrics that are like, oh, this went viral, or this got tens of thousands of views. But especially in the SaaS world and the B2B world, people like to know they want some hard figures. Well, how many deals did this influence, Tom? Or how much revenue can we attribute to that video, Tom? The truth is, unfortunately, we can't, right? One of the factors of me stepping into the role I'm in at the moment, and one of the reasons it was so easy to do so, was that everyone I spoke to in the business had mentioned that their deals... I'd kind of come up in their deals. So maybe they'd seen some of my content, or their team had received some of my content, or they loved the kind of stuff I was doing. So it became a very easy conversation to have, almost a no-brainer, that I would kind of lean in to that. And I'll tell you this story. I've had two conversations with people at this event, and they've both said to me, I send your content to my team all the time. Now, I can't track that. I can't measure that unless they like, engage, you know? And that's what we call dark social, right? This inability to see how far and wide our content is travelling. But as I've just said, it is happening. People are seeing the content. So you can't rely too much on those vanity metrics. But I think if you just put as much effort into your content as possible, make it resonate, add the value, that will hit home with an audience, and it will travel far and wide, especially on LinkedIn. It's that kind of penny-drop moment, right? So when I was an active seller, it used to happen to me all the time, I'd reach out to someone, and they'd kind of go, Oh, yeah, I think I've seen some of your content. Or like, oh, yeah, maybe I got sent that once upon a time. But now I get that from our SDR team, right? So they're able to have conversations with their prospects who've maybe enjoyed content that I've created, or we as a marketing team have created. And they're able to leverage that to book a meeting and to have a better conversation, which is what it's all about, right? Video is ever-expanding and ever-changing, right? Having created video for lead generation purposes and now creating video for brand awareness purposes, I think I really want to lean into that kind of brand awareness piece, right? I mean, it's in my job title, so it makes sense to me to really kind of focus in on that. But ultimately, I want to encourage others, not only on my team, but on other teams, to replicate that, right? So to empower them to go, look, you can be the voice of your sector, even though you might think, well, I could never do that, right? Even though you might think, well, I'm just in sales. Because I was just in sales a few years ago, right? But actually, if you're consistent with the content that you're creating, you're passionate about it, you have fun with it. Because again, my rule is, if I have fun doing it, they'll have fun consuming it. You can become a real powerhouse in your organisation. So, yeah, of course I want to continue doing the brand awareness piece at SalesLoft, but ultimately, I want to inspire others to do the same, to have a voice and to ultimately have fun with it. Because let's not forget, video, social media, it's all fun at the end of the day, right? A lot of us are on social to have fun and have a good time. And we can get so caught up, right, with like, oh, is this perfect or is this right? But actually, it's more important that you're enjoying the process of creation. And you're in it for the long haul, right? If I didn't enjoy doing video, it'd be a long-hauled career. Because I'd be thinking, oh, here we go again. But I love it. I absolutely love it. And I think that comes across, hopefully. I think when I was creating videos for Lead Gen, I would only have one purpose. And the single purpose of a video that would go straight to a prospect was to make them smile. I didn't really care about telling them about the product or how I could help them. And I knew they'd get a phone call from me, probably the next day, because that was a step in my cadence, so I could have that conversation. So the only thing I wanted to get out of that 30-second video was, can I make them smile? Will they relate to me? Or will they think, oh, I think he's quite an interesting person? That was it, right? And that was quite a liberating thing. I didn't have to go through the features. I didn't have to try to book a meeting. I just had to create a connection. Now, with the brand awareness piece, I can't just do that, right? I can't just make videos to make people smile. I do have to bring in the value. And I need to come across as knowing about the product, giving a feature update, maybe a series of webinars that we're creating, anything like that, right? So that has very much been a big change. But I've also enjoyed that change, right? And I love it when my team come to me and they'll say, Tom, we've got this coming out in three months. How could you bring video to promote it and to celebrate it? I absolutely love that. So, yeah, a little bit different, but I certainly enjoy it a lot more now. Yeah, well, I mean, it's how we tell stories, right? It's how we bring those stories to life. So there's a lot going on with SalesLoft this year. I won't give too much away, but we have some big announcements in 2023, right, that are really going to change the world of sales forever. And I do say that quite boldly. AI has been a huge topic at this event, and that really excites me because we have a few tricks up our sleeve, let's just say, with how sellers can utilise AI in 2023. And video is going to be a huge part of us telling that story. So I have some projects coming up to help bring that to life. I've had a lot of fun on social already, kind of poking fun at the world of AI. I'll still continue to do that, right? Because at SalesLoft, we understand that to connect with customers and to connect with potential customers, it's all about being relatable and creating content that they will get and understand. So, yeah, with our platform changes this year, video is going to be huge in regards to helping us tell that story. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of organisations will find this, right? Their team, especially the sales team, are very happy to send a video to a prospect. And they'll film themselves for maybe 30, 60 seconds and be confident and bright and happy. But if you ask that same salesperson to put that video on the internet, oh, I could never. There's no way, right? My face doesn't look right, my hair doesn't look right, the background doesn't look right. I think it's really important to break through all of those challenges, OK? As a bald bloke with a ginger beard, I kind of just used what I'd got, right? This is the face that I have. I'm going to put it out there. And I think confidence is a huge thing. A lot of people that I work with, it's not even about the content. It's not about the message. They know the message. They have that conversation with people every single day. It's hitting that record button. It's playing it back and going, oh, I can't even listen to myself. Never mind watch myself. And there's no way I'm going to post that. So, yeah, I think that, like, the shift needs to be confidence. Confidence in your message. If you're actively reaching out to people every day with a message in their inbox, leaving them voicemails, leaving them voice notes, why not bring that message to life on social? And video is a really quick and easy way to do that. But, yeah, you just have to shake off that confidence and go for it.