Erlend Førsund - How to Pull Video into Your Marketing and Sales Stack

But I'm going to speak about how we use it in our own marketing. I'm not going to show any customer examples, although we also have them. So if I can accomplish one thing today, I hope it would be that you have at least one takeaway or idea with you back home after this 20-minute session is over. I'll check with you afterwards and see if that went well. So a little introduction. Market Partner is a digital agency. We were founded in 1997. We were then a traditional agency, but we transitioned into being a digital agency, producing lots of websites, doing a lot of digital marketing. But since 2014, we have been an inbound agency. We partnered up with HubSpot that year, and today we're a diamond partner, I think the only one in Norway, and among 30 or 40 worldwide. So last year we almost doubled the number of employees. We are now almost 50 employees as Market Partner. And we have all the roles, skillsets that are necessary in a marketing department. So some of the customers use us as their outsourced marketing department. We have developers, designers, writers, content creators, business consultants, inbound marketing consultants, etc. So in just four words, our mission is we help businesses grow, and we do that by putting the latest marketing and sales technology to use. We have a philosophy that we want to be data-driven, as Maria also spoke about here a few minutes ago, data-driven first and then creative after that, in that order. But today I'm going to speak about how we use video, and we have been at it for a year, and we are still experimenting with it. So keep that in mind. Our services include digital marketing, web development, social selling, and sales. We help businesses do that. We also do courses and keynotes. We do consulting around e-commerce and also, of course, inbound marketing. And we are proud partners of HubSpot. Umbraco is a CMS e-commerce, also a CMS for web shops. Third Light, an image management system, e-Marketer, and also 23. Some of our inbound customers that we work currently with, I think some of them are here today. How many of you have actually heard about Markspot before? Just show of hands, that's maybe 60%. That's great. I'm among friends. So what we deliver in a nutshell, we deliver, we help our clients with creating a digital marketing strategy. And that's always, when we work with them, it's always based on inbound marketing as a foundation. And we also use, of course, outbound tactics to supplement. Then, of course, we have the technology that you need to actually accomplish what you have set as goals. And we have a content strategy on top of that. We also produce content for our customers. Our content department is, I think, the biggest one in our company now. A lot of former journalists and also copywriters. They're mixed backgrounds. So about me, I'm the head of marketing at Markspot. I'm a writer by trade, I like to call myself that, and a marketer by education. I have 16 years' experience in business-to-business marketing. But I'm focused mostly on content marketing and inbound marketing. I'm also the leader of the HubSpot user group in Oslo, where we gather quarterly to talk about inbound and video and digital marketing. So you're welcome to drop in there. It's at Nydalen, Handelshuskolen Bay. I'm also the editor of our three business blogs. And my personal blog, Marketsheltene, I've been blogging about marketing since 2009. I'm a mentor for some students at the Hager School of Management and also have guest lecture assignments at Kristiania University College and Östfold University College. Okay, so how does video tie into an inbound marketing strategy? So how many of you are familiar with inbound marketing? Yeah, so 37%. So inbound marketing is all about attracting potential customers with content and making them into customers, very easily said. And it's based on the same principles that content marketing is based upon, namely that you have to add value to your contacts or prospect before you can extract value from them. Since we started with inbound marketing, this shows our traffic growth. So it's more than 10 times as much as when we started. So it shows that inbound marketing is working at least for us. And also I'm happy to say it works for a lot of our customers. So in our own marketing, we try to attract three different types of personas. It was mentioned by Marie also. We have CEOs, CMOs and sales directors as our main personas. And the data shows, of course, also we know that video is a hard trend. It's been for a long time. We've seen it coming. I think Daniel Burroughs is speaking about these hard trends, like processing power is getting better, storage is getting cheaper, distribution is getting cheaper. So it comes to a point that video just has to happen and we've seen it for years. So I'm asking myself sometimes why are we so slow at adapting it? But we see that 80% of all internet traffic will be video by 2019. I was speaking to a friend here about this just before the talk here. And of course, video takes a lot of space. That might be a reason. But all the other facts indicate that video is popular. 75% of executives watch business related videos every week. And almost 60% prefer to watch video over text, according to Forbes. So we definitely need to do video. So the inbound methodology looks like this is very easy. It's not rocket science. Doing it is more rocket science actually. But the concept is quite easy. Attract, convert, close, and delight. You can read lots about this on HubSpot's blog, for instance, or our own blog in Norwegian at inboundblogging.no. But video, I mean, we have video all over the place now. We have it on YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. We should forget Snapchat, I think you said. Because I don't understand Snapchat. And my siblings make fun of me because I think the user face is rubbish. And it disappears. I want to see it again, and it's just gone. So I like to store video. So talking about storing video, YouTube, is YouTube enough? Can't we just post it on YouTube? Of course, that was a discussion we had in the beginning. YouTube only. But we came to the conclusion that YouTube is not enough. Of course, we have to post on YouTube also. But there are many reasons for not only relying on YouTube as a place to host your video content. Because you don't control your content there. They place ads before, after your video, and even on your videos with banner ads. And your biggest competitor could actually piggyback on your content. And that's not fun. Videos from YouTube doesn't also play on Facebook. There are limited opportunities for conversions. There are some. And no good solutions for measuring traffic and conversions. And no integration with HubSpot. Which is a key point for us. So how did we choose our video platform? There were a lot of options to consider. We have Vimeo, we have Brightcove, 23Video, Vistia, Sprout Video, Vidyard. But we found it hard to compare apples and pears. There are so many features, so many variations. So we made some criteria for choosing our online video platform. And we defined four important must-haves for our platform. Number one, it should have a good integration for real-time data with our customer data platform, which is HubSpot. And good primary functions for managing, storing, and analyzing videos. Also efficient sharing to relevant channels, social media channels. As well as a pricing model that works in our market. Looking at integrations was very important to us. We want to secure our black gold, which is the user data. If you have lots of applications, you can do that. If you have lots of applications, you have one for email marketing, one for video marketing, one for CRM, etc. You have data in piles all over the place, and you can't connect them together and use them or leverage them very well. So we want to secure that our black gold flows effortlessly in our system. And HubSpot is our platform there. So we made a matrix where we compared the different platforms. Which one has all the necessary features, which one has lax features, which ones have a two-way integration, a one-way integration, or no integration at all. It made it very easy for us to choose 23Video for our video strategy. So with help from 23, we have now created a video hub where all of our video content lives. It stays there, and we can also publish from there to other channels, social media channels. The backend provides very useful data on how the content is consumed, play rates and engagement rates, etc. All over and also on each video. And even better, it pulls the data back into HubSpot to the contact timeline. So very helpful for the sales reps preparing for meetings to see what content has the prospect engaged with. And also very useful to use in lead nurturing workflows. Which is automatic, automated marketing based on your digital behavior, what have you shown interest for. Okay, I also have seven ideas for your video strategy. Ironically, I will not show you any videos. You can watch them yourself as our video hub. But I have some animated GIFs of them, and I will talk about them. But I think you will get the point. One is personalized one-to-one connect call videos. So this is a screenshot from one of these videos. My colleague, Katrine, is down in the corner talking to the prospect. This is a video where you film yourself on your laptop. And the way we manage our leads is that we call actually each and every lead that come into our system. Not the sales manager, not the sales call. But it's just a connect call just to see how are you doing, did you appreciate our content, etc. Is there something we can help with, some other content that we could provide you with. And sometimes it was hard to reach the person on phone. What my colleague then did was to just record very briefly a video of herself showing the site of the customer. And maybe talking about some advice she gave them. We used Vistia Soapbox for this. I think 23 is working on a similar solution. We could probably use them to do that. But at that time we used Soapbox for that. The results were that 71.4% of all emails were opened. And 70% of the recipients watched more than once or forwarded it. And 40% responded with a wish to chat. Because this is quite unusual that somebody makes a video just for you. In a year or two maybe everybody does this. So if you want to, I think I would grab the opportunity and use this if you're working B2B. Just a sample feedback. Thanks for the video greeting and lots of great content on your website. We're happy to talk. How about Wednesday? Then we have event invitations for our annual Inbound Marketing Day here in Oslo. This year we created a video invitation for each of our personas. So I was speaking to the marketing managers. My colleague Tore was speaking to the CEOs. And my colleague Lars was speaking to the sales directors. Video invitations, as you can see here on the heat map, attracts a lot of attention of course. And a lot of people click on the video. Compared to last year, most people clicked on the link to go directly to the agenda. What we did here was we sent them directly to a landing page for the video. And then they had to click from there to go to the agenda. I think next time I would like to have the video on top and the agenda below. So we actually added some friction, but we experiment with the video all the time. So we're getting better at it, I think. It was filmed with a smartphone, 30 second length. And we used embedded animated GIFs in the email. So it's moving around in the email. Of all the invitations we sent out, there were 237 plays. Most go directly to the agenda, I think. But the turnout was great. 180 participants this year and 100 last year. So we must have done something right. A third idea is to do expert interviews with your subject matter experts. Because all of you have those in your company. You're probably a subject matter expert in some topic yourself. It's a great way to build thought leadership. And it's a great way to enrich your blog post if you do blogging. We filmed this with a DSLR camera. We have a Zoom H4N audio recorder with lav mics, studio lights, and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. You don't have to do that, but that's what we did for these recordings. Except the one right corner there, which is a Skype interview. I interviewed an American expert on thought leadership who is an author of a book for CMOs. And it just took 20 minutes. And when the talk was over, the video was there. It was just uploaded. So very cost-effective. No lights, studio, anything, expensive camera or editing software necessary. So the video with the camera was very good. So the video with the GDPR compliance there has now over 1200 plays. And it's a very hot topic right now. So it also builds thought leadership for us to do these videos. We have no CTAs on these ones. We have them as a blog enrichment and also posting them on social media. Then we also did the live reporting from Inbound last year. It was actually the kickoff for Mark Rapporten doing video. This is where we tried to kickstart our video strategy. Reporting, it was actually live reporting. We didn't have great internet connections. So we recorded and uploaded it in our hotel later at midnight. Every night I was up until midnight. But we had a lot of engagement with those videos. And it was also a fun experience. And it was a way to start creating a culture for video and getting people used to the camera, used to speaking in front of the camera. Equipment, GoPro camera with selfie stick and iPhone with handheld mic. I think the mic costs about 500 kroner. You can just buy it online. The quality is good enough, I think. It's authentic and it's live. So it gave us massive coverage of the event. Yeah, and it was where we started. It's a good place to start using video. Maria was speaking about bottle of funnel content. We also realized that we are very good at creating top of the funnel, middle of the funnel content that creates tension and makes you understand the concept that we're trying to preach. But we came to the realization that we were lousy at actually telling people what we sell. We thought that was the sales rep's job to do that. So we're planning now to do lots of webinars this year. Not very expensive to do. We can also do it on 23 video. The first ones we did was on GoToWebinar. It's a lead generation magnet, but also important for moving leads through the funnel. We have a few coming up now right away. Number six, blog post, teasers and opinion pieces. The other day I discovered an app called Clips. Have you used the Clips, the app Clips? It automatically transcribes what you say. It has also Norwegian, but you have to speak Bukmål. I speak Western Norwegian, Vestlandsk, so it looks funny when it tries to find out what I'm saying. So I posted a video the other day in English, it's much easier. It's voicing my opinion on something. If you want to know what I was voicing my opinion on, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and see it there. But it's gained a lot of attention, I think. It's also a way to... I think for me as a marketing manager, I want to be an example for my colleagues and show them what they can do and try to lead by example. You can't force your colleagues always to post on their own social media channels, but employee advocacy is very effective. Very effective blog teasers, 5 to 15 seconds blog teasers, just a colleague of mine here telling the audience what she had blogged about today. I think you can see it here, the number, 688 plays. Quite good, I think. Okay, presentations and keynotes. This is something we have used for a while in our lead nurturing workflows. It's a very good way to educate our prospects on inbound marketing, inbound sales and what we deliver in the market. This video is from the Inbound Marketing Day 2016. It has over a thousand plays and 21,000 minutes of engagement. It builds thought leadership and helps our prospects see the light. They need in-depth content to really grasp the big picture of things. If they've seen an entire presentation like this, it's a very good signal that there could be a good fit for us. All right, so video is very high on our agenda for 2018, but we're just getting started. I just want to say thank you for your attention and if you have any questions, I'm glad to...