HubSpot CMO, Kipp Bodnar, on Video

Three words in two Academies, when it comes to time. a bleep. Three words incoherant, when it comes to time,. When it comes to time. Iam toasted that the bottom line is they share issues with us because like we do not get too much information. Out what people think, get relief. If they want. If they want to go to the market, they are supposed to go to more fundamentally for a few reasons. The primary one is always some type of technological advance, right? And you have good mobile network data now, and you have really good wifi that's fairly ubiquitous, and then you have great mobile phone technology. So you can, the consumption availability that used to be limited to this one room in your house is now everywhere, and I think that's the core trend, and I'm not telling you anything you know, or you don't know, but it's like, that's massive, and it's also the way people want to hear stories, and the way some stories just need to be told, especially if you're a B2B company. Like, you can have this really complex, challenging story, but video can often communicate it really simply and really well. Even though marketing was always about like creating really great content to attract people and then help pull them through the buyer's journey and make that happen, and video is like, is a very critical content format, right? And more so than that now, video is really the core content if you want to be successful in social media, right? If you're going to be successful on Facebook, you're gonna be successful on Instagram, you've gotta have video, and you've gotta have great video, and you have to have it formatted and created natively for those channels. Video throughout the marketing funnel's really interesting because it really goes parallel with a lot of the other marketing tactics that folks do, right? Your top of the funnel video that might be for generating awareness is gonna be more broad, more general-pleasing, more applicable, where at the very bottom of the funnel, you're probably gonna have a very personalized video asset where if you're working on a very specific account, you might make even a custom video for those folks, and I think that's the opportunity there. I look at measure videos similar to how I look at other marketing tactics, which is like, depending on how you're deploying it, kind of changes how you actually use it, and so at the top of the funnel, I think that things like view counts and referral traffic and direct traffic correlation are really valuable, where at the bottom of the funnel, if you're talking about a personalized video, you're either gonna equate that to a sales conversion or you're gonna equate that to things like demo requests or high-intent actions. Yeah, marketing automation is just software that makes people not have to do crap work, right? And it's good at delivering the stories that we wanna tell, and video's a key platform, and if I talk about messaging and bots, one of the interesting things is, I think video's gonna be a huge part of the future of messaging. I think you're going to use short videos and messaging conversations to really communicate as a business to your customers. Storytelling's the hardest thing, right? You can buy some equipment, you can teach yourself some video editing and production, you could do some of that, but if you don't have the right stuff and it's not put together, doesn't matter how put together it is, if it's the bad raw material and you don't have the right story, and so if you think about storytelling, for me, the best stories, I think especially from a marketing standpoint, almost always come from a place of vulnerability but with a strong point of view, and just like everything else, there are different types of archetypes for stories and you have to understand the story you're gonna tell. What's the story you're gonna tell? You're gonna tell a hero's journey, and what's the hero gonna do, and what's the point of view of that hero? And that whole thing might just be around your position in the marketplace or the methodology you have for helping your prospective customers be successful, but if you don't think about package it that way, it's gonna fall flat. We just came off an awesome campaign with Facebook. Four days of Facebook campaign, we did a ton of live streaming video for that over the course of four days. We ran the whole thing through the Facebook Messenger interface, you registered, you got notified everything via Messenger. It was a really great experience. We had over 25,000 people register to come join us. It was awesome. Yeah, when you think about inbound marketing, the evolution continues to happen, right? And at the top of the funnel, content is evolving in terms of video and also in terms of the types of text that you want. I think one of the interesting things in the content side of inbound is that kind of the middling content, regardless of format, whether it be text or video, is falling out, right? You either want really short, crisp text or video, or you want really deep and rich, that middle kind of halfway point that I think a lot of people did in the early days of inbound marketing because they felt like that was the right sweet spot. It just doesn't prove to be effective, isn't the type of information people are looking for anymore. So that's one thing. And then AI and marketing automation, the technology continues to grow and scale and shift dramatically. It's opened up a bunch of awesome opportunities. It's going to be fun. What's next for HubSpot specifically? So we were here at inbound. We announced a bunch of awesome products yesterday, actually, and we launched HubSpot Conversations, which is our product around messaging bots and helping businesses scale conversations. We launched our entrance into the customer service success market, which is really great, and we launched a really grown-up CRM that is going to be awesome for businesses who are scaling up and want to grow. All those products and building them out and making them better is going to be the next year for us. I see video becoming a much bigger part of the sales process. I see it from the sales reps that I work with at HubSpot. I see them using tools like Loom and Soapbox and different things to record their own personalized videos for their customers. I see them just trying to find new ways to tell their story, and that's the salesperson's job, and video is a key platform for doing that. Well, that's the hardest thing to do. Optimizing teams and organizing teams is hard, especially as you grow and you scale, because the reality is it's like things change and things evolve, right? And how you have a team organize one year isn't necessarily the optimal way to do it the next year or a year and a half later or whatever, right? And so for us, we try to find the alignment that makes sense. Our product marketing content team rolling together because we think that content is critical and storytelling is critical to product marketing. And so we do product marketing content, we do all of our brand and creative work together, and then we do all of our basically product acquisition, like demand gen, all that kind of stuff together as well. So we kind of lump everything together that way. Not optimal, but you still figure it out. Yeah, the pace of change in social media is frenetic. I think the evolution there is Facebook continues to be the core dominant player in that market. Video is the core dominant content format now, for sure. And messaging has become like, component, I use Instagram messaging personally a ton, because it's like that unit of a video or unit of a photo just connected with that ability to share or have a start a conversation just is natural. So I think those are all the ways social's gonna change, and it's like, my gosh. And the other interesting about social is that the ad technology's gotten a lot better. If you're a marketer today, and you're trying to reach people on social, the tools you have today versus a couple years ago have dramatically improved. You know what I like? I like brands, I like a few different things. I like brands and businesses who fill a niche. I like a lot of media brands. So, Pierre from Refinery29 was here. That is somebody we look up to. I think the folks that are at attention are doing cool things. So those folks are sure. Those folks are sure, I think. But there's even smaller brands. There's a great watch website called Hodinkee that has an amazing mobile app and a great design aesthetic and amazing photography. It's like I can find basically things to learn from almost any brand. That's what's so cool about it. One piece of advice for marketers going into 2018, I'm gonna give this advice to myself too, which is simplify. You're probably using too much technology, trying to do too many things. Take a little bit of time, step back, really assess what you need to do, what you need to focus on and do that and cut the other stuff out.