Jennifer Van Lent, Managing Director at Digital Doorway

Also a HubSpot partner, and we're working here in Europe and actually across EMEA Europe, Middle East and Africa, predominantly with B2B clients and specifically around strategy, campaign management, and alignment across marketing and sales organizations. So we've really adopted our approach and aligned our approach to HubSpot's flywheel strategy when it comes to taking a look at a holistic approach to customer engagement, and we really like that model because what we found particularly over my years, I was an early adopter of marketing automation services and marketing automation platforms, you know, 15 years ago, what we found is that marketing and sales and customer service, they've really been operating in silos. So what we really like about HubSpot's approach and model and what we've been facilitating is the idea of using digital tools, using online strategies, and using face-to-face, human-to-human strategies to make sure we can break down silos between marketing and sales, marketing and customer service, sales and customer service to really give a positive approach to customer engagement, give it better impact, higher impact, and really make the customer at the center of your marketing strategy and really your whole engagement strategy. I think in terms of change over the past 15 years, and I've been working a lot with US companies that had a beachhead or a foothold here in Europe, particularly with the regional headquarters, for example, here in Amsterdam, and what I found is that classic marketers early on, they were focusing a lot of their budget on events, they were focusing a lot of their budget on print and ad, and I was fortunate enough to be working for a super innovative organization that really had a marketing-first approach in terms of how they were looking at growing their business, how they were looking at attracting opportunities, converting opportunities to the pipeline, and so when I first started talking to marketing professionals and asking them about their digital strategy, they were really looking at me with a deer in the headlights look like, well we actually go to events and most of our money is budgeted to events and magazines, and I'm really excited to see the changes over the years as people have really been adopting a digital strategy as table stakes. It took some time for sure and you had different adoption across different countries, but I think in terms of best practices, particularly with the generation of marketing professionals now, you're really finding a solid strategic approach and really an innovative approach in a lot of areas and that's great, but I would have to say there's a there's a but, there's a caveat to that. One of the things that you are finding is that with this great new world of digital first, with an amazing opportunity, with predictive analytics, with artificial intelligence, with machine learning, being able to find those contacts out there that could be a great fit for your organization, people are really missing the human-to-human touch. People are realizing that it's you know a little bit more difficult maybe to pick up the telephone and call. They're hiding behind emails or they're hiding behind their social strategy and surprisingly enough we find a lot of people that never actually talk to a customer until four or five touch points later and we feel that's a big miss and that's where actually video is becoming an amazing bridge between that promise and those opportunities in the digital world, but then making sure you've really got a human-to-human touch, making sure you can have that personal approach and it's not just with marketing, we really really love the possibilities that video brings to one-to-one interaction. Sales account managers sending an email maybe with a video link or sending a link directly to a video as a first touch. You know when you see it in practice the first time a prospect, a buyer, a potential buyer sees it they're like oh well okay now what is this, but as you start tweaking it as you start finding the nuances of who and where you can use it we've really seen some amazing potential. We have been using video with our clients with digital doorway for some time and there are a few different ways that we've found great success. Of course you've got personal videos so you have the opportunity to be creating video on the fly. Now that's something that everybody can do these days which is an amazing thing because you really get that genuine feel and that genuine touch and that approach comes across so even though you may be 10,000 kilometers away what you're finding is that personal interaction is just as powerful in fact as it is if you're face-to-face sitting in the same room. Video from a more structured standpoint I love how it's become less costly, how it's becoming more available even for professional quality produced videos whether or not it's something that you're producing in a studio, online, in an animated form it's really an amazing way to be able to tell a story and we work with a lot of business to business clients, a lot of B2B clients and sometimes their stories are a little bit complex. It really is It's funny because of course back in the day you used to be sitting there creating a 20 page or 10 page product documentation. Well you don't have to do that anymore. What you can do is you can actually create an easy to understand short video or a series of short videos that walk people through a process, that walk people through a journey. I sat at a client yesterday in Belgium actually and we were sitting there talking about the possibilities of taking a really really difficult concept and converting that into an easy story and they love the idea that they can do it quickly. It's not a huge, you don't have to spend a huge amount of money or a huge amount of time but what you do have to do is you have to be just as detailed oriented with your storyboard. You can't just do video on the fly even if it's just your own creation without actually knowing who are you speaking to, who's your persona, what's my message. All those basics people really need to have as the as the table stakes, as the foundation and if you take the time to do that then you're going to be able to create video that's just has a huge impact super high to the target audience that you want and I would say the other thing that we're finding that's really really amazing and really happy to be part of this project. We have one client, again a B2B client, they're using really fantastic cutting-edge approaches to finding, nurturing and closing opportunities clients in Africa. So if you can imagine it's places where the bandwidth isn't always consistent, where you have mobile phones that may not be the highest on the market, really you need to be able to adapt your approach but what we've been able to do is work with them in finding ways that they can really reach clients. Again difficult to get to areas multinational, multicultural so the power of video whether or not it's an animated video that you can shoot and you can dub in multiple languages or short video on the fly, customer interviews, capturing scenes, it's been incredibly powerful for them and what they've been able to do is they've been able to package this and reach people in areas through online marketing tools like HubSpot and also through LinkedIn and other social platforms and really been able to grow their business in an amazing way and I love that story because it shows how a small organization in a continent across the Mediterranean or across the Atlantic or Pacific can actually grow and reach a target market, do it profitably, find those people and really talk to them in a way that I think we never were able to do 20 years ago. I think a lot of people have actually tried video or they have the idea that it's either too complex for them or it's too simple. They might have had the situation where it's been too complex and they've realized I need to have ten thousand euros for this particular video and I just don't have that right now or they've made it too simple and they've shot a video without a story without understanding who their audience is. So the way we've been able to bring that together is actually in I don't want to say baby steps but in logical steps where we can say let's take a look at where this makes sense in terms of your funnel. If you're not quite ready to use it to attract a wider audience, let's take a look at maybe having video for people that are further down your opportunity pipeline or maybe actually let's just take a look at clients. What can you do to help clients in a training modus or introducing new products using video tools and then when they realize that okay yes we need to have the basics down pat we still need to know where they are in the customer journey we need to make sure that we've got a good storyboard we've got a good message and we're talking to the right persona then they realize how how simple it is so it's um it's a little bit of re-education but to be honest once they start it scales quite quickly and then all of a sudden the opportunities explode and then they start moving to different levels okay I've done this now maybe I should try animated video maybe I need to do something more professional and I have to say if you take a look at how for example HubSpot the HubSpot platform is able to integrate that that video experience within your customer journey and start identifying well not just that someone watched a video but who's watched it how many times have they gone back to watch it what type of things am I measuring that's important to my organization at this point in time whether or not it's your marketing team or your sales team or your customer service team that's when they start realizing oh we're not just shooting video for the sake of shooting video just to get a word out we're actually really seeing some high-level impact in terms of how we're able to convert customers and move them through the pipeline so we found we found some some early mistakes that we've made of course and and and that we've made together with our clients in terms of taking a look at and and and oftentimes this has come from from a client need well our CEO or a managing director really wants to produce a video so how are we going to be doing it and we have spent a lot of time with agencies that work on production whether or not it's an animated video or whether or not it's a studio production and it's great it's it's taken a long time but then at the end when we've you know tried to identify how are they going to be using this where can they get value from this that's really where the conversation stops for them they've just had this idea that video is a great way for them to get their message out into the marketplace but okay that's nice but where where can you use it so right now what we've been doing is we've really been trying to help customers take a look at what their content approaches so for video for social media for different types of content including podcasts including written content logs etc and make sure that they're mapping the journey and in a in a systematic way that makes sense to those personas that they're reaching and so actually a lot of times we've got clients that have gone back and repurposed video that they may have created two three four years ago and finding new ways either by editing it by using subtitles or by using bits and pieces in their marketing campaigns and they're finding well you know our message hasn't changed and we really like this but we you know we're now finding ways to use it so you may have people that for example shot of 30 minutes promotional video for some particular reason maybe it was internal maybe it was external for an event and what they're able to do is they're able to actually recoup that return on investment again and be able to extend the life of that in a way that really hadn't thought about before so you know if your content has been well thought out of if you've had a good strategy if you've known your persona at the very beginning that content doesn't necessarily need to be going into a closet or into a file server if it's 24 months old it's great to be able to say and this is one of the things that people probably don't do enough it's great to be able to say let's take a look at we have in our what we have in our archives let's see how this is relevant and let's see how we can repurpose this and sometimes the best content with the highest conversion rate is some of your older content that you may have so go back and look at those videos that maybe had you know great viewership or maybe you know some of the podcasts that you did or some some white papers or whatever things you've written 12 months ago or 18 months ago and see how you might be able to bring a fresh approach and a new life. No for a long time we really had this idea that your marketing team is producing you know these materials and responsible for this piece your service organization was responsible for this piece at the end of the life cycle your sales had a totally different approach and as much as we tried to and I and luckily again I worked for organizations that really you know had this marketing inclusive approach sometimes it was just siloed and sometimes it was because we were in a different country sometimes it was because sales adopted one approach and and wasn't quite using the marketing language or vice versa and what we've really found organizations needing to do today is to be able to see how they can bridge those silos a great way to do this is actually to take a look at something like a customer persona buyer persona we're finding more and more organizations are taking the concept of buyer personas and using them all throughout their organization in the sales organization and customer service with strategy those exercises weren't always necessarily done together and there were some practical reasons teams were in different locations or people just weren't able to get together in the same spot we're finding actually now that if we again using this idea of aligning with HubSpot's flywheel approach where you're taking a look at the customer at the center of the journey we're using a number of different tools including video including online and offline games sometimes as simple as strategy card games in a in a in a sales meeting as an example to be able to start bringing the same terminology to start bridging different parts of the organization as an example one of our clients we have these persona cards so about how do you create a buyer persona so what they do is they'll hook up again via video conference they'll hook up their marketing organization in one country on their service organization in another part of the the US and their sales teams together to be able to do the strategy session online to be able to build a consistent buyer persona that everybody knows about so that means that marketing is no longer operating in silos they have relevance so much relevance to the rest of the organization where sales needs to find a more personalized approach to be able to have one-to-one relevant interactions with with with buyers because buyers are more specific these days about what they want to hear and how they want to hear it and who they want to hear it from and then finally with customer service who is essentially one of the most important parts of the equation because we all talk sometimes about acquiring that customer converting that prospect the importance of the sales pipeline but it takes a lot more to be able to convert a new customer than it is to keep a customer and make them a champion for your organization so what we've done is we've actually and taken a look at an approach where we have all sorts of online tools to be able to help people understand what are the relevant personas for their organization so salespeople do a video clip as a potential buyer so I am this person in this organization and this is what my motivation is these are what my needs are this is what my potential risk is and then that can have life throughout the organization and help other people understand well hey no this is a customer on the phone and yes it's with ABC company but now I know a lot more about them in the background from an analytics standpoint I think a lot of people have been focused on some marketing analytics and and that's fantastic that they've been trained to focus on for lack of a better word so for email marketing of course you're taking a look at email open rates CTA call to action click rates those are things that people are really familiar with and platforms like a HubSpot do a great job reporting on that but I think what people are still trying to identify is how do video metrics what kind of data do I need to look at what am I analyzing is it number of views is it repetitive views is it frequency of viewing of my videos so I think really depending on where your video is in the in the pipeline that will determine what your metrics are as an example for our customer who's marketing b2b services in Africa just simply that touch getting people to take a look at that video and then consequently following it up four weeks later six weeks later with a different type of video so that first touch and that repetitive touch are massively critical for customers that are just really getting started with it we find it's a little bit easier for them to talk about views because then they can get an idea okay well I'm getting some quick wins and then they can get some ideas of where they might need to be publishing that on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or what have you and then we start getting a little bit deeper okay are these so let's take a look at your viewers let's take a look at for example your contact and HubSpot let's look at the video that they looked at some let's take a look at how many videos they've looked at and let's see if they've progressed through the journey where what have they done after they've looked so they clicked on that CTA have you had any other type of engagement and those are the types of metrics that we would measure when we are a little bit further on down the pipeline when you're really using video to start really explaining things in depth when you're losing video to really build that build that consideration piece of the journey and support that decision part of the journey and that's where we really want to take a look at what is that contact that you are doing in HubSpot what is what are the which the history of that contact and let's take a look at what's been of high impact for them okay well these videos have been higher impact now let's take a look at other contacts that have a similar profile see if we can reach out to them in a different way in terms of getting started with video I have to say I'm I'm even though I do a lot of public speaking and I will be involved in a lot of presentations I'm still actually a shy person at the end of the day so it was a little hard for me personally to take some of those first steps I think a lot of people have the same thing they see themselves on video or they see a photo of themselves and they think oh I don't want to do this we started just simply with the basics jumping into deep water and saying we're going to shoot some videos we're going to start with an expert series so a few of my partners and I we would just literally some years ago just hook the camera up to the laptop and start shooting start shooting a video and fine-tune it a little bit later and we would take a look at what we did we realized we made some mistakes we would go back and see what we can do to edit and and see how we could repurpose and then just try again and I have to say I can't really give any better guidance than that you just have to jump in you have to see what makes sense if you personally have such a fear of being on camera I'm positive there's somebody in your organization that loves it so if it's not you find a great advocate and then be able to go ahead and and give them some scripts give them some guidance help them along and you find yourself really jump starting your video strategy really quickly isn't it isn't it funny because really you all of a sudden are so critical personally of how you are on video you're critical of your looks and you're critical of your voice but I think a lot of people don't actually think about the content what you're sharing and if and and you know of course as an expert and whatever it is that you're field you find that people really really not only love to get advice and they love to get tips and they're really happy for you to share the expertise but it makes so much of a difference if they can see you if they can put the face to a name it makes it personal and what we end up finding is that you end up developing a personal relationship with people that you've never met and that's again bringing that human-to-human interaction back so we found people saying ah we love your video or we saw this particular series and tell me a little bit more can I invite you to to this place or that place or I'd like to have you come into the organization we don't find that as often with things like podcasts but we definitely find that with video because people are really making that personal connection that literally no other media can so so we're super excited about it and we're really like I said we're really happy that it can help re-energize that human-to-human that in person interaction that I think sometimes we've lost over the past couple of years in terms of video marketing there's a huge amount of opportunity of course naturally I think where I see it most is to be able to again in a very structured away in a way that you're really using your video to target personas to target markets that previously you've never been able to target our world is so small of course with social media and with our digital world content can go viral in seconds but I really I'm seeing people in a structured way saying we have to have video as part of our marketing strategy and we're actually going to be using it to test drive our product in new markets how can you do that you can do that you can do that a couple of different ways one way is to invest a huge amount of money and go do research and a lot of people will still still do that but for companies that don't want to do that or that can't do that I think having a mix of video marketing to be able to do that go to market assessment to be able to try products in new areas to be able to reach out to different personas that's where I think it's going to be the sweet So it's not necessarily going to be you know it's not rocket science I think it's just using video in a different way that people hadn't before and again I think more of that person-to-person interaction especially for people that are a little bit further on down the funnel I see salespeople will have I see the opportunity for salespeople to use video just exploding the personalized video where you're able to reach out directly to a contact in another region or another country and have a personalized message that we're really finding having great impact and I think that's going to be transformative for sales and I think video in the context of being able to reach new markets bring products to new areas target new personas with low impact and minimal cost that's going to be a great opportunity for companies as well too