John Fernandez - Video Content Marketing at Scale

So our talk was a little bit of an introduction about Contently. We launched our Contently One platform yesterday here at Marketo Summit, which is awesome. You know, Contently, we believe in the power of storytelling. And we have a content operating platform that we're honored by the fact that many of the world's largest brands use us to really engage and connect with their audiences. And so Contently One is the one platform that actually unifies technology and talent, our network of over 100,000 freelances and our strategic services as founders of content marketing to really help you get that content mastery that everybody's trying to get to. We presented was Brown Brothers Harriman, who's one of our financial services clients, has done an amazing job with a very small team of three using Contently and Marketo to produce over 500 pieces of content as an organization, wonderful initiatives such as Women and Wealth to connect with their audiences, even though they're much smaller than their competitors, being able to just every single day get better. And for them, the story was a lot about how they were here one year ago with the ink freshly wet on a contract with Marketo, going around the sessions, being really intimidated, and that one year later they've already had some meaningful results as a business was really wonderful and they had a fantastic story. Cool. That's awesome. Can you tell me a little bit about how a team can scale with their content, but more specifically with video content? Well that's a great question. I think scale is something we're all being asked to do and scale is really just another way of saying do more with less. It's shorter, it's more engineering-like, but it's certainly one where the challenge of how do you create content that for us is accountable and that's something we're big fans of is how do you produce accountable content. It's not really content for content's sake. If you go, hey, here's a blog post or here's a wonderful video, people can watch it and say, oh wow, that's awesome, but what business drivers is it making? And so for us, accountable content is really about four things. One, what's the strategy? What are your personas? What is their journey? What is their pain? We're just trying to reach out to them and make that connection with them that says, hey, you're not alone in this problem and we can help. A lot of it's about process. What is the internal process of getting content created? It takes a lot of steps in a lot of organizations. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen and even in a lot of organizations, especially those in regulated industries or publicly traded companies, when the content is finished, it's still not finished because then you have review cycles and processes. And then obviously the content itself, how is it compelling? Is it high quality? Is it not pitchy and selly? Is it actually just connecting with your audience and educating them? And then ultimately it's the results. How is that piece of video driving results? Now maybe it's revenue. As someone who has revenue in his title, I'm partial to that, but not every piece of content can do that. Sometimes it's, hey, is it creating pipeline? Is it creating leads? Is it scaling? Are you able to create more content, more video, cheaper, faster? Or maybe it's stuff like engagement and views, something that you would have to replace by going out and paying for. What's a quantifiable number that you can take back to your CFO, CEO and say, hey, you saw this video. It was wonderful. It's great. It looks cool. But it's also driving a business metric that you and the executive suite at the board level, at the investor level care about. That's how you get the budget and resources to really scale. More specifically, then, what are some key metrics you would suggest that helps marketers improve the ROI? Well, everything you can do to try to link to revenue is always good. The more you have your buyer journey mapped out and understanding, awareness level video will generally look more at volume. That's where you're more quantitative. Are you getting people viewing it? Are they sharing it? Is it getting the attention that it needs? As you get through to consideration and decision, you want to get quantitative metrics have a way of being very easily gamed. You can always throw more traffic on it that is the right traffic. Can I also get some quantitative metrics in there? Can I see how the video itself is performing in the larger context of a page? Are people actually getting to the end of the video? Are you creating a call to action within that video that's being followed up on? There's a time component, which is, is this speeding up my sales cycle? Is it something that's actually causing people to make that next step in their journey? That's something that we find is really important and video is really an important format because the great thing about it is it forces you to watch it continuously. Text can be asynchronous. I can stop reading a book and pick it up right where I left off. It's harder to do that with some videos, especially shorter ones. You need to have the full attention of the viewer. They have to be watching. They have to be listening. There's very rare moments where you actually get people's full attention these days. Video is a great way to make that message come through, especially in the transition points. Getting them into a funnel or getting them to make a decision. Video can be a very, very useful tool, but you want to make sure you've got a mix of your quantitative and qualitative metrics because it's very easy to play with one of the two. Making sure both go up is the hard part. Lastly, just to build off of that, what are your thoughts on the future of video marketing? I think the future of video marketing has a lot more to do with the hardware in some ways than the software. Video is very portable. I can pull my phone out now and watch it. I think the question is mobile is becoming a bigger issue for buyers. We're seeing it so much in B2C, which is where it's starting first, but it's now creeping into B2B enormously. How do you engage people with mobile? Obviously, folks are pushing things like AR and VR. I'd love to have the Google glasses where I can see video. I might start walking into things. There's probably some complications around that, but how do I break through? It's more of a cocktail. Nothing is going to work 100% of the time. You can't have a strategy that is just text-based. You can't have a strategy that is just video-based. You've got to figure out what are my personas doing and what resonates the most with them. I think it's hard to fake. You can have a pretty beautifully designed webpage with some pretty bad text content on it, but video production is something that shines through. I think from a brand perspective, with high-quality videos, you can show, hey, these people put some work into this. From a buyer perspective, if you say, I appreciate and understand the message, it helps me, and these people seem to care, that's a great way to build credibility. That's a great way to build heart-share and mind-share in the view of buyers. I expect videos should be being used more now than it is, but it's certainly all going up.