Katherine Barrios - Video Across the User Journey

My name is Catherine. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Xeneta. We create an ocean freight benchmarking and market intelligence platform. And I'm responsible for marketing customer success teams. And at Saastra here in Europe, we talked about in the panel that I was on, about customer success, happiness, and how do we measure that. And in particular, my topic was more involving on how we integrate marketing customer success teams and all the different tactics that can be used there to make the customer successful throughout the entire journey, including sales. Video plays a key role in all parts of the journey. Not only from the acquisition perspective, so when we look at acquisition and sales and marketing, video plays a key role, but also in the retention of a customer and how we're able to deliver our message and make sure that we highlight what's valuable in our products and platform. Video definitely plays a huge role because people are able to engage better and learn better via video versus just text or basic content. So we're starting to use video at the top of the funnel, trying to get our BDRs then to also use video as much as possible, where it makes sense for certain prospects as an introduction to themselves. From a marketing perspective, also we want to use video where it makes sense, whether it's how-to video or explainer videos we have or overall brand video. We do see that people engage a lot more with that. And when we're on the retention side, on the customer side, and with customer advocacy, we also can introduce our customer success managers via video. Also, a customer advocacy manager can be using video to introduce certain programs as to make it relatable basically to the customer and our prospect that there is a person behind our business. So right now we're just looking at engagement. So are people looking at our video? Is that helping them? What's the path after that? Are they engaging with other content after that? Is video the first thing that brings them, enables them to continue their journey with us? In some cases it is, and we can tell that if we send static content, they may not engage with that. But if we send video content, then we've hooked them, which makes it easier for us to continue sending other things that nurture them in a better way. So looking at the engagement definitely helps us see what was the attribution, for example, if it was video or not, and helps us to replicate that as we acquire new customers and also for retention of customers as well. And so we have HubSpot as our main automation tool integrated with Salesforce. And then we're able to see not only the engagement that if people click on certain things, we can see that with content. If they click on a link that leads to a video, for example, we're able to measure that and see what is making a customer move down the funnel. In addition also is that we measure customer engagement via HubSpot as well, so whether they're engaging with different content and different video. It's important to try to have your data that you collect from customers and prospects in one place, because what we want to do is form a picture of a type of prospect or a type of customer. And if we know what makes a successful prospect or what makes a successful customer, we're able to, again, replicate that. So we can gather all of that data in one place. We have a more holistic view of what worked and what didn't work. And marketing automation is key for that because of the intelligence that it can give us as marketeers. In general, we can be lazy. We don't want to read things, right? Video is just much more attractive. You can make an impact into a prospect's journey much easier, much faster, and really just much stronger than any other form currently. And we are fighting for customers' and prospects' attention, right? They have things, digital world flying around all the time, and video allows people to just get what they need, the snippets, and make an impact quickly. And it's also engaging. And you have sometimes just a split second to get somebody's attention, and video does allow for that to happen. At Teneda, we have a quite well-established content strategy. I mean, it always can improve and improve in terms of our blogging and then how do we repurpose our blogs and how can we use other assets to support that. So video is playing a role in that where we're having some video couple that support our blog posts and more snippets and bite-sized ways of complementing our blog posts. In addition, it's repurposing our content is actually one of our key techniques and making sure also that our information is contextual pertaining to a particular persona that we're after. So being more focused and laser target our ideal customer. And that goes through all of the different channels. So we also are using social media to push out our content as much as possible, email nurturing as much as possible in order to make sure that we are targeting the right people and offering different types of content in different package forms so that people can consume as they wish. So I think the way people can connect to a company or particularly a product is that you have to touch something that does create a type of emotion somehow. And even for us, we work in the shipping industry and in some cases you can find that to be very emotional unless you're in the shipping industry. But if you roll things back, it really affects every single person's life somehow. And video allows for that emotion to come to life with not only imagery, with voiceover that's used, with any type of audio that's used. And all of that together creates a story that allows people to connect to what you're saying. And video is the true catalyst for connection of emotion and feeling to any type of product and allows that story to be told in the best way possible. Overall, I believe what's important is to first align the teams, align behind a common strategy and a common acquisition strategy and an ideal customer profile through your commercial team, sales, marketing, customer success, and then also down to your technical team, the product and engineering to make sure that everybody is aligned in what kind of customer we want to have, what makes a customer successful, how can we provide value to that customer and make sure that we are creating a product that people want to buy, and then essentially all of the different tactics and channels that all the different teams use to make that a reality, right? Because we eventually want our customers to remain customers for life and help us bring in new business. So the alignment between teams, I believe, is something that needs to really happen and sometimes many companies, including ours, are sometimes too slow at aligning our teams. So that would actually be my advice is to really align your teams along the customer journey with using things like video and other types of content and making things contextual throughout all the different phases of a journey.