Kathleen Booth, Vice President of Marketing - Prevailion

My name is Kathleen Booth and I am the vice president of marketing at Prevailion. I came to InBound in part because I was speaking and presenting about building a brand publishing business and how that can really amplify the results you get from content marketing. But But I'm also here to learn about different approaches to marketing, different strategies that I can take back and use to build a strategy for Pavilion. Video is going to be critical for us, particularly because we're really looking to build not just a marketing platform to generate leads, but to build a brand and to build thought leadership within the industry. The product that we're building is different than anything that's ever been on the marketplace before in the cyber industry. Video is going to be really important for us because we need to not just generate leads, we need to educate the market about what it is we're selling. We're building a product that hasn't existed before in the cyber security industry and video is really the only medium that I think is going to be truly effective at communicating what that product is and how it will serve the market. We're in the process of building a new website, so video will definitely play a big part in that, but I think it's going to be central to our larger multi-channel strategy. Social media, email, it will be very important. We're trying to reach a hard to reach audience, the C-suite and Fortune 100 companies, and so having videos in the email will make a big difference in getting through to those people. But I also think it's actually going to be very important as part of our strategy to get our marketing assets on other people's platforms. Guest articles on other sites, video interviews that we can distribute through other companies' YouTube channels or through their email newsletters, that type of video is going to be critical for us in order to get placements on those different channels. We're creating a category that hasn't existed before, so there's a ton of education that has to happen with that. We need to do that in every form possible. People need to read about it, they need to hear about it, and they need to see it. Video is going to be very important as part of our strategy to explain exactly what it is we're bringing to the market. Video analytics are definitely important to us, and I think we use video in two different ways. I look at it as there's marketing video, which is the one to many video, and we're definitely going to be looking at views and engaged time in that video. Obviously, there's no point in having a video if people aren't going to watch it and hear the whole message, so that's important. We also do a lot with one-to-one video, and the analytics behind that are critical. The videos that we put in our one-to-one sales emails and the outreach we're doing, knowing whether somebody has actually watched that is vital. Yes, analytics are absolutely central to our video strategy. Video in sales outreach is a total game changer. I've experimented with it in a couple of different positions that I've had, and this is one of the things I'm really excited to bring to the team at Prevalion. When you put a video in an email, it absolutely makes a difference in terms of getting the recipient to engage with the email, having them feel that it's a more personal form of outreach, them being able to see your face, see your smile. It makes a huge difference. One of the things I'm really excited about is building a culture of video within the company. I come from a background where I've worked in various settings where video has been a part of our daily lives and the way we interact with each other internally in the company. A lot of times marketers think of video as something that you use to reach your external audience, but I think it's equally, if not more, effective in communicating internally. As somebody in marketing, the relationships that I build with my product team and my sales team are vital to my success. Using video to communicate with them, to give them updates on where we are in terms of developing marketing assets and making sure that that communication between the teams is really strong, video is so, so helpful for that. I think video has a really big role to play in every aspect of the customer experience. So obviously in marketing we focus on, in many times, the first touch the customer has with us. I think there's plenty of potential for video there in terms of a customer or prospective customer finding you on social and seeing a video or finding you organically and watching a video. But there are so many more touch points that a customer has with you throughout their journey. In the sales process it's important. When a customer is onboarding we sell a software product and I think video can play a great role in smoothing out that onboarding process and making it more enjoyable for a customer and reducing the amount of friction. Then once they're using the product, I think there's definitely an opportunity for ongoing customer education to make sure that they're getting the most value out of the product. That helps reduce churn. It also, I think, makes our customer support function more efficient. So I definitely see roles for it throughout the entire customer journey. Every video that we make serves a purpose. And usually, especially as a marketer, that has something to do with getting someone to take an action as a result of watching the video. So having a call to action in there is important and making it clear and compelling and incentivizing that person who's watching that video to take the next step, whether that's to book a meeting or to check something out on your website, to sign up for an event or register for a webinar. Whatever that is, as a marketer, it's all about getting somebody to take the next step. I've spent the last 12 years of my career in the agency world, and it's been very interesting to watch how the agency attitude towards video has evolved. A few years ago, I think it was seen as a nice to have. And companies, after they were deep in their marketing strategies, would then think, oh, now I can invest in video. And I think that's really flipped in many ways. I'm now working in-house in a company, and when I look at our marketing strategy, I think of it as video first, not video second or last. When I think about building a team, which is something that I'm working on, having a videographer in-house is actually going to be a part of our strategy. Whereas I look at how companies approached this a couple of years ago, and it wasn't ever let's have a videographer internally. It was let's hire an agency, let's make a few videos. It's totally changing. And when I walk around a conference like Inbound Now, I see people with video equipment, I see individuals with their cell phones taking video. It's become a part of our everyday lives.