Michael Barber, SVP, Chief Creative Officer - Godfrey

What will the video producer help you do? I'm Michael Barber, Senior Vice President and Chief Creative Officer for godfrey. Godfrey is a midmarket agency dedicated to telling the stories of industrial manufacturers. We help motivating the world change pieces, Street preview, floritideous and professional in-house both video production as well as editing and things like 3D animation, graphics, things of that nature. Video has become a really important component of how we tell our clients stories, not only just helping them bring products or ideas to market, but also how do they go about talking through those new products and experiences, whether that's through a webinar or through a white paper that's delivered via video. So it's become just an important component of all the tactics that we're doing for our clients. We do webinars for ourselves, both at Godfrey, if we're putting out a thought leadership piece or a white paper, how do we go about generating those conversations with potential prospects and customers. We also help our clients produce white papers as well and webinars that go along with them. So that could be anything from helping them concept what's the webinar topics and all of the content that's going to go with that webinar, from everything from developing what's the title to the actual description of that webinar, to from a tech side also helping them decide which particular platform they're going to utilize and how they're going to either monetize or distribute that webinar after the webinar is completed. So how do they utilize all their paid, earned and owned channels to actually generate more views of that webinar in the future. We live in a day and age where people want more visual or auditory based content. So although I don't think that we are seeing sort of the death of long form text based content, I think you're just, we have different attention spans and we need to be able to deliver content that works for people that are looking for long form content like a white paper, technical information that they want to get really in depth content about. But there's also certain personas as well as other types of audiences that are looking for those quick hits, right? They're just looking for, tell me the best of the best or tell me exactly what you're trying to get across to me in the simplest way possible. And a webinar, whether it's visual, right? Looking at through a video or doing some sort of auditory like podcast based webinar allows different types of people that want to learn information in different ways. All the different unique, allows us to be able to serve that information, whether it's via some sort of text based opportunity like white paper, whether it's bringing it to life in a visual or auditory based way. So we track video performance, whether it's a webinar or just any source of video content in a variety of ways. We typically try and look at more engagement metrics. We don't think just pure views are a perfect way to track whether a video is engaging or not. Looking at things like how long do they stay engaged with the video? So if it's a minute, looking at how much time they're spending on a 10%, 30%, 50%, 90% view rate. How long do they take to take an action? So some videos will actually embed conversion opportunities like, hey, we could do a lead gen opportunity within this piece of content for email addresses or text messages or phone numbers or something along those lines. So we're measuring not only just on engagement level, so how long they're spending based on the length of that video, but also are they taking actions from that video too? If there's a call to action to a website instead of that video, how many people are actually going to that unique URL that's happening within the video? So we're trying to measure beyond just what I would call soft vanity metrics like views and looking at how often they are engaged, whether it's total time that they're spending watching or whether they're taking action from actually watching that video or not. The next step after we're going through these conversion actions, whether it's a client or whether us, is it's setting up what are the tactics we're going to use to try and nurture those conversations. So that could be, hey, we're going to put them into an automation flow through email, trying to drip them additional content to see just how interested that they might be in the product or service that we're selling. The other thing is we add sort of the ability to score leads, right? So as they view those videos, if they're viewing for more than 50% giving them a higher lead score or if they convert on one of those conversion actions like a lead form or a phone number or within a text message opt-in, scoring those leads even higher. When they reach those lead thresholds, whether it's sales qualified, marketing qualified, making sure that they're getting to the right departments or team members so that they can act on those leads. So this is an interesting question. We have, we started doing some personalized videos, especially for prospects that we feel like we have a greater chance of actually landing a conversation. So, and it's been interesting to watch that sort of change over the last couple of years as prospects have gotten accustomed to a personalized video message. You know, five or six years ago, if a salesperson was sending a customized video message, there was almost this creepiness factor, this odd or weird factor that people would think about. But today, because we're all accustomed to understanding that we are being targeted, that everything is tracking all of our behavior and that at the end of the day, regardless of whether we like it or not, we know much more information on our prospects than they would probably like us to do so. We're starting to see more and more people be really attracted to that personalized opportunity. Whether it's personalizing the call to action for that video or actually personalizing the content inside that video to make it more applicable for that lead or that individual that we're marketing to. Some tips that I would give, two or three tips that I would give for marketers trying to leverage video is one, think about all the questions that are being asked of your customer service or sales team. So those could come from your FAQ page, they could come from customer service forms, they could come from just having conversations with your sales team of saying, what are the questions that all these potential customers are asking you? And then answer those top 10 questions, at least those top 10 questions with some sort of video content. You can distribute those in a variety of different ways. It also gives your sales team the ability to literally give them links that say, here are the links to those top 10 questions. So as you have a conversation with a customer, they can just drop them a link to get that question answered as easily as possible. The next thing I would say is any content that you're doing, make it as liquid as possible. So don't just understand that all of this content these days, especially video is being indexed by any given search engine. It's not just about owning the video that you're putting on your website by itself, it's about distributing it as well through all the channels that people are finding video content. So that may be any one of the big video sharing platforms that are out there. So make sure you're answering those questions, make sure you're distributing as much, and also just making sure you're experimenting with different features that you can do in video. You can do pre-roll, mid-roll, end of roll sort of calls to action conversions. You can be throwing in animations to get people more interactive as a part of that video experience. Taking that video content and utilizing it in other tactics that you're doing, maybe it's about utilizing video not just for your landing pages and microsites and questions that you're asking, but it's also embedding it within emails. It's also about making calls to action in all the different tactics that you may be utilizing or paying for, like a Facebook ad or a LinkedIn ad or the like, is leveraging that video in as liquid as way as possible. Some of the trends to think about for video in 2020 are understanding that different audiences are going to want different types of videos. For a long time, we've largely done just a, especially with our type of clients, we've done single cuts for some sort of tactic or campaign, like, hey, here's our 30, here's our 60, here's our 90 for different audiences. Now it's more than ever, I think it's about how we distribute all these different formats that we require for all the different places where we are distributing that content. So understanding that a video is not just a single use source of here's our video content and it's just done, like we've done the 30 second, we've done the 60 version of this particular spot. It's all how do we make it vertically oriented so it works within a 15 second story on Instagram or a piece of content within Snapchat. It's also understanding that when we're on, say, YouTube, we're going to want a more landscaped version of that video that's saying the same things, but it's just the format and the places where we're telling those stories, I think are going to become even more impactful because as consumers, we want that experience to be as seamless as possible. And if the video doesn't fit in our screen, if it feels like that marketer or brand isn't paying attention to the nuances of having a certain type of video inside of each one of these platforms, it's going to feel sloppy. So I think the one term we've got to keep in mind is that any video production we're doing is making sure that we've got all the different types of orientations of video, the different lengths of video so that we can be driving traffic from all different points where we're doing this storytelling and when we're promoting these videos. So the place where I think we're not leveraging video enough is not understanding that if somebody is coming from a video piece of content, they're going to expect to be told whatever messaging you're taking them to in a video specific way. So I think a lot of us think that, hey, we promote a piece of content like a video and that we take someone to a classic landing page that's just text and image based and that's enough. It's not. So for these audiences that have been attracted to our product or service or whatever we're promoting via video, we've got to continue to tell that through line with video to every step of the way. So that becomes like making sure that if they convert or they click on some video to a landing page that we own, it's telling the story or the messaging within video itself. If we are retargeting that individual outside of our website or our dot com, it's retargeting that individual with a rich media or video based piece of content versus it just being a retargeted ad that's using an image and just text, right? It's about understanding as we touch individuals, potential prospects or customers with a video based piece of content and they're very attracted that if we don't utilize that through line through all the tactics, we're probably missing an opportunity to continue to connect with that individual by not utilizing video through that connection opportunity or through that conversion opportunity.