Jason Miller, LInkedIn - Video Marketing: How to Do It Yourself

So I'm the head of social content in EMEA for LinkedIn marketing solutions, Linkedin sales and marketing solutions, and I just finished a conversation around what I like to call do it yourself marketing. So, since we're in London, do it yourself movement was born out of punk rock in the 70s, and they gave birth to this whole, you know, way of doing things and kind of cutting out the middleman and taking a punk approach to things. So I thought, what would happen if you took that approach to marketing and it started like, didn't over complicate everything, but just said, you can do this yourself, don't need a huge team, don't need a huge budget, but let's look at doing something really cool today for tomorrow, something that, what's the technology in front of us that we aren't leveraging to the fullest extent, and how do we put that to work for us smarter with the content that's already existing, so we focus on sort of, it's this thing I call the Big Rock strategy, which came from my days at Marketo, so the Big Rock is sort of one substantial piece of the ground, one substantial stake in the ground piece of content around a conversation you want to own. So, how do I advertise effectively on LinkedIn, how do I drive thought leadership on LinkedIn, those are just a couple of the questions we have that Big Rocks kind of deliver, and so we think of it as Doug Kessler, my friend from Velocity Partners, would say, one home run piece of content per quarter, a big, meaty, substantial piece of content that you can sort of slice and dice and leverage throughout the quarter, throughout the year, even further sometimes, so, but anything from e-books to videos, info graphics, I mean, pretty much anything you can, any way you can think of telling a story or creating some piece of content that can help answer a question and search results or whatnot, so that's where we focus. So, it's interesting, especially for B2B, I don't think we've figured out how to scale video, I don't think we've figured out how to do video on a budget, so, how do I think about video? Well, last year, LinkedIn introduced native video to the feeds, who are members, and we're starting to roll that out to company pages now, and in a very short time, we're launching a sponsored video content as well, but it's interesting, because I think the conversation around video, to a lot of maybe B2C folks, a little bit tired, like maybe they haven't figured it out, but I think the conversation around video for B2B marketing, specifically on LinkedIn, what does that look like, what does success look like? I don't know what the answer to that is quite yet. We have some beta customers who are doing quite well, and some members who are leveraging video quite well, so it's gonna be interesting to see what video holds for our members, especially in the B2B space for 2018. Somebody asked me this the other day, we were just at Adweek, because it's overlapping right now, and I think it's interesting, because you're seeing a lot of scrappy, kind of startup B2B marketers, and I don't think they don't have access to a huge budget, and they don't have that mindset of, I have to create a commercial, right, so the B2C mentality, and so they're coming up with very unique ways to tell very short anecdotes, not full stories, but an anecdote, a piece of a story, in a really unique way, shot on an iPhone, but edited really well, and the audio's great, and so I think it's gonna be exciting to see these folks who don't have that television mindset, that television commercial mindset, and they're scrappy, and they're smart, and they're leveraging these emerging video platforms to tell really cool, sort of anecdotal stories. Maybe B2B marketers struggle with, what should this video be about, and does it have to be a talking head? That was kind of the session we did at Adweek, was beyond the talking head. Why does every video, B2B marketers, why is it a corporate boardroom conversation with a talking head with one angle, or why is it somebody walking down the street? There's a time and a place for that, but the real opportunity, I think, is if you have great content, if you have a blog, if you have e-books, if you have infographics, you have a script, right? If you have, every good video starts with a good script, and if you can take those scripts, shorten them down, condense them, turn them into a piece of video, I think that's the first step in leveraging what you have instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. And I don't think there's any more excuse around not tying pipeline or revenue, or some sort of customer lifetime value metric to your content. So whatever marketing elevation platform you're using, they all have the very similar capability to do so, but I mean, we look at, that's what we look at. We also look at, I have two dashboards. I have one for my team, which is a lot of engagement metrics, and the Google Analytics time on site stuff, to see who's there, who's engaging, if we're attracting the right audience. And then I have a separate dashboard for the execs of the C-Suites that actually show conversions, revenue driven, customer lifetime value, and then the video falls somewhere in between that, between completion rates, we look at views, of course, view through rate is not something we really pay attention to, because we don't have ads yet. But yeah, I think just, is the audience watching the video? Are they sticking around? Are they interested in the subject matter? That's what's interesting to us. Do you have a video, and you have a link, and they watch the video, click on the link, track that, did they convert? Do you retarget to them if they didn't convert? Do you put them into a nurture trial? What do you do? So I think it's all about mapping that journey, but video is certainly something you can't, you can't avoid any longer. And you have, like so many people are uncomfortable about being on video, and then the more you do the video, the more you just start to get excited about it. It's just like blogging for the first time. I was scared to death in my first blog, and it's terrible, it's a terrible blog. But once you put yourself out there, get a little traction, get a little feedback, you start moving forward. I think the same could be said with video.