Driving Value Through Video Content Marketing

How can you drive value at every stage of the buyer's journey, with video content? Our Head of Sales, Fes Askari details how marketing and sales teams can use a variety of video formats at different stages to drive value and help both prospects and customers. 

You can also view the full video here.

Driving Value With Video Across the Buyer's Journey

Full Transcript

Hey guys Fes here from Strategic IC.

In October, we have the CEO of Vidyard, Michael Litt flying over to London and joining us for our breakfast session on the 10th, where we're going to be talking about disruption and changes happening in B2B sales - so, modern digital selling, and also how marketing and sales teams can drive more value through video content.

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And that's something that I wanted to talk more about in today's video, because one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. That's a staggering insight from Forrester research a while ago. I think we can all appreciate the way that video and on demand content has changed the way that we engage with brands, and the way that we learn, whether it's from our personal or professional lives and the way that we buy and consume. So video is having a great impact, a considerable impact across many facets of our personal and professional lives.

[In this video] I wanted to connect that to the buyer's journey, and how marketing and sales teams can add value through video at each stage of the buyer's journey. So if you break the buyer's journey down into the awareness, consideration, decision, and customer engagement stages, you can start to evaluate how your teams can drive more resonant messaging, create more clarity around your value proposition at each stage of that journey.

So at the top of the funnel you may be creating branded video content to promote your message to the marketplace at scale. You may be adding video to paid ad campaigns because that boosts ad engagement by 22 percent. You may be including video on landing pages because that increases conversions by 80 percent. There's a lot of great value coming through video at the top of the funnel. In fact, Matthew Barby Head of Growth at HubSpot, recently did an interview where he talked about the way that Google ranks video content above certain other content formats because it resonates better with searchers for specific terms.

So it's really about evaluating how you're using video across different channels and tactics. And that's just at the top of the funnel.

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If we move into the middle of the funnel, the consideration to decision stage, where you're moving MQLs or leads into sales conversations, you can consider this from both the sales and marketing perspective. So from the marketing perspective, you're going to be creating customer stories (and I'll talk about that in a minute), but from the sales team perspective, Chris Ortolano from the sales stack community has been doing some great work with Vidyard and he's put together this resource called Stories in Focus. It's a library or resource of searchable interviews that Chris has created, that talk about how to create compelling stories - and combining that with the power of video. So you can create customer stories, sales stories and marketing stories. And sales stories is really interesting. It's about enabling the sales team with storytelling that they can use when they're connecting with buyers throughout the stages of the buyer's journey. For example, you get an MQL, a lead in, and you provide that to the sales team. They're going to have, hopefully, some insights from your CRM and marketing automation about what that contact is engaging with on your website. There may be a lead in HubSpot, so they'll be able to see the insight from the contact record there. And then they're going to be doing some research on LinkedIn perhaps, and they're going to start building up an understanding of who this potential customer is, what their challenges are, and what they're interested in. Then they [your sales team] can really start to create a compelling message to that prospect at the one to one level, and create a video that helps to engage that buyer in email or through social channels. And it's really all about that one to one message and creating a meaningful engagement when sales outreaches to the contact.

Then from a marketing perspective, you're going to start creating video stories - and case studies are a great middle of funnel piece of content. It's even more valuable if you can help give your customers a voice about how you add value to their teams.

So Jed is VP of Marketing at one of our clients, Acxiom, and he's created a really compelling story about how as an agency we've helped drive more value through their marketing programs, working with their marketing teams at Acxiom. And it's just again, helping to communicate the value of your proposition and how you add value to your potential customers throughout the buyer's journey.

Lastly, in terms of internal coms, we [at Strategic] have the ability to communicate to internal stakeholders and external customers using video. Let's just take the use case of when you're sharing reports. So often when you share a report, maybe an excel spreadsheet, it's often more beneficial to have a call and talk through that report because it adds context.

Well, if people aren't available for a call, then creating a short video showing that along with the excel report or a Databox report, helps to create context and spotlights insights and data that creates a compelling story, that creates action. So again, it's not just about using video to generate awareness. It's not just about using video to engage prospects. It can be used to help communicate internally and also with customers, so I just wanted to share some use cases there across the buyer journey.

Lastly, how do you do this? Well, if you want to enable your teams with short format video tools, Vidyard has a really effective way of doing this. You can go to the chrome store, add the Go Video, chrome extension, and you can quickly start to create short format videos to share internally or to show externally with customers.

If you'd like to know more about this, message me. Otherwise, we have the breakfast session on the 10th of October with Michael from Vidyard. If you'd like to attend this session, in London, drop me a message and I can share the registration page.

Video transcribed with Temi.