Every time you feel like you have digital figured out, it changes. You master data sourcing, but then everyone adopts AI. You perfect email outreach, but buyers move to Slack. You invest in social, but influencers steal your emoji-laden thunder.

Can’t a marketer catch a break? We’re afraid not. Technology marches on, and as the planning season is upon us, the chimerical question raises its head once again:

How will you stand out in 2018?

Lucky for you, you don’t have to answer it alone. At Fast Forward—Vidyard’s virtual video marketing and sales summit—be the first to hear ideas from Laura Ramos, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester; Jeff Loeb, CMO of Vidyard; Megan Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB; and 29 more experts. There will be 20 sessions in all!

(Seats are limited, so if you’re even thinking of going, best to reserve yours now.)

Throughout that day, they’ll explode your conception of what it was like to market in 2017, and what you learn about next year, just might blow your mind.

Here’s a sneak peek:

3 questions that’ll blow your video marketing mind:

1. How are you going to stand out in 2018?

If you were hoping that the answer is “dust off the trusty old funnel,” you’ll be sorely disappointed. Top marketers everywhere are flipping their funnels, adopting ABM, and experimenting with alternate channels and content formats like their lives depend on it. AI chatbots are exploding in popularity, especially as website lead-gen tools, and video is entering a renaissance, delivering click-through and open rates the likes of which haven’t been seen since AT&T ran the world’s first banner ad.

The question, then, is what combination of these new tools will you use to stand out? Which new ones will emerge and which will prove to be next year’s ROI cash cows?

Fast Forward offers answers. Join us and catch The CMO’s Perspective: What’s Hot And What’s Not For 2018.

2. How will you innovate with video formats?

Video formats are as varied as the technology is ubiquitous and next year marketers looking for an edge in attention-seeking scenery will show us things we’ve never seen before. Some of it will be technology-driven as they experiment with interactive forms, post-roll gating, and mass-individualized content. Other parts of it will be format and story-driven, as marketers get back to their home-video roots and eschew production value for austere authenticity.

How will you give your videos a new twist that surprises and delights the world-weary viewers of 2018?

Attend Fast Forward to catch The Rise Of The Video-Enabled Business and see.

3. How will you use analytics to reach peak performance?

Ever since marketers opened the Pandora’s box of attribution, there’s no going back on delivering “the numbers.” As Marketo put it so presciently many years ago, “Marketers finally have a seat at the revenue table.” Today, that means marketing on a performance basis and aligning more closely with sales to act as one unified revenue team. But what does next year hold? What channels can you plumb for data-driven advantages? Will the alignment singularity finally occur? And how will you become next year’s digital disruptor?

We guess you’ll just have to Fast Forward to find out.

The post 3 Questions That’ll Blow Your Video Marketing Mind appeared first on Vidyard.

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Real World Growth Hacking: A Guide to Getting Customers for the Unfunded

“1.2 million uniques in 18 months.”

Sounds impressive.

Looks amazing at first blush.

Until you start reading. Until you start listening.

And then you see it. Spot it from a mile away.

“Raised $XX million from Joe Schmo venture partners” in fine print towards the bottom. Like it was insignificant. Like it didn’t change anything.

Immediately you should see red flags. Instantly you should be put off.

It’s not just the money. It’s the access. It’s the network. It’s the one-line email to a friend of a friend that gets you in touch with every top media property on the ‘net.

I’m not hating. Neither should you. It’s just that the numbers and therefore, the article, become farce. Those “tips” they used. Those “hacks” they employed.

Writing “really great content” isn’t the reason they hit 1.2 million uniques in 18 months. Going from $zero to $millions overnight is. Going from from 10 beta users to 10,000 the next day is, too.

Talent starts listening. Prospects start buying. Journalists start taking notice. Instant credibility hits as a byproduct.

All of those things are great. If you can get them. But you can’t. Because you’re un-funded.

So here’s what you should be doing instead.

The biggest problem facing the unfunded

Raising money isn’t the end goal. It’s also the exception in most cases.

You wouldn’t get that from reading most tech sites. But in reality, out there in the real world, it’s true.

The problem is that if Paul Graham ain’t on your speed dial, you’re gonna need a second approach.

‘Cause the things that work in that tiny, miniscule, subsection of a market won’t work for you. Or me. Or most.

The context is completely different. Which means the strategies, tactics, and campaigns are, too. Or should be, at least.

Here’s an example to make this crystal clear.

Let’s go on a new trip. Pick anywhere at all. New York City sounds fun.

So what do you do first? You don’t go to “Hotel XYZ.” Not initially, anyway. Instead, you go to Expedia or TripAdvisor or Yelp or Hotels.com or Google Travel or wherever.

And what do you look at first, before price?

Names you recognize.

That’s because 59% of people buy from companies they recognize.

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Another study from a different source found the same exact findings.

“70% of US consumers look for a ‘known retailer’ when deciding what search result to click.”

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“Brand bias” is way out in front, before pricing for most people.

How about one more for the skeptics out there?

MarketingExperiments.com ran a simple conversion test. They did all the crap A/B tests you hear about on most sites.

They did the headlines the buttons the CTAs the colors and the rest of the junk “experts” say you should be doing.

TL;DR? None of that stuff moved the needle. Not significantly. Not permanently.

One test, however, did.

Except you’re probably not going to like the answer. Not if you’re unknown and unfunded, anyway.

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The test the moved the needle on subscriptions by 40%?

The freaking logo.

“There was no significant difference between any of the treatments. The Boston Globe audience is highly motivated, and putting a button above or below the fold didn’t matter as much as the newspaper’s respected journalism.”

That’s it. All it took was the brand name. Because it’s known. Because it’s respected. Because people can trust it.

Because it’s been established over the past century.

This is the part no one tells you online. This is your biggest problem.

It’s not Skyscrapers. It’s obscurity.

Funded companies (usually) get instant credibility. By association. If they don’t completely suck.

But you gotta get it any way you can get it.

The unfunded doesn’t. There’s no awareness. Which means there’s no trust. Which means nobody’s buying.

Social proof ain’t a gimmick. It’s validation. And you need it. So here’s how you go about getting it.

First, here’s what won’t work for you

All companies have constraints.

It’s time for the funded. They need to go big, fast, now.

It’s money and notoriety for the unfunded. Time? You should have loads of it. You don’t have many customers distracting you, right?

The point is that you don’t have a ticking-time bomb. You might feel pressure to scale to X or hit $Y in revenue in Z months. You might need a certain number to live off. But there’s no pressure to do this by the end of Q3.

Hell, the unfunded has probably never done anything by Q’s in the first place.

So it’s a marathon, not a 5k. And that changes a few things.

❌ SEO is a no-go. Yes, it’s important. But no, it won’t help you in the early going.

Search engines are literally designed to reward entities that have been around the longest, have been cited the most, and already have that big brand name.

All of which you don’t have. And won’t. At least, not in the next few months.

❌ Advertising, too, won’t help you. Yes, it works. Amazingly well if you do it right. Which you won’t. Because you don’t have enough capital.

And even if you did, it probably should go somewhere else, first. Like people. Like design. Like product quality.

Because your product is your marketing today.

So you still need awareness. You still need to build a brand. And you still need customers.

Just realize now, up front, that almost 90% of your options have been eliminated.

Counterintuitively, that’s OK. You can focus now. You can start off in the direction that works with what you’ve got.

1. Align yourself with others

You need eyeballs, leads, and credibility.

Fortunately, other organizations already have those things.

So go get them. Even if it costs you a little more.

Example: Who’s the biggest player in your industry?

If we’re talking B2C ecommerce, it’s Amazon. 44% of all searches start (and end) there. They make up almost half of all U.S. online retail sales.

Walls Need Love, a home decor site you’ve probably never heard of, got their initial break through Amazon.

So too, did The Daily Fairy. “Amazon’s been incredible for my business. I started selling on Amazon in October of 2015, and it’s doubled my sales. What that tells me is that there’s a whole slew of people,” according to Emily, The Daily Fairy’s founder.

Amazon is an obvious first choice. But they’re far from the only option.

Walls Need Love also works with marketplaces like Etsy, Wayfair, Touch of Modern, Fancy, and even Urban Outfitters.

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Right off the bat, Walls Need Love looks for marketplaces that have decent terms (nothing longer than net 30, no restrictive shipping policies, etc.).

But next, they’ll look at promotion options.

For example, some marketplaces will give them advertising options to put them front-and-center on their site. Except instead of charging them out of pocket, they’ll do it as a rev-share agreement.

That means they waste nothing on fruitless ads. They’re not paying for impressions or clicks or any other meaningless metrics.

Instead, they’re only ‘paying’ (or giving up a share of the revenue) when a real buyer comes through their doors.

That gives Walls Need Love what they need most: awareness. It gives them credibility. It gives them recognition.

And it also gives them a shot to re-sell or up-sell to them later to make up that cost.

It’s no different in the B2B world.

Same objective, different tactics.

If you sell any kind of inbound marketing, you’d align yourself with HubSpot. They’re like the Salesforce of the marketing industry. The biggest, brightest, most well-known alternative.

That starts with the certifications they offer.

Sure, you and I know these are mostly useless. I’m not saying the information is bad. It’s not.

It’s just that it doesn’t ‘mean’ anything in real life. Except, to prospects. To potential clients. To people who aren’t as familiar with the ins-and-outs of the industry.

The next stop is a partnership.

Most software companies offer something similar.

Unbounce has an official one. Wistia has one, too.

The Moz one is unofficial, but still impactful.

Personally, I’ve never heard of Mammoth Growth. But they’re an official Kissmetrics partner. So they must be good!

See how this works?

You’re not just another nameless, faceless “marketing company” now. You’re a “HubSpot partner.”

You send a cold outreach email on LinkedIn or, god forbid, you meet someone at a networking event, and you’re an “Unbounce partner.”

All of these programs often offer education, too. They can connect you internally to other companies who’ve been where you’ve been and scaled up.

So you can learn. So you can level up. So you don’t go it alone.

At the very least, you barter. You trade time for eyeballs. You trade expertise for eyeballs.

You do whatever it takes to get eyeballs.

Basically, you need early wins that you can leverage for more future wins. Start with legitimacy and credibility.

Because those pave the way for everything else.

2. Now emphasize those early wins

Here’s how it works in real life.

Someone finds you through a marketplace, a partner, a vendor, a supplier. They find you because you’ve seamlessly aligned yourself with them.

So they check it out. They click and look. You need to reel them in.

Let’s stick with the Mammoth Growth example because they do this better than most.

You hit their website and see this:

Pretty simple and straightforward. A consultation form on the far-right. Some basic copy about what they do and how they can help you.

Now, look over in the upper right-hand corner:

You only get three options.

Home introduces you to everything. It’s the high-level overview.

Case Studies dig a little deeper, showing off the third-party validation earned in the previous section.

Contact is the next step. It’s the thing you need to do next.

And that’s it.

Where’s the corny team page? You know, the one where the agency shows off their “culture” and their “personality” and their “quirkiness” that makes them the perfect hipster crew for you.

It’s not listed. Nowhere to be found.

Instead, the focus is squarely on building credibility.

Scroll down on the homepage and you see more partner badges:

What do these three partner badges tell you? What do these companies have in common?

Mammoth Growth is using these for credibility, sure. But more importantly, they’re subtly positioning themselves.

They have a speciality. They work with specific companies looking for a specific solution. And if you fit that mold, with that need, there’s no one better.

Keep scrolling and you see Testimonials.

Best of all, the people in these testimonials line up with the case studies above. So the work and results become real.

Head towards the bottom of the page and you see more client logos.

Some, again, are the exact same companies. That’s not a knock. It’s clever.

Sports Insights, for example, are featured in a case study, testimonial, and here again at the bottom.

You kill it with five customers out of your first 15. (Let’s be honest, there’s gonna be some losers in the early days.)

Fine! Celebrate those wins like there’s no tomorrow. Highlight the biggest, the best, the most well-known.

Look:

Not once are services discussed on the page. Not once do we delve into pricing. Not once do we figure out if there are two people in this company or if there are 500 across three countries.

But that doesn’t matter.

You see Walls Need Love is featured on the following and you know they’re legit.

Third-party validation isn’t the only criteria. It might be the most important. It gets people to recognize and trust you. That’s more than half the battle.

However, there’s still one subtle difference to launch you on your way.

You won’t get overwhelmed with traffic in the early days. No need to worry about servers going down.

But on the flipside, that also means you gotta convert what you get. Mammoth Growth get this right. The entire site experience is first-rate. Here’s why that’s important.

3. Simple, conversion-based design

Things is a task management app from the Cultured Code.

It wasn’t founded by ex-members of Facebook. It hasn’t raised a Series A, B, C, D, E, or even F. It’s not valued at $100,000,000,000 or some other similarly-fake number.

But it is freaking beautiful.

And that matters when 94% of your first impression online comes down to design.

Things has done the first two steps here brilliantly. They’ve leveraged others. Primarily, through their one thing: design.

Literally every single big review they’ve received mentions it:

But how do you find that? How do you know what that “one thing” should be?

You don’t. Your customers (or potential customers do). Which means you should ask them. Interview them. So you can pre-sell the vision to afford actually building it.

Just under the first homepage section on their site is an introduction video.

Thanks everyone for a fantastic launch! In case you missed it, check out the all-new Things and our launch video: https://t.co/MKwe8EdL9k http://pic.twitter.com/9YmZTgZbC7

— Things (@culturedcode) May 20, 2017

The reason here should be obvious.

Video is the best way to show off their primary competitive advantage. It’s something they can control. And it doesn’t require a Series A to pull off.

Almost every single stat shows that video produces the best ROI, grows revenue faster, and is preferred by customers.

Scroll down even further to get simple, transparent pricing plans:

A little further for Twitter mentions to also boost credibility:

And… that’s it.

Once again, no superfluous extras. The main menu only squeezes in the essentials:

“Simple websites” often perform better. Simple as that.

You have constraints. Often, it’s limited resources. It’s limited money and people.

That means you need to put the most of what you’ve got behind fewer things. Which means you need to make sacrifices. Which means you can only afford the essential.

The good news is that aligning those things with what’s proven to work can, well, work. No matter how much is left over in the bank.

Conclusion

Every single company is bound by constraints.

Every single decision maker needs to move the needle with a less-than-perfect hand.

Pocket Aces don’t just fall in the unfunded’s lap. You gotta make your own luck. You gotta pull off some bluffs.

Big bets can put you into trouble too early. You can’t afford to lose on big pots.

Instead, you need to win a bunch of little pots before you’re ready to go after the big ones. You need to capitalize on what you’ve got.

That starts with affiliating yourself with bigger players. Ride on their coattails. Do what they want so you get what you want.

Then, you leverage those first few wins. No matter how small. You put the attention on those things so it takes attention of you.

Next, you make what you have the best possible. Even if it’s not a lot. Even if it’s three pages instead of 100.

Make those three pages the best in the business. The best design, the best copywriting, the best social proof, the best video, the best feature/benefit examples, etc.

The funded can afford to diversify. Literally.

You can’t. And you won’t. At least, not for awhile. So don’t even try.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

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Timely and Relevant Is The Only Message That Matters

During the 2014 Grammy Awards, musician Pharrell Williams was seen wearing an unusual hat:

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Sure, he may have gotten some funny looks, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.

That is, until a certain fast food chain seized the opportunity to craft a clever tweet:

Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs

— Arby's (@Arbys) January 27, 2014

This was a spectacular feat on several levels. Many brands had been unsuccessfully trying to capitalize on the Grammys, but Arby’s nailed it.

It was also a great use of Arby’s social media persona. The restaurant even gained a funny response from Pharrell himself:

Y'all tryna start a roast beef? "@Arbys: Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs”

— Pharrell Williams (@Pharrell) January 27, 2014

Those two Tweets gave Arby’s a colossal amount of publicity, gaining tens of thousands of retweets in a couple of days.

And they did it all with just eight words and a related hashtag.

Why did it work so well?

This smart marketing move had two important characteristics. It was timely, and it was relevant.

The most successful marketing is timely and relevant, and as I’m about to explain, that’s all that matters.

It doesn’t matter if you have millions of social media followers. It doesn’t matter if tons of influencers are promoting your product.

If your marketing isn’t timely and relevant, it won’t succeed.

It’s getting tougher and tougher to do marketing right. People are pickier about what they consume, and they’ll ignore anything that rubs them the wrong way.

If you throw salesy terms at your customers and pressure them to buy, you’re not going to get a lot of conversions.

But if you can build a connection with your customers, they just might turn into lifetime brand advocates.

You need to reach your customers where they are. That’s why timely, relevant messages are crucial for your brand.

What exactly does timely and relevant mean?

First, let’s define these terms.

“Timely” and “relevant” aren’t just buzzwords. They have real implications for your business, and as it turns out, they’re fairly complex.

Let’s tackle timeliness.

Many marketing campaigns are timely but not relevant. Often, these campaigns fail.

Make no mistake––timeliness is crucial. But you can still fail if you send a message at the perfect time.

Consider the Race Together campaign that Starbucks put out in 2015.

The campaign definitely came at the right time. The coffee giant launched it in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, which had just happened the previous year.

The cases were still in the news, and Starbucks decided to create a dialogue about race. It should have been a match made in heaven, but it wasn’t.

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The campaign flopped quite badly.

The initiative itself was inherently flawed. It didn’t matter that it came at the right time because it just wasn’t the right marketing approach.

The race issue is definitely of intense importance, but the way it was approached was solidly off.

So timeliness is definitely important, but your marketing can’t be just timely. It also has to be relevant.

To be relevant, you have to think about your audience’s current needs, wants, and opinions.

You can’t base your ideas of relevancy off of old trends or data. You have to stay up to date and figure out what your customers want and like right now.

You have to think about what your customers want, where you can reach them, and how you can benefit them.

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If your audience isn’t interested in what you have to offer, they’re not going to listen to you.

If your audience isn’t hanging out in the same places you’re marketing, they’re not going to hear you.

If your audience doesn’t derive any value from your marketing, they’re not going to pay attention to you.

Last but not least, if you want to be relevant, your marketing has to fall in line with your audience’s values.

If you launch an initiative that your customers fundamentally disagree with, you won’t see much success. The same thing will happen if your marketing is insensitive or poorly done.

To sum it all up, relevancy means catering to your customers in as many ways as you can.

When you combine timeliness with relevancy, you get a one-two punch that almost never fails to convert.

The danger of the wrong message

To understand why timely and relevant matters so much, let’s consider some marketing efforts that failed miserably.

One of the biggest marketing fails in recent years has to be Pepsi’s controversial ad that was called “tone-deaf” by almost every media outlet in the world, from the New York Times to USA Today.

The 2017 ad involved TV personality Kendall Jenner taking part in protests and eventually offering a can of Pepsi to police.

Pepsi said the ad was meant to “project a global message of unity, peace, and understanding,” but it fell flat because the ad painted an unrealistic portrait of protests and the interactions between police and protesters.

Like Starbucks’s Race Together campaign, Pepsi put this out at the right time, in the wake of police protests that seemed to divide America, and the company’s intentions were positive.

However, the ad wasn’t relevant. It was far too staged and the situation far too impossible to relate to viewers.

To put it bluntly, the public thought the ad was a ton of crap and spoke out against it. (Pepsi removed the video from their channel, but the reuploaded version received over 150,000 dislikes!)

The flak that Pepsi received for the ad was more than negative publicity. Pepsi learned the hard way that the wrong message at the right time won’t work, and that was a wake-up call for businesses around the world.

You don’t have to be Pepsi or Starbucks to send the wrong message and alienate your audiences––it can happen to a business of any size.

SaleCycle found that out when its content strategy failed.

The B2B company wanted to produce more content and provide more value to its readers. So far, so good.

SaleCycle started publishing 2-3 pieces of content per week, and their overall content output soared.

However, they focused more on quantity and less on quality.

Even though they had 100 blog posts, just 10 of those posts made up half of their total blog traffic.

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The reason? They were publishing lots of content that their audience wasn’t interested in.

While it may have been timely, it wasn’t relevant whatsoever.

These examples prove that you need both timely and relevant marketing. You can’t just have one or the other.

Being timely but not relevant (or vice versa) is an awkward imbalance. It makes it seem like you’re kind of paying attention to your audience, but not really.

Both the Pepsi ad and SaleCycle’s content strategy were timely, but they weren’t relevant. In both cases, customers felt distanced from the business.

Ultimately, it’s your customers who decide whether or not your message are timely and relevant. That’s why you have to prioritize them.

You have to know your customers

Being both timely and relevant requires you to listen to your customers, get to know them better, and produce content that they want to see.

That sounds simple enough, but how does it play out in real life?

Basically, you have to continually track certain elements of your audience and use customer feedback to improve.

Okay, that still sounds simple. But trust me––there’s a lot to it.

Many businesses think that they can just glance at online reviews or social media posts to create timely, relevant messages.

But here’s the thing – customers want you to know them super well.

But the customer-business relationship is a two-way street. If you’re not doing your part, why should your customers?

So put in the extra effort to build personas, get to know what your audience wants, and cater to them.

Make “timely and relevant” your motto

I hope you’re convinced that timely and relevant is truly the only message that matters.

That doesn’t mean you’re done.

Understanding is only the first step. You have to implement it.

As corny as it sounds, being timely and relevant has to be something you are and not just something you do. (I told you it sounded corny.)

You might tell yourself that you’re being timely and relevant, but if your customers still aren’t happy, then you’re not doing so well.

Pepsi is a perfect example. When it created the disastrous TV ad, it wasn’t trying to deliver irrelevant content to their customers, but they misunderstood the kind of content their customers would connect with.

There’s no doubt that Pepsi thought it was delivering a message that was both timely and relevant.

Just like you probably think you’re delivering the right messages to your customers.

For all I know, you are. But the point is that you can’t ever assume you’re doing the right thing and turn a blind eye to your customers.

If you want to create the most timely and relevant messages, that concept has to be a focus throughout your company.

Everyone on your team should be thinking “timely and relevant.”

Think of Amazon’s mission statement. It’s easy to remember and permeates every level of the company.

Our vision is to be Earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.

Every Amazon employee knows that this is the goal. In the same way, your entire team should live and breathe “timely and relevant.”

That concept has to guide everything you do.

Your social media team should be thinking “timely and relevant.” Your product manager should be thinking it. Everyone from the interns to the CEO should be thinking it.

If everyone isn’t on the same page, then one person’s efforts could get completely lost in translation.

Conclusion

You care about your customers, right?

Obviously that’s a rhetorical question because you do care about your customers.

But be brutally honest with yourself: When you put out your content, run your shiny new marketing campaign, or release a new product, does that attention to your customers still come across?

The Pepsi and Starbucks fiascos proved that intentions don’t always translate into actions. What begins as a good-natured marketing plan may end up taking a nosedive.

As much as it might hurt to admit, you might be ignoring your customers.

And you might be sending your customers the entirely wrong message, which is directly caused by ignoring your customers.

At the heart of the matter, being timely and relevant is all about taking care of your audience.

If you listen to what your customers have to say and understand what they want, you’ll almost never send the wrong message.

You’ll understand your audience’s wants, needs, interests, and dislikes.

You’ll be able to see what kind of content is both timely and relevant.

To make it even easier on yourself, you can take advantage of Kissmetrics Campaigns.

 

Campaigns was developed with the goal of delivering the right message at the right time. You’re able to send emails based on your users’ behaviors. Essentially, Campaigns is a behavior-based email engine. You find a segment of your audience that needs a nudge, and you create and send your emails in Campaigns.

The engine runs on the fuel of behavioral analytics and segments. Behavior-based emails mean that your emails are much more likely to be timely and relevant to your users.

And instead of relying on basic metrics like opens and clicks, Campaigns digs deep and looks at behavioral analytics.

Is your marketing and content timely and relevant? Have you had issues delivering the right message for your customers?

About the Author: Daniel Threlfall is an Internet entrepreneur and content marketing strategist. As a writer and marketing strategist, Daniel has helped brands including Merck, Fiji Water, Little Tikes, and MGA Entertainment. Daniel is co-founding Your Success Rocket, a resource for Internet entrepreneurs. He and his wife Keren have four children, and occasionally enjoy adventures in remote corners of the globe (kids included). You can follow Daniel on Twitter or see pictures of his adventures on Instagram.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2xBseXl

Shock Talk: Shocking Ways to Build Brand and Generate Demand with Video

Is doing more with video still a horrifying concept for your marketing and sales teams? Does the idea of getting on camera send shivers down your spine? Are you paralyzed at the thought of how you would turn video content into real leads and real revenue? The truth is, video is a shockingly good way to build your brand, generate demand and accelerate the buyer’s journey, and it’s easier than you may think.

In this shocking twist on our video marketing Chalk Talks series, we unmask the potential of video for modern marketing and sales teams. See how you can cut through the flesh…I mean, the noise…with creative and educational videos (like this one), and how to use interactive content and video analytics to turn your viewers into victims…ahem, customers.

While the following program is intended for both mature and immature audiences, viewer discretion is advised.

If you’ve been scared straight and want to start doing more with video, check out our real Chalk Talks video series to learn all the latest best practices! You’ll find frighteningly educational videos on topics like:

• How to get more value (and leads) from your existing video assets
• Best practices for optimizing Video SEO
• Using interactive video to generate new leads and accelerate deals
• Using personalized video to stand out and boost response rates
• Using video for Account-Based Marketing (ABM), Events and more
• A framework for developing a video marketing strategy
• How to track and measure video performance and pipeline attribution

And as an extra treat, you’ll get inspired by how we create videos like Chalk Talks on a $0 budget. Happy Videoween!!

The post Shock Talk: Shocking Ways to Build Brand and Generate Demand with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

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3 Ways Video Helps Sales Teams Supercharge Your Conference Strategy

“One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school.” – Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite

One hundred and fifty. A number conceived by the anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, who posited that the maximum number of people you can keep relations with is 150.

Think about the number of people that were at the last conference you attended. Conferences are overwhelming. They are like Celine Dion concerts, except louder, harder to navigate, and harder to comprehend.

Before attending, we sign up for conferences and get dozens of emails asking us to spend time at various booths, breakfasts, and events. Most consist of the generic templates that sales reps love to use.

During the conference, you are busy learning, networking, and trying to get those premium front row seats for your favorite keynote speakers. With each vendor vying for your business card, it’s hard to keep track of all the conversations you’ve had along the way. Not to mention the days following the event when your inbox and voicemail fill up with different sales reps trying to regain your attention.

After several days of hustling, the question remains: how do sales teams distinguish themselves to the average conference attendee?

Here’s a way to approach connecting with conference attendees and generating pipeline for the next conference you’re sponsoring, and it uses the power of video. Given that it’s hard for attendees to remember who they spoke with at an event, video helps sales teams introduce themselves, recap conversations, and stand out during the post-event chaos.

Here are a few examples:

Before the event

Imagine cutting through that pre-event noise with something more personal.

Like we said, the same templates get shuffled around asking people for meetings, to come to breakfasts, and interact with vendors. There is nothing distinguishing them from the rest of the rabble. A personalized video invite is the best thing you can send to stand out in their inbox.

During the event:

“I don’t remember what we spoke about at your booth.” Sound familiar? With such a busy schedule, the last thing on the average attendees’ mind is keeping diligent notes on every vendor they interacted with.

Using video you can:

• Recap the session that your prospect presented
• Recap important conversations you’ve had while they are still fresh
• Keep yourself top-of-mind by being the person who sent a detailed video

After the event:

The biggest challenge post-event is getting those leads to pay attention and respond. This is where the power of video can help maximize conversions with the people you, or your colleagues, interacted with. If you were to send a video with:

• An introduction, or reintroduction, of yourself to put a name to a face
• A brief recap of the conversation they had at the event
• And an invitation to chat further about your product or services

Then you are guaranteed to stand out from the crowd and much more likely to get your foot in the door. Check out this post-event example that was made:

These methods are great to keep yourself top of mind for people entering conferences, exiting conferences, and everything in between. If you need help getting started on your video event journey, check out Vidyard GoVideo and this blog post on creating your first of many videos.

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How To Control Your Video Search Result Listing

We’ve talked about search and social snippets before. A rich snippet is what you see below your search listing enriched with rating stars, author information, a thumbnail, etc… scraped from the linked page.

For video listings, Google often shows:

• The video thumbnail (which implies it’s a video)
• The date the video was published
• The author of the video

That image is probably going to attract visitors as well as increase the page engagement, as the listing often provides additional information like duration, and a description of the video (so the visitor will be well-prepared to watching the video when clicking-through).

Your mission is to optimize your rich snippets, and so get a better control over your video search result listing.

Here are a few tips to do just that.

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Upload To YouTube

Youtube videos rank well! Surprised? Me neither…

You can also use other video hosting platforms (Vimeo comes to mind), and your own website, but maintaining your Youtube presence is a must. Deal with that.

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Optimize Your Youtube Listing

This is very similar to how you would do it for any other content. A few ways include:

• Make sure your video title *naturally* included primary keywords you are targeting (use this tool to help). Optimize the title to reflect keywords and so target your ideal audience, rather than leaving it ambiguous or using the wrong phrases.
• Write a good original keyword-rich, but not spammy, description that will attract viewers’ attention immediately.
• Use the right tags. One of the worst things you can do is just add random, popular tags that you think will get search results. That will do nothing but annoy the people who come across the video. Use good tags.
• Make sure what they see is going to be good. Thumbnails will show up in rich snippets. Your video thumbnail should be high quality and optimized so they want to click on it. Read this article with tips on making the most of your Youtube video thumbnail.
• Use the checklist:

Also read: How To Make Your YouTube Video Go Viral

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Markup Your Page with the Video

When you embed a video to your page, it’s a good idea to add Schema.org code to make sure it’s easy for search spiders to “scrape”… umm understand your page…

Basically, schema.org is a way that all major search engines will see your video and grab its thumbnail easily. I did a detailed guide (and cheatsheet!) on Schema.org markup.

Schema.org Cheatsheet from Ann Smarty

**The easiest way to get the correct source code is through this handy tool that lets you put in the URL to a video, and it generates one for you. If you do want to go through all the source codes you can go to the official site here.

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Is That The Only Way To Be Seen?

No, you can promote your videos in any way you see fit. Run ad campaigns, utilize social media, create newsletters… anything you would do to promote any other content can help bring you attention and even launch you into viral status if the planets are aligned.

Like I noted above, this guide is only about making the most of your video search appearance. When people do a search for the topic of your video, they should see immediately that your content will fulfill what they need better than anyone else’s.

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Conclusion

You never have complete control over your search results. But covering the basics is essential to get more out of your search listing than your competitor.

Do you have any tips? Questions? Let us know in the comments.

Save

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Using Marketing Analytics to Win at Email Marketing

You might be part of the group of marketers that feel as though your email campaigns are missing something.

Only, you’re not sure what they’re missing.

You’ve reversed engineered your competitor’s email campaigns to see what they’re doing, but the truth of the matter is, you will never know the strategy behind their success because you don’t have access to their analytics.

So you end up in a cycle. You create emails, you write good copy and add relevant graphics, just like the guides tell you to, but you still don’t see the kind of results everyone talks about.

Email marketing is consistently one of the best marketing avenues to use.

So why aren’t you seeing the same results?

Many marketers make the mistake of not paying close enough attention to their email marketing analytics.

If you’re a marketer who isn’t using data to fuel and guide your email marketing campaigns, you’re leaving serious money on the table.

Data allows you to see what does and doesn’t work so you can optimize your emails to perform better.

It’s a tricky, but rewarding process and involves taking raw data and turning it into actionable insights to help improve your email marketing campaigns. Doing so will put you leagues above your competitors.

In this post, I’m going to explain the importance of using email marketing to improve the way you segment your emails, improve the email content you send out and create winning email marketing campaigns.

It doesn’t matter how brilliantly written your email marketing campaigns are, or how many well designed images they contain if you don’t see any results or can’t measure whether your efforts are helping you achieve your overarching goals.

Let’s dive in!

Choosing an email marketing vendor

Looking at the current landscape of email marketing and the software available is often overwhelming.

If you’ve already chosen, and are happy with your email marketing provider, move on to the next section.

If we look at the email marketing software market radar below, it’s clear to see there are a number of different vendors to choose from.

Choosing an email service provider largely depends on what you hope to achieve with your email marketing campaigns and what feature(s) you’re looking for.

Source: Email Marketing Market Research, Crozdesk

Taking into account vendor size and the strength of the solution may help you evaluate which vendor to choose from based on your business’ personal requirements.

For example, if you’re looking to send automated, triggered email messages, you might use a tool like Kissmetrics Campaigns or you might choose to use a provider like Sendgrid if you’re looking to just send email marketing newsletters.

The issue, though, is although your choice of vendor will have some say in the types of email marketing campaigns you can run, they only go so far with providing you an honest view of how your email marketing campaigns are performing and what you need to do to improve them.

If you are looking to improve your email marketing campaigns, you need to consider utilizing analytics to provide you with the core insight into how your current campaigns are performing against your preset goals.

Know Your Goals Before Choosing KPIs

Before you begin email marketing, think about what you hope to achieve from it.

You need to set goals.

Where most marketers go wrong is thinking their goals should be things like:

• Increase open rate
• Increase click-through-rate
• Reduce the number of people who unsubscribe

Although these are some good metrics to follow (more on that later) they’re not goals.

Your email marketing goals should align with your business goals. For example, you might choose to do email marketing in the hope of generating more leads, growing your subscriber base or converting more leads into customers.

Note: you can have more than one goal, but you’ll have to tailor each metric to each individual goal.

When you’ve chosen the goal of your email marketing campaign, it’s time to work out which metrics you should be using to track the progress of your goal.

Image Source

For example, 73% marketers identified click-through rate as being one of the most useful metrics for measuring email marketing performance.

But let’s think about that for a second.

Say you’re the email marketing manager at a SaaS company, you might want to increase your open and click through rate.

The problem is, open rate and click-through rates are known as process metrics. They indicate the order of events that occur from when an email is sent to when it reaches the subscriber. But they shouldn’t be goals in and of themselves.

Now if we reframe the situation and change our goal to: increase the number of free trial sign ups.

The reason isolating metrics is counter-productive is because it doesn’t give you the full picture.

Within your last campaign, suppose you increased your clickthrough rate. You might think that’s good, but the key question you need to answer is, did that increase the number of free trial signups? If the answer to that question is no, you need to work out why.

If it did increase the number of free trial sign-ups, can you correlate that to your click through rate. Now, you can see how things like changing your email subject can have a direct effect on your click through rate which in turn has a direct effect on your conversions.

The key is to not take each metric as an individual number, but to use these process metrics and incorporate them into your overall marketing strategy to increase your revenue, or whatever your end goal might be.

If your goal is to attract more visitors to your website you probably want to focus on growing your subscriber list. So this is the metric you need to be following.

But what if your goal is to increase the number of leads generated? If this is the case, you should be tracking how many leads you’re capturing each day/week/month.

Choosing the metrics to follow largely depends on what sort of business you’re running. A SaaS company might have different goals than an e-commerce company who also might have different goals to a non-profit.

Moving beyond basic data

If you want to win at email marketing, you need to think seriously about your analytics. There is a lot to track, so I’ve broken the core analytics down to focus on into three categories: basic, advanced and expert, with each getting harder to come by as you go up the scale.

Basic metrics

Basic metrics are easily accessible and are also known as behavior metrics. Most basic email service providers will give you some information around these metrics.

They include things like:

• How many people open your emails?
• How many people click your links?
• Which links get the most clicks?
• What’s the most common time people open your emails?
• How many people unsubscribe (on average) from each email you send?

You might already be looking at behavior metrics to improve your email marketing campaigns.

But you’re ruining your chances of developing a winning email marketing strategy if this is the only data you consider.

What’s the point in having 100% open rates if no one purchases? Something has obviously gone wrong and understanding analytics further will help you understand why and where it all went wrong.

An open case for advanced email metrics

The thing about the basic metrics like click through and open rates, they’re basic metrics and simplistic. In that whilst they tell you who opened the email and who clicked through, they don’t tell you much else.

Moving beyond these basic metrics, consider your click-to-open-rate.

This metric tells you how engaging your email content is. It helps you understand whether the content of your email resonates well with your specified target segment. Working out this metric will provide you with a percentage of your subscribers who opened your email and also clicked on a link. It helps give you a clearer idea of the entire story.

So if one of your goals is to create engaging content, your aim should be to increase this percentage. Your click-to-open rate gives you an indication of how your subscribers behaved when they opened your email.

It gives you a complete, holistic view of how your email content is performing. For example, you might have a low click-through rate, but you can still have a solid click-to-open-rate. If you judge your emails on just one metric, you won’t get the full picture.

When you create a Kissmetrics Campaign, you set a Conversion goal. If the users you sent these emails to convert, they’ll count in this converted list. So for example, if you send out an email to people about a sale, you can select your Conversion as “Purchase”. If they read your email, then go on to Purchase, they’ve converted.

Advanced metrics

The advanced metrics looks at the results of your campaigns. They help you answer things like:

• How many people actually purchased one of your products or services after clicking on your email?
• How much money do you make on average per email campaign sent?
• How much (on average) does each subscriber bring you in revenue?
• How many of your email subscribers convert into an actual lead?
• What is your email marketing ROI?

Expert metrics

Expert metrics are also referred to as experience analysis.

Experience analysis explains why your subscribers do what they do. Expert metrics are important because they show you what drives your subscribers decisions and the motivations behind the choices they make when they choose to engage or ignore your email.

Instead of just knowing how many of your emails within a specific campaign were opened, you’ll understand why they have a higher rate.

You’ll have a greater understanding why revenue is higher or lower at certain parts of the year, for example.

Now the issue is, for this area of analysis, you probably won’t be able to gather this data from your email provider. You’ll have to look further afield to get into your audience’s mind and understand exactly what makes them tick.

It’s no lie that understanding the behavior analysis is important, but it only goes so far. If you want real insight you need to know whether the people who are engaging with your emails are doing so because they’re bored on their train to work, or whether it’s because you framed your message right and they’re interested in doing business with you.

Using your data

Now that you’ve gathered the right data, it’s time to start listening and drawing the right conclusions.

When you have collated the right data from your email campaigns, you’ll be able to send better email marketing campaigns by first creating data driven customer personas.

You’ll now identify who to target, when and why you should target this person and send them content you know will be useful to them.

For a second, let’s think about our own email inbox. How many times per week do you receive irrelevant emails that seem as though they have nothing to do with you? How many times a week do you consider, or actually unsubscribe from email newsletters?

If everyone used their data to fuel their marketing campaigns, they’d have less people unsubscribing.

Using a tool like Kissmetrics Campaigns will enable you to send automated, triggered emails based on user’s previous behavior. The beauty of these email is that they’re not cold and they’re not unwanted because they’re based on previous behavior. These emails are in place to nudge the user towards something, whether that be purchasing, logging in, etc.

 

When you start to use the right tools to get the right data you’ll be able to:

Define and segment your audience

Who is your audience, and what sort of emails do they want to receive? When you’re defining your audience, let’s not forget about your original goals from the beginning.

In the example below, Pets At Home, a pet retailer, use the name of the pet within their email copy.

They also ascertain exactly what type of pet you have whether that be cat, dog, rabbit etc to ensure they only send you relevant targeted emails that you’re likely to open.

If you don’t segment your emails, you will end up sending general emails that attempt to appeal to everyone but end up appealing to no one.

It’s shocking to think there aren’t more more marketers segmenting their audience based on data because segmented emails generate 58% of all email revenue.

When you choose to segment your audience you improve the personalization of the emails you send.

You can segment your audience by demographic data such as:

• Age
• Income level
• Gender
• Occupation
• Marital status

But most importantly, if you want real success with your email marketing, look at how your audience is behaving and segment based on that in relation to your overall goals we spoke about before. You might consider things like customer type, spending history, adoption status etc.

Targeted, personalized content

Once you’ve segmented your audience, you’ll be able to send specific relevant content to different cohorts of people.

74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement.

Target messaging involves having an understanding of your audience and tailoring content and offers that speaks to them at the different stages of their journey with your brand.

In simple terms it means using the information about the audience within that segment to guide your message. If you’re a SaaS company and you have a segment of subscribers who have yet to try your software, sending them an email letting them know there’s another chance to get a free trial will obviously be more relevant than sending that email to someone who is already making great use of your software.

Email marketing shouldn’t happen in silos

Email marketing, as we’ve said, shouldn’t happen in isolation to your other marketing efforts, they should all be connected. Email marketing should be there to support your overarching, larger goals.

Often, your email audience will be prompted to visit your website after reading an email. It’s important to continue looking at the data once they land on your website to see if the whole cycle from email, to lead to conversion could be improved.

Use a heatmap tool like CrazyEgg to see where your visitors are clicking on and interacting with your page.

Doing so means the hard work from your email marketing isn’t lost by a poor landing page that doesn’t perform.

What’s more, if you’re already using Kissmetrics campaigns, you can use the platform to track website behavior too.

Having a tool that tracks both the way your audience are interacting with their emails and your website will give you a much clearer idea of what is and isn’t working. You’ll not only get to understand the behavior, but you’ll be able to see what they actually did on your site and see exactly who they are.

Testing and analyzing

Even after you’ve defined your overarching goal and the metrics you need to follow to achieve that, you should always be testing.

Because your email marketing campaigns are now data driven you will have a clearer idea of what elements you should test.

Focusing on the data will give you a clearer idea of what elements you should be testing.

If your goal is to increase landing page sign-ups, you might decide to track your open and click-through rates.

If you notice you have low open rates, but high click through rates, that should tell you that the content of your email is good, but you need to improve your subject like to encourage more of your subscribers to open your email.

Analyzing your results in this way will improve your email marketing campaigns.

It will give you a clearer idea whether or not you’re focussing on the right metrics and also whether the things you’re doing to improve your campaigns are actually working.

In short, look at the metrics you’ve chosen, compare those to the desired goal and devise a list of ways to improve next time.

Takeaways

How do you measure your email marketing success? Do you look at your open and click rates? Do you look at the number of people who unsubscribe and hope it’s lower than your last campaign?

If you do any of these things, you’re utilizing the basic core metrics most email marketers use.

But you’re ignoring the most important and critical metrics that will actually enable you to improve your email marketing.

Finding data isn’t hard and most email providers will offer some sort of analytics data in order to understand how your current and past campaigns are performing.

And for some marketers just looking at your open rate or click through rate is perfectly ok.

But what challenges most email marketers is finding advanced data and finding specific data to make the right changes to campaigns.

This post outlined how to define email marketing goals and use those goals to define which metrics you should be concerned about.

I’ve also explained why you need to look beyond the basic metrics to gain helpful insights into your subscriber list and how they behave.

So, now you should be able to leverage your own email data to improve how your email marketing campaigns perform.

What ways have you utilized email marketing analytics to your advantage? Leave a comment below.

About the Author: Jordie Black is a content marketer and strategist helping startups and SaaS companies in the B2B space improve the way they connect with their audience through content. Learn more about her at www.jordieblack.com or follow her on Twitter @jordieiam to keep up with her updates.

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