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Summer Reading: How Webinars Help Drive Pipeline

Best Practices

For today’s marketers, generating leads is the name of the game. Make more leads, get more money. Sadly, identifying quality prospects — those sales can turn into revenue — isn’t easy. As marketers, we need to look beyond measuring the potential for pipeline and move towards measuring results for pipeline.

So, how does this work? Well, we Mark Bornstein lays it out on track three of our Summer Playlist , but we can also summarize the main points here.

Conceptually, it’s straightforward. Take a look at all of your marketing tactics and analyze conversions by percentage of market-qualified leads. Then, focus your efforts and exploit the tactics that work.

Microsoft, for example, analyzed its methods and found webinars converted leads — attendees to buyers — at a high rate (7.2 percent) . It doubled-down on its webinar efforts, going from 200 to more than 4,000 webinars per year — and netted SiruisDecisions’ 2016 ROI Award in the process.

So what are the basics of using webinars to drive pipeline?

First, webinars need to drive movement across the entire buying cycle — not just top. That means you’ll need to develop thought leadership webinars, company and product positioning webinars, case studies, validation and, of course, demonstration webinars to offer your prospects a full picture of what your organization has to offer.

Keep in mind the tone needed for each stage. Top-of-funnel events, like thought leadership webinars, should remain high-level and avoid being too “pitchy.” Similarly, bottom-of-funnel events should address specific pain points attendees are experiencing and demonstrate what your solution can accomplish for them.

The second step in getting webinars to drive pipeline is to increase the number of content touches in each webinar event. Creating these opportunities is advantageous in and of itself — it makes your webinars more interactive (by having your presenter point out where visitors can go for more information), and it gives you the opportunity to audit your content.

Still, you’ll want to make your content available in a webinar for one key reason: to let your audience members choose their own buyer’s journey experience. By enabling attendees to decide which steps they want to take, whether be it downloading content, registering for a demo, contacting a salesperson, or simply looking up the presenter’s biography, you provide your prospects with the subtle tools to indicate where they are on the buyer’s map, what stage and how likely they are to convert.

Just remember: more content means more opportunity for engagement and potentially more qualified leads.

The third step in using webinars to drive pipeline is to take a closer look at lead scoring. By examining how an attendee engages with a webinar — by asking questions, downloading content, answering polls and surveys and more — you can get a clearer understanding of where the attendee is on the buying cycle as well as the likelihood of future engagement and if they’re a good fit for a potential buyer.

Engagement scoring through webinars is a great way to break out leads across different tiers as well. For example, the most engaged leads can be matched with an account executive while the least engaged leads can be given nature material — saving your sales team time and effort. The point is, by measuring webinar engagement, you can better break out leads by quality and give them the appropriate amount of care and attention.

The final step for driving pipeline is handing off to sales. With right marketing systems in place, complete with engagement analysis, webinars can provide your sales teams with the critical contextual information they need to make a quality call with a lead. For example, if the lead asked a question during a webinar, a sales rep could provide them with additional content or offer a direct answer to their problem. They could also reference the content of the webinar to continue the conversation with a lead and, hopefully, bring in a close.

Webinars make it easy to drive pipeline. All you have to do create, provide, articulate and follow up on the content you’ve already created.

Speaking of which, we have some more material for you to peruse. It’s our Summer Reading list inspired by track three of our Summer Playlist. Take a look:

  1. Using Big Marketing Event Ideas to Drive Pipeline
  2. It’s Time for Marketing to take on Revenue Responsibility
  3. How Genesys scaled its global webinar program with ON24
  4. Lead Intelligence: A Better Model for Lead Gen
  5. How Microsoft creates world-class, ROI-driven webinar programs

The post Summer Reading: How Webinars Help Drive Pipeline appeared first on ON24 .

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Gallery Training Available On Demand

CMMA Blog

I just wanted to remind everyone that Gallery training is available on-demand. This allows you to view the courses on your schedule and at your own pace. Watching the on-demand training is a great way to get up to speed and learn about Gallery. Each course also has an accompanying Quick Start document that allows you to follow along with the training. The following courses are available:

Building Portal Experiences using Gallery Quick Start
Building In-Page Experiences using Gallery Quick Start

To view all of our online training offerings, visit the Training section of our website. Feel free to contact the Learning Services team with any comments or questions.

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Fact or Fiction: ‘Short and Sweet’ is the Best Video Strategy

CMMA Blog

Thanks to a famous report from Microsoft we’re all aware that the human attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish. While that may not be a scientific fact, we do know that the average attention span is decreasing, leading to the common belief among digital marketers that video content has to be short in order to be engaging.

To put this myth to the test, we invited Shootsta’s Melissa De Coster, an experienced creative strategist who has produced content for brands such as MTV, Dove, Colgate, and KPMG, to join us for the very first episode of our new video series, Video Marketing Mythbusters.

Check out the video to hear Melissa’s take on the perfect length, as well as best practices on how to use the first 30 seconds to capture your audience and keep them around.

If you have a myth that you’d like to explore, tweet us @Brightcove and we’ll cover it in an upcoming episode.

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A Sneak Peek of the New Brightcove Live Streaming Platform

Marketing

We just launched the new Brightcove Live streaming solution and couldn’t be more excited to share the details. We caught up with Ryan Struhl, Senior Software Engineer, to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how Brightcove Live can help you build engaging live event experiences for internal or external audiences.

Q. Ryan, how were you involved in the recent release of the Brightcove Live streaming platform?

I am the Engineering Product Owner for the front end of Brightcove Live. For readers outside the Brightcove walls, this means I am in charge of creating the user interface of our live platform. I did a lot of the initial architecture and building out of the internal business logic for the new interface.

There was a total of four dedicated engineers that worked on the project and I managed all of the work being done. I have to say, the amount of work this team was able to accomplish is amazing.

Q. What’s your team’s superpower?

Super Speed. My team is a set of unbelievably talented engineers that are killing it! They can turn around features in a short amount of time and are just unbelievably cool to work with. It would be pretty amazing to have laser vision, but not sure how useful it would be.

Q. What features are you the most excited about with this Live release?

I may be biased because I built it, but I think the clipping functionality of the Brightcove Live streaming solution is super cool. I have to give a huge shout out to our UX designers for helping design a tool that is intuitive to use.  
 

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Q. Can you tell us what the new live clipping tool does?

Of course. Let’s say 30-seconds ago something exciting happened during the live stream. I can go into the clipping interface and create a clip of what happened, save the clip as an on-demand asset and share to my social channels while the event is still happening.

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Q. That sounds awesome. What do you hope our customers get out of it?

I hope our customers find it easy to run live streams and generate more content for their audience. The new interface makes it easy to create videos on the fly, saving a ton of time. We put a lot of work into creating an easy user experience for a product that is often seen as complex and complicated. To me, that is the most important thing. You can talk all day about how clips can help promote your event content, but if it isn’t easy to use, no one is going to do it.

Q. Ok, so now that the latest release is available, what is next for Live?

There are a lot of exciting things already in the works for Brightcove Live streaming, but one thing I am really passionate about delivering this year is even more enhanced analytics. We will have more on that coming very soon.

 

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Simple Steps to Improve Video Performance

CMMA Blog

“Hey Sally, how are our videos doing?” asked Sally’s supervisor as if such an ominous question could be answered while passing by. “Great,” said Sally. “Lots of people watched them, we got 382 views.” Yet they both wondered, “Is that good? Is that below average? How can we get more views?” If this scenario sounds eerily familiar, you’re not alone. I’ve worked with countless Brightcove customers who have wrestled with the same questions. So I’ve created a series of steps anyone can take to improve video performance.

Challenge: Get more people to click play

There are a couple of basic things to consider when you’re having issues getting viewers to engage with your content. Look no further than your poster image, your video size, and page placement to improve video performance.

Step 1 – Tighten up the poster image, title, and description
Website visitors generally feel hesitant to commit 1-2 minutes of their life to a video unless it will:

  • Help them with something 
  • Answer a question 
  • Entertain them

The number one way to get more viewers to click play is to set expectations using the cover image title and description—tell the viewer exactly what they will get if they click play.

If you’re making a video about how to assemble a desk, say, “How to assemble our new desk.” If you’re explaining quantum physics, “Explaining quantum physics” would be a great title. Don’t over think the title or get to clever with it. Avoid using “marketing-ese” and be clear.  You can even photoshop the title into the poster image itself. Check out how I did this for a recent video I created. 

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Home Depot has always been really good at this. If you check out their video portal you’ll see that they tell you exactly what you’re going to get in the video.

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Step 2 – Adjust the size and page placement 
We all love big videos. It’s the reason we keep buying bigger and bigger TV’s and phones. The same is true for viewers on your website. If you place a tiny 320X180 video bottom right, two page scrolls down expect to see low numbers.
 
Placing it front and center and making sure it’s as large as your page design will allow dramatically increases the chances of someone clicking play. I’ve clicked play on a video that I wasn’t even interested in just because it was so big and beautiful.

Check out this landing page on Smithsonian’s website . I dare you not to click play.

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Challenge: Get people to watch more of your video

So now that we’re getting more clicks, how do we get people to stay engaged for longer periods of time? This is possibly the most difficult one to define and quantify. After all if there was a formula we’d all be making viral videos.  
 
Step 1 – Be Consistent with Context
Let’s say you have a website that lists all of the specs of a tractor.  You place a shiny new marketing video that focuses primarily on how great the tractor is and why everyone should buy it. We have two completely different conversations going on here.  If your page provides info or explains something, so should the video on that page. Save your marketing video for a marketing page.

Take a look at Moment Lens’ product page . Someone visiting this site is exploring the product and wants more info about it. The video inline on the page gives you an in-depth look at how they are made, answering specific viewers questions.

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Step 2 – Think about tone and placement 
When you head to a job interview or go out socially with friends you think about each situation differently and dress appropriately. The same is true for a video. Before you start writing a script or storyboarding your shots, have a short conversation about what tone and presentation best supports both the topic and destination of your video. For a social piece you can and should be more casual and conversational. If it’s going on your home page, you can and should be more polished and formal.  

Step 3 – Tell someone’s story 
As humans, we are drawn towards someone’s perspective on a story, not just the story itself.  It’s the reason we like reality shows and why we listen to a specific news channels. Yes “story” is king, but someone’s perspective on a story is what makes it interesting and relatable. Once you’ve identified a story, ask yourself, whose perspective of that story makes it most interesting?  A customer of yours? An engineer who worked on the product? A sales person? A salesperson’s Mother? You get the idea.

Step 4 – Always be helpful 
Being helpful wins every time. If you’re not sure what your customer pain points are, dig into your support tickets and ask your sales team what customers ask about most often. Then go create content that helps your customers solve those problems and they will keep watching. 

Xero’s “Startup Series ” is an excellent example of this. The videos directly address and provide answers to questions that new startups are asking.

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While there is no formula that will guarantee your next video will double your company’s revenue or go viral, the suggestions above will help improve video performance and engagement. Ultimately we all know that the more people that click play on your videos and longer they stay engaged, the more likely they are to eventually convert.

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Five Steps To Video Campaign Success

CMMA Blog

There’s a reason video continues to rise as one of the most powerful mediums we have — it connects us on a human level, it’s moving and engaging. With video, you can take something intangible, like B2B analytics software, and bring it to life. Three minutes of video has the potential to be far more powerful at conveying the value of a business than any whitepaper or email ever could.

To put it simply: video works. But just creating video content is not enough. Making a video and driving return on investment from it are two completely different things. Too often, we miss the mark on the implementation side of our video strategy, leaving real business value on the table.

Here are five key ways to make sure your video campaign is a smashing success:

1. Video is measurable. So measure it!

Like all digital marketing, video is measurable. But many companies miss the simple act of connecting it to real business results. We spend a lot of time putting together email campaigns, driving whitepaper downloads, and increasing traffic to our blogs. We set up beautiful nurture and personalised campaigns based on what users click on and download. So why are we operating video in a silo, separate from the rest of our marketing stack?

The ability to measure video impact is no longer about view counts; it’s about who is viewing your video. Instead of focusing on clicks, we need to build out profiles of individual viewers and communicate with them based on their needs and interests.

This is what takes video campaigns to the next level and allows us to serve consumers the most relevant content

2. Think experiential and outside the box

Video works, but it doesn’t have to work at the expense of your other content. Embedding a large player box to watch a single video means sacrificing valuable real estate as well as decreased engagement with other parts of the page.

A better way is to think about video outside the context of the player by making it a key piece of your user experience strategy.  

When it comes to user experience, brands are beginning to bring interactivity into the equation with powerful results — videos with interactive elements have a much higher click-through rate compared to linear video. Interactivity doesn’t have to be complex. It comes in all shapes and sizes from gamification to quizzes, chaptering to hotspots and calls to action. It transforms a video from a one-way conversation into a two-way dialogue.

Not only does interactivity help increase completion rate, time on sight, click-throughs, and engagement, but it can also play an important role in strategy development. Every click and action is measurable, providing greater insights into your audience.

3. Personalisation, personalisation, personalisation

In a world increasingly defined by customer-centricity and user experience, it should come as no surprise that personalisation in video really works.

Most brands and companies still deliver a single video message to all of their users, but we’re learning that it’s important to take it a step further.

At Brightcove we practice what we preach, so we’ve embraced a video-first account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. We use personalised videos for demand gen as well as land and expand targets. By creating bespoke videos for various accounts, we can immediately engage customers and create a personal connection. Integrating this into account-based advertising campaigns means videos are delivered to the right audience across social channels and email.

And the results have been outstanding.

Emails have a 224 percent open rate. Yes, people liked the outreach so much, they were forwarding it to colleagues. And across account managers, we have an 80 percent engagement rate on video.

4. Expand your reach to expand your ROI

Unlike the 1960s or even the early 2000s, we can no longer expect our audience to gather together to watch TV. Today, our campaigns must reach the audience where they are and deliver content that matches consumption habits across multiple screens and different social channels.

And while you have to think about content length and context for each channel, you do not need to create a whole new video for each medium. You can take the same video and cut it down to different lengths depending on the platform.

Why is this important? Almost half of people on social watch branded videos , and more than half make a purchase after watching.

But we can’t stop there. Connected TVs (CTV) are shaping up to be another critical distribution channel. According to the IAB Australia, Connected TV streams grew by 351 percent over a 15 month period alone (January 2016 – March 2017). And with over 2.9 billion ad opportunities served across Australia’s main four free to air broadcasters via Connected TV streams, CTV is becoming a medium to consider for your next campaign.

It’s about time brands catch on.

5. Go live

Live video is growing, with audiences coming to expect some form of live coverage for major events.

This shift is reflected in the number and variety of live events we have seen in the last year. The Exploratorium recently brought us the solar eclipse , live. Sotheby’s auctions are live . We even had a customer live stream a brain surgery!

We already know that video has the unique ability to win over the hearts and minds of viewers, but going live just makes it that much more engaging.

Play to win with a video-first strategy

The best companies have a video-first strategy. When you think video-first, you’re forced to come up with the full story you want to tell. And with that story, you can easily create the rest of the content that surrounds the video: the email, the landing page, the blog.

 

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