Using Marketing Video Data for Better Sales Alignment

Getting alignment between sales, marketing, and brand can be challenging. Within many organizations, especially in the B2B space, sales teams require a fast pipeline of qualified leads from the marketing team’s efforts. Sales teams are always eager to close more deals, but where do the leads come from? How do they know who’s best qualified? Meanwhile, marketing teams struggle to create the right content: content that connects with their target audience and answers their most pressing questions.

“Marketing teams struggle to create the right content: content that connects with their target audience and answers their most pressing questions.”

While these are big problems to solve, we at Wistia believe that video data can be an incredibly valuable tool. It not only helps you figure out what content is resonating, but it also connects you with your audience. Learn how to give your viewers the precise information they need to solve their problems when they’re grappling with the most.

In this short video series, Mathew Sweezey, Salesforce’s Principal of Marketing Insights (and everyone’s favorite Atlantan), explains how video data can be used to better connect the worlds of sales, marketing, and customer experience.

Using video data to improve the sales process

Successful sales depend on delivering the right message at the right time. Historically, macro trends and best practices have been used to determine the appropriate moment to reach out. Now, video data allows us to make much smarter decisions about when to engage with a specific individual and what content to send them using behavioral cues.

Marketing needs to send as much insight as possible to sales about how prospects are engaging with content. Video playback data is unique in that it indicates more than just a “view.” Drilling down into how a viewer engaged with and even rewatched your content opens a more direct path to understanding a viewer. Beyond building a human connection with your viewers, video enables marketing and sales teams to access the most actionable data available about their behavior.

You can pipe your video data directly into your CRM using one of Wistia’s marketing automation integrations with Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, or a custom third-party add-on with another platform.

You probably won’t start out knowing exactly how your most valuable leads interact with your content before moving to purchase. You’ll need to try out a variety of tactics to figure out what works. For some companies, maybe watching a whole video is a strong behavioral cue for sales. For others, rewatches of specific parts of a video might indicate relevant engagement. And for businesses with an extensive library of video marketing content, perhaps the best behavioral cue is watching a series of videos in one session.

“To ensure that you’re tracking the most appropriate behavioral cues across your marketing content, you need to implement a communication loop between marketing and sales.”

To ensure that you’re tracking the most appropriate behavioral cues across your marketing content, you need to implement a communication loop between marketing and sales. The sales team usually wants access to as much data as they can get, but it’s also important to identify which data points best indicate high close rates. This way, marketing can double down on tracking the most critical behavioral cues.

Achieving contextual relevancy & demonstrating ROI

The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like receiving just the information you wanted, exactly when you wanted it. If you want your marketing to be great, you need to create useful content and then deliver exactly the right materials to your prospects at exactly the right time.

Online buyers behave differently from the buyers of the past. They do their research through blogs and reviews, and they pay more visits across an array of devices before converting.

Changes in buying habits mean that we marketers have to adapt our approach:

1. We need more content (and more granular content) to always have contextually relevant content to share.
2. We need to know when/where/how people engage with that content.
3. We need to use this data to adapt future communications with individual prospects.

Instead of creating one generic, cookie-cutter video for all of your prospects, try making highly specific videos for people at different touchpoints. The more detailed the context of a prospect, the more personalized your content needs to be to connect with them.

Because video can seem like a daunting investment, many businesses are tempted to spend a significant amount of time and money on perfecting a single creative piece, similar to TV advertising. However, in digital marketing, five well-targeted, lower-budget videos are likely to provide more value. It’s about saying the right thing, to the right person, at the right time — rather than just saying it slickly.

“It’s about saying the right thing, to the right person, at the right time — rather than just saying it slickly.”

Video: More than just ads

Yesterday’s video content consisted of one-way communication: TV advertisements shoved in people’s faces with little to no feedback. It was hard to know whether people viewed your ads and, if they did, whether they liked them. Even if we could access this data, we couldn’t pinpoint interested viewers and follow up.

Today, we can do so much more with video. We can access pinpointed and valuable feedback to tell us what people liked and didn’t like, in the form of watches, rewatches, and skipped portions. We can identify individual viewers, and we can even reach out to them directly. As Mathew puts it, “Video gives us behavioral cues that we can’t see in written content like blog posts or ebooks.”

“Video gives us behavioral cues that we can’t see in written content like blog posts or ebooks.”

Measuring the value of video

Video adds concrete, measurable value in two primary ways. It’s a lead generation tool and a medium that drives conversions. Let’s take a look at how we can measure both:

1. Collect leads from your best video content. You can add a gate at the beginning, middle, or end of videos using Turnstile or add email forms to the landing page where a video lives. Then, you can pass these leads into your CRM and gauge which videos are driving the most leads (as well as the highest quality leads ).
2. Once specific prospects close, identify which videos they watched most. Marketing teams can now see which videos have the most impact on someone’s likelihood to buy. We can do an ROI analysis on specific videos or look at aggregate data for all videos. For instance, by integrating your video provider (like Wistia) with your CRM, you can see how many leads watched a video before they closed. You can see how many of them watched video X versus video Y.

Both of these data points help guide your future video strategy (as well as whether you make videos at all). Use data to prove the value of video marketing and win bigger budgets for new video initiatives going forward.

Improving customer experience

For years, marketers have been talking about customer lifetime value, but the tools to really measure the effect of our content on the lifetime value of our customers have emerged only recently. By tracking video views post-purchase and then piping this data into your CRM, you can identify which video types are helping to increase revenue and word of mouth from our existing customers.

“The most innovative companies today are also using marketing content to increase retention and establish brand loyalty.”

Historically, marketing has been focused on brand and bringing in new customers. But the most innovative companies today are also using marketing content to increase retention and establish brand loyalty.

Get ’Em Sweezey … 

As Mathew points out, the most critical component of successful customer experience content is honesty and authenticity. At Wistia, we call this building a human brand. You can learn more on how to achieve an authentic, human online presence using video on our blog:

• Be (Super) Human
• How Sandwich Video Makes Product Videos with a Human Touch
• How Niche Modern’s Videos Communicate Authenticity
• From Conversions to Connections: 3 Levels of Video Strategy

We hope you found this guide useful! Feel free to connect with our featured guest, Mathew Sweezey, on Twitter at @msweezey.