Highlighting Your Product Benefits—and Tracking ROI—with Video

Interview with Peter Kosmal, Multimedia Production Manager at Euromonitor International.

How and why did you get started with video? Why Wistia?

A few years ago, we realized that although we were surrounded by in-house research and industry expertise, our knowledge was not being shared in a concise, clear manner. We started putting our experts on camera, talking trends and insights on their areas of expertise.

On top of that, we have a very complicated and diverse enterprise product. It’s highly visual, and we’ve learned that video is a key tool for demonstrating our product’s abilities, how it works, and how you can use it. Without seeing it, you cannot fully understand our product.

Our plan is to use more video to communicate our product’s benefits to potential clients. To justify increased investment in video production — we needed a process to clearly track the ROI on the content we create.

With Wistia, Marketo, and Salesforce, we’re able to track video as a touchpoint in the sales cycle. We can evaluate when a lead watched a video, and track them as they journey from watching a video to requesting a demonstration of our products and ultimately buying something. The proof that video is a very real touchpoint for our leads helps guide our video and multimedia strategy.

“With Wistia, Marketo, and Salesforce, we’re able to track video as a touchpoint in the sales cycle.”

What types of video do you make?

There are two different types of videos we prioritize.

As a research company, we have extensive information on fast moving consumer goods industries, economies, and consumer trends.

When we talk about our research and trends, we call these videocasts — they live on our blog. These videos showcase trends and conversations in each area of research we cover. For example, if one packaged food company buys another, we’ll do a quick two-minute videocast on what that actually means according to our analysts and the impact it will have on the industry and the major players.

We’re also increasing production of marketing-focused content — videos that show how our product can help potential customers grow as a company using screencasts of our product doing what it does best.

Which Wistia feature do you use the most?

The integration with Marketo has been incredibly valuable. Before using it, there was no real way to track ROI for video. You could see people were watching videos, and maybe down the line they’d buy something, but that insight wasn’t nearly as trackable as it is now.

Before we had the Marketo integration, the process was like throwing a video to the wall and hoping it stuck. And now we know that most of them do. I can track the lead in Marketo from the point when they watched a video, see how much they watched, and beyond that — what else did they look at, opened opportunities, and if a won opportunity goes through.

“Before we had the Marketo integration, the process was like throwing a video to the wall and hoping it stuck. And now we know that most of them do.”

What has been your most successful video this year?

Whenever we release something new, we make a video — “Here’s our new research and how it will help you to do x, y, and z. Contact us for further details.”

Our 60-second overview about Passport, our flagship research database, has made a huge impact. After people watch this video, they fill out a form expressing interest to learn more or schedule a demo.

As far as we’ve seen, using video shortens our sales cycle. We continue to measure the impact of video, but this video and others like it seem to accelerate the speed of a sale. Beyond this, we plan to do more videos explaining the benefits of our Passport product. We think of them as mini-webinars, but with a targeted approach to educating people on our flagship product.

“We continue to measure the impact of video, but this video and others like it seem to accelerate the speed of a sale.”

How has your video marketing evolved over time?

Our video team is a global effort. I film and edit out of our Chicago office, and we consistently produce content from our 12 offices around the globe with help from various members of our communications team. Last year we produced one piece of multimedia — a video or podcast — for every single day of the year.

Strategically, it’s very important for us to distill our vast amount of data and analysis to one specific goal per video, and I run trainings with our analysts to help them prepare for this.

As far as video marketing goes, our strategy is very simple: showcase our products and solutions in a clear, concise manner and leave the viewer wanting to know more.

What’s next?

With the Marketo integration, we’re working toward collecting more data that proves the monetary ROI of video. At the end of the day, my ultimate goal is to be able to say, “on average, a lead who watches a video is worth this much money compared to a lead who doesn’t watch a video.” Then we could clearly make the argument that we should try to route more people through videos on our site.

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Want to share your success story? Shoot us an email at stories@wistia.com with a little bit about how you use video and Wistia to achieve your business goals.