Infusionsoft's Keys to Setting Marketing Goals with Video

*Interview with Carey Ballard and Jake Johnson, who focus on content and marketing at Infusionsoft.

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

CAREY: We’ve used video and Wistia consistently since the day I started at Infusionsoft. The engagement opportunities are so great with video, and we love the transparency of the viewing data that Wistia provides. It has been such an important tool for our marketing strategy.

What are your goals with using video?

CAREY: Ultimately, our goal is to educate and inform our audiences in an engaging way through video. We use video for a whole host of projects, from humorous messages to customers, to online courses, to simplifying a complicated topic in a blog post.

We’re launching online courses right now, and they’re 80–90% video-based. Once the views start to come in, we’ll look at the engagement rate and evaluate where people stopped watching.

Whatever the content, we most often use video to showcase our Infusionsoft personality and highlight the fact that we’re humans on the other side of the screen. This helps bring out our brand voice in a really powerful way.

JAKE: Video can be a huge differentiator for us in our marketplace because we have customers that are emotionally-driven. Emotion is a big part of that buying decision process. We don’t want to have a generic vibe. We want to focus on reaching out to our customers with a human element — we have a personality for our business.

How did Infusionsoft get to where you are in video marketing?

CAREY: Fortunately we’ve had a strong in-house video production team since the day I joined. In the last few years, we’ve started tying video pieces into the right areas and strategies of our business.

For example, we recently created a series of customer stories that tell many sides of the customer’s journey. We have some segments that are focused purely on awareness – introducing viewers to the unique and interesting stories of our customers. In these segments, we make little to no mention of Infusionsoft. The videos are intended to be introductions and celebrations of the small businesses themselves.

However, there are also matching videos that showcase how the businesses interacted with Infusionsoft, and how the product helped them grow. These videos even describe specific campaigns that they used. In the end, we were able to create a full suite of videos that very naturally bring viewers through the entire buyer’s journey.

Which Wistia feature do you use the most to help you reach your goals?

CAREY: For me, the data and dashboards. I love to see the engagement and viewing patterns of each video, so that I can work to improve and innovate on our strategies. Prominent videos on our site might have high drop-off rates. So for me, to be able to make an educated decision about creation and promotion is extremely valuable.

One of the major videos we’ve used in the past is a 12-minute, very simply shot video that was a pivotal piece that the sales team used constantly, but we found that most people dropped off at 2 minutes.

We changed the strategy to include two videos — each one was six minutes long, and neither had as much of a drop-off rate. We also experimented with the way these two videos were shot. Of course, now that we’re actively looking at stats, we’re going to keep trying to tweak those videos, innovate, and make sure we’re doing the best we can. We love testing and verifying our results through the data that we collect on the Wistia stats page.

“We have a whole host of nurture sequences that rely on video to engage the lead”

How do you use video in your lead generation strategy?

CAREY: Currently video supports our entire lead generation strategy. We have videos that are focused on building awareness of our brand, and these videos tease resources and tools that can be downloaded. We generate lots of leads that way. Currently, this is one of the areas we are looking to increase substantially, since we are increasing our production of all multimedia content in our lead gen strategy.

Do you use video in your lead nurturing strategy?

CAREY: This is the area I believe our video portfolio is the strongest. We have a whole host of nurture sequences that rely on video to engage the lead. We have humorous videos, educational videos, encouraging videos, and they are all specifically positioned to move leads farther down the funnel.

For me, this is one of the most fun ways to use video because of the transparency of the medium. We can see if a lead didn’t watch the whole video and tailor a call with that knowledge. It can be extremely powerful for the sales floor.

Currently, if a sales representative gets on a call with a lead who isn’t quite ready for the close conversation, we have educational sequences that will allow learning and information to pass through virtually – putting less pressure on the sales rep and the prospect. That nurture sequence keeps the prospect engaged while educating them.

Because we can track viewership on Wistia, the subsequent sales call is much cleaner. Our sales rep can then say, “hey I noticed you didn’t finish the video,” or “you re-watched this part,” or what have you. If they did watch the video, our sales rep knows the prospect is engaged, and they can talk about what that person is really interested in doing with our product.

Can you talk about your future plans for your video marketing strategy?

CAREY: We are still building a cohesive video marketing strategy, but I know we will be more focused on using video to increase awareness and conversion in the future. We will also be refreshing our nurture programs, but I’d like to focus heavily on leveraging video to engage and inspire our future customers more than we have in the past.

JAKE: I’d like to use video as a way to humanize the power of our software. We’re thinking about playing around more with Instagram as a video format. We haven’t figured out how to use that channel for our marketing purposes yet. We’re a B2B marketing automation company, so it almost feels like it’s not the right place for us, but I think we can approach it creatively. I’ve been thinking about doing data-centric stories about topics that are important to small business owners. We can take information from our data reports and tell stories around them using video. That kind of video would be fun, human, and valuable to our customers.

What has been your most successful video this year?

CAREY: One of my personal favorites is a video we created called the “We Believe” video. We needed to refocus our brand voice a bit and get our whole company on board, so we created a video that highlighted the unique personality of our company, as well as the amazing grit and tenacity of our customer base.

Video was by far the best platform to evoke the emotion and the connection that we were looking for. In total, video content has been one of our best performing formats on our social and acquisition channels. Engagement with the content is always heightened, and there are more comments and shares on video-based content.

Overall I think video is one of most powerful mediums to be utilized by content marketing and marketing teams in general. I think the future of video content is strong, especially with the advances being made in the technology space. We’re excited to start doing more with video.

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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.