Leveraging an Educational Video Series to Teach and Inform

Interview with Nick Dujnic, Senior Director of Demand Generation at LiveIntent.

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

We’ve always had an interest in video and believed in the strength of video for a B2B audience. We came up with a concept of a weekly email — kind of like The Soup for digital marketing. We shot a pilot video for it, but didn’t have any lighting, microphones, or advanced gear. In fact, we even shot it on an iPhone. It was super low budget.

That video got a lot of engagement from our audience. Turns out, it’s easier to explain complicated issues in a two-minute video rather than a thousand-word blog post. We said, “If we spend less than $500 on basic lights, a green screen, a decent camera, a tripod, and a wired lapel mic — we could do this on a weekly basis and see higher engagement.” That sold our higher-ups, and we started making a video series called LiveIntentional Weekly. Since launching in April of 2014, we’ve seen a 138% year-over-year growth in total plays of our videos.

We’ve used Wistia from the beginning. We were always wary of YouTube because we wanted ownership over the content. Plus, YouTube would send our audience away from our website and on to other suggested content that wasn’t ours. We wanted to keep our website traffic, build on our video SEO, and see in-depth analytics. The ability to add Turnstile as a subscribe function pushed it over the top. Finally — the price was right, which made it an easy sell to our higher-ups.

“We wanted to keep our website traffic, build on our video SEO, and see in-depth analytics.”

What are your goals with making video?

Our main goal is to educate leads, clients, and partners on what is going on in a very complicated digital marketing landscape, in a fun and accessible way. We measure our success by looking at the video engagement numbers every week, so early on, our focus was on growing those numbers. As we evolved and we did more, we realized our people were as confused as everyone else in our space. LiveIntentional Weekly episodes are single pieces of content that can be leveraged by every stakeholder.

When we first started with LiveIntentional Weekly, we wanted to run a test and answer a few questions. Could we differentiate ourselves in the minds of the people we are emailing on a daily basis? Can we do something fun and engage our audience with it?

We put the video to the test, and ended up seeing higher engagement than with other newsletters we’d previously sent out. We saw more people spending time watching videos than reading blog posts. Once we started evolving the content, it became an educational tool — both internally and externally.

“We put the video to the test, and ended up seeing higher engagement than with other newsletters we’d previously sent out.”

We started using these videos for internal education for new team members, who watch the videos as part of their onboarding. We have weekly company town halls, where we watch a LiveIntentional Weekly episode as a team. The videos have also become sales enablement tools, teaching our audience about marketing concepts, so our sales team has an easier time talking to them about our product.

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 is the most valuable for LiveIntent?

The reporting and analytics function is incredibly important for us. It’s great to know where our audience rewatches parts of the video. If we know that someone has re-watched a part multiple times, that person is clearly interested in understanding that subject matter. That’s a cue, telling us — make more content about that topic.

We used to do three really quick segments in one video until we tried an episode where we spent more time on one specific subject. Sure enough, we saw a significantly higher engagement rate — people re-watching, spending more time on the video, and higher play rates. Now we focus on one subject per video and do a three-minute deep dive covering the whats, hows, and whys. As of this change, time spent on our website has gone up significantly. This uptick in analytics is spurred by the Wistia reporting functionality that allows us to analyze and iterate.

“Now we focus on one subject per video and do a three-minute deep dive covering the whats, how, and whys. As of this change, time spent on our website has gone up significantly.”

Each week, we sit down together to review how the last video performed, and our current goal is to grow the engagement numbers on our videos. We have a nice repeat core group of audience members. At this time, an engagement rate of 75–80% is a good sign — there’s a wind down and Turnstile at the end of each video, so core audience members know it’s coming and drop off before then. As of now, we’re at a consistent basis, and we’re pushing to grow our play count and engagement rates.

Can you talk about your experience with the Wistia-Marketo integration?

With the Wistia-Marketo integration, we can gather data on who is watching our videos, as well as how much they’re watching, and pass that back into Marketo and Salesforce. From there, our sales team can reach out to folks, have strong conversations, and provide them with the information they need.

“With the Wistia-Marketo integration, we can gather data on who is watching our videos, as well as how much they’re watching, and pass that back into Marketo and Salesforce.”

If someone watching our video is in our database as a customer, we can track that view — we know who they are. If I see that person has watched a particular video multiple times, I can email someone on our sales team and say, “Hey, this person has watched 4 videos on this particular topic.” Then, our sales team can reach out with relevant and valuable information.

Currently, when a viewer watches more than 50% of a video, our sales team is automatically notified to follow up with that lead. We’ll use Marketo data more in the future to inform some of our upcoming nurture campaigns.

What’s next?

We’re trying to figure out how we can leverage video even more as a sales and nurturing tool. We’ll be adding videos into nurture streams for inbound leads. We’ve gotten great feedback on our videos as an educational tool, and we’ll begin to measure whether having LiveIntentional Weekly episodes in nurture campaigns will increase the rate of leads moving up the funnel.

We’ll also be running paid campaigns toward our LiveIntentionals and looking for more syndicated partner posts. These videos have become core to our voice and content. We get great feedback from customers, our sales team, and executives — it’s content folks want to engage with, and we’re sticking with it.

Find LiveIntent online, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

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.