Adding Personality to Your Brand to Connect with Prospects and Customers

Interview with Thad Peterson, Director of Product Marketing and Chris Masterson, Video Editing and Production Associate.

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

CHRIS: Video and Wistia actually predated both of us at Buildium. When I was brought in as the first video-dedicated employee (initially as an intern and then full-time), we were using video primarily as a help center tool, with the occasional blog video. As a SaaS company, it made a lot of sense to focus on showing customers how to do certain things in our application.

Since then, we’ve shifted our focus to using video as a way to humanize our brand. We started using employees on screen to announce new product features and releases, and we also helped sales agents put a face to a name with their leads. More recently, we’ve invested a lot in customer testimonials and a customer story piece to help keep the focus on the people who really matter most — our customers.

THAD: There are a couple data points worth noting. We recently surveyed 700+ property managers, and one of our questions was, “If you need information, where are you most likely to get it?” These were the results:

Separately, we asked site visitors this question: “Would you rather watch a video or read about what Buildium can do for you?” 57% said “Watch a video.”

What are your goals with making video?

CHRIS: Our primary goal is to connect with customers and prospects. Video’s strength is that it brings a level of personality that’s missing from text and imagery. Of course, we also want to increase conversions for leads, and we’re constantly trying to improve our numbers with our add-on services that we market to current customers.

“Video’s strength is that it brings a level of personality that’s missing from text and imagery.”

THAD: We want to be more human. Folks in our target audience are “people people,” and they tend to connect with real people (as opposed to copy and images), so video makes sense in our world.

Which Wistia feature is the most valuable for Buildium?

CHRIS: I might say the SEO optimization that Wistia includes. We integrated videos across the features section of our website, which was then 11 pages and has expanded to 14. The captioning and descriptions for SEO helped boost the pages' ranks and contributed to a spike in organic traffic and organic leads from the redesign of those pages.

A close runner-up would be the replace video feature. It’s such a simple thing, but it means that when we change our support number at the end of a video, we don’t have to replace the embed codes all over our website and our partners' websites.

THAD: My vote would be CTAs. It’s great to be able to turn to the executive team and say, “We created this video, and as a result, X number of people took this action.” Literally, just today, I was able to report that because of some very short videos we shot with our customer success consultants, we generated 20 new appointments to discuss a product that we just rolled out. True story!

“Just today, I was able to report that because of some very short videos we shot with our customer success consultants, we generated 20 new appointments to discuss a product that we just rolled out.”

Which video has been your most successful one this year? How did you measure its success?

THAD: I’m going to cheat and say that cumulatively, the short videos on our feature pages have been a collective grand slam. They’ve received thousands of views. We’ve driven more conversions from those pages than ever before. They’re not the sexiest videos we do, but I think you could argue they’ve delivered the most results.

CHRIS: To add on to that, those videos are far and away the best performers we have by views, conversions, and engagement. They range from about 81% to 91% engagement rates, which is something we’re really happy with.

“We’ve driven more conversions from those pages than ever before.”

What’s next?

THAD: We’re planning to tell more emotional stories about our customers and employees and incorporate more video into our help and support content, all while continually improving each of our videos in little ways.

Find Buildium 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.