The business-as-usual model has changed. Even though you may be in a B2B or B2G business, look at what the B2C online businesses are doing. They’re constantly exploring other avenues for satisfying customer needs for information about the product. Customers who have the product can make a video and post it. They’re using all these tools. So watch the big retailers like Amazon.
Toby Younis
Vidyard sponsored the research report that we are discussing today. We are not affiliated with nor sponsored by Vidyard. We used the Vidyard research to come to some findings, conclusions, and recommendations regarding using video to enhance business communications.
Vidyard is a cloud-based business that provides you with the tools necessary to make user-generated videos. User-generated means you have direct involvement.
That means either a screen cap kind of video or a screen cap with your image on it.
They’re being used significantly by sales organizations because they learned over the pandemic that their buyers accept a salesperson cannot physically call on them and often prefer it that way.
One user of this type of video, so she can reach out to her clients, is Toby’s daughter. She works for Monday.com from her home in Alexandria, Virginia, and she has clients all over the world.
A lot of communications with these clients are through Vidyard-style user-generated videos, as opposed to produced videos. Produced videos are created in advance and then used as a promotional tool.
I’ve checked out Vidyard as a product, and basically, you can make a video, but you can’t download it. It’s somewhere in the cloud. Then you send the link to your client.
There’s a way to embed the video into an email. Clients and prospects open the email and click play to watch the video.
They might do that for several reasons. It could happen anywhere along the customer journey.
The provider might answer questions to help the person make a good decision.
They might present the client with a feature of their product that would solve a problem for them.
The concept of communicating through video is not a new idea. We used a product called Bomb-Bomb to produce a user-generated video, put it in an email, and send it to a client.
Vidyard is cleaner because you’re not dealing with a video that’s coming from your desktop, it’s dealing with a video that’s in the cloud. That makes it a lot easier if you’re emailing it.
Email applications have an easier time dealing with a link and a picture, directing them to a video. That’s how it becomes such a useful tool.
The reason for that question is that the pandemic started in 2020, driving how people were communicating with their clients.
User-generated video increased in 2021, and again in 2022. So 2020 wasn’t the high water mark.
The reality is their customers got very used to the idea that remote selling was a credible way to sell and buy. You didn’t have to travel.
Also, with a Zoom call, even though it’s online, you have to be there at the same time as everybody else. Whereas these types of videos are in your inbox, and when you have a moment to go look at them, you can do that.
I’m thinking of this from the viewpoint of what I would do if I were selling.
It gives you the opportunity to have a call with your client and ask them questions.
You do the immediate research in response to the question.
Then you produce a video, and you send it to them.
You’ve done the follow-up that was expected and finish your sales call by identifying what the client needs.
It is what’s necessary to move the client forward to the next step.
You’ve kept your promise as a sales professional to respond to the client and they don’t have to read a wall of text.
They can open it at their own pace.
Then send a follow-up email or even a text that says, I sent you that information you asked for. What did you think?
In the research report, they stated that even though there’s a return to “business as usual,” video uptake is growing.
I’m going to disagree with that slightly. I think the definition of business as usual has changed because of the pandemic. My hopping on an airplane from Washington to Atlanta to visit with my client was business as usual prior to the pandemic.
Your buyer is now more open to remote communication by Zoom or any of the other video communications products.
Travel can be very expensive, and that affects your bottom line. If we transfer the cost of travel over to a budget to create short videos for our clients, we can increase business at a much lower cost.
There are so many good things that we have gained doing business this way that we will give up a few things, like being there in person and shaking somebody’s hand.
We can see the eyes of the other person. We can have a conversation and we can still do business over the internet through video.
These conversations that are in real-time using one of the video communications tools are shorter. Everybody wants to get to the point, get to what the next steps are, or deliver what they’re requiring, and then move on.
When you’re talking in person, you throw in some stories and repeat yourself.
Can I get you some coffee?
How was your flight?
The weather is great for golf this time of year.
Extra niceties and small talk take time.
If you’ve ever been to meeting after meeting working for a corporation, it could be a long day of wasted time. But if you’re just opening up an email and somebody tells you the exact information you need in five minutes, that is a great way to save time.
I agree with that.
Even though you may be in a B2B or B2G business, look at what the B2C online businesses are doing.
Amazon has the retail model down very well, but they’re constantly exploring other avenues to satisfy customer needs for information about the product.
That’s why customers who have the product can make a video and post it on Amazon.
Artificial reality is another way that they’re using it. Put on your goggles or use your phone app and you can see how that chair looks in your living room.
A good way for you to understand exactly where this technology lies and how you can expand your current utilization is to watch the big retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart.
Video has become one of the most important tools for people in sales and marketing.
In the marketing realm, they use more produced videos versus user-generated videos.
But if you look at some of those produced videos, they are designing them to look like they were user-generated videos, but in a more elegantly produced model.
Not only do we see that from marketers and sellers, but we’re also seeing it with political campaign ads.
I saw one recently that was supposed to look like what’s happening in a typical family in the near future if we keep going the way we’re going.
It looked like somebody had shot it with their cell phone, standing inside this house. We see police come to the door and the back-and-forth conversation between the family and the police. It was very dramatic and useful for changing people’s minds and spurring them to vote.
There is a great difference between a user looking at a seller-generated video on their smartphone versus a pamphlet that you get in the US Mail.
Once I see those bars across the envelope or pamphlet, I don’t pay attention to it. I’m just putting it in the trash. I know it was sent to me by a company and the only thing they know about me is my address.
There are small businesses with 10 or fewer employees, medium-sized businesses with 200 to 1000 employees, and large businesses with greater than 1000 employees.
All of them are looking for ways to make their salespeople more efficient by using this kind of technology.
Three of Toby’s adult children work from home for high-tech companies using these kinds of tools. Whether it is online, real-time telecommunications, or user-generated videos.
Overall video creation, as opposed to video production, increased by 178% in 2021.
That’s a noteworthy percentage of any technology being used.
When somebody says we increased our use of video conferencing by 25% last year, you’d think that was a big number of hours. People stopped traveling to communicate. They used video conferencing instead.
But 178% is even more significant. That means if you had 100 hours in user-generated video, you’ve increased that to 178 hours for every person in your business who is responsible for selling or marketing.
These are people adopting this technology as a realistic way to reach out to their clients and move them through their sales process.
Key takeaway number two, 80% of all videos created in 2021 were user-generated versus 60% in 2020.
This is in the Vidyard model. When they refer to videos that are being uploaded to their site, 80% of them are user-generated. Meaning I’m using a screen capture tool and I’ve got my face down in the corner.
That’s a 20% year-over-year increase in people using this technology to communicate with their prospective sales clients.
Once you’ve adopted it, then you just continue to increase the amount that you’re using it.
If you have a group of salespeople that you want to test videos instead of making calls, Vidyard offers an onboarding process and a free trial.
Key takeaway number three, video increased across the business spectrum.
You would expect this to take place in high-tech companies, and indeed it was 113%, but look at the number for retail, which grew 231%.
Retail has traditionally been a face-to-face business.
In your engagement with a retail store, whether it’s you order online, or you go into a store, eventually, they’re going to ask for your email address.
That email address gives them the ability to communicate with you. They can have the retail clerk with whom you communicated during your last purchase make a video and send it to your email telling you about a sale they’re having.
If you want to buy a car online, you can work with somebody who can make those videos for you to answer all your questions. You can make the entire purchase online using something like this.
The communications industry is the biggest user of all this technology.
They’ve increased their utilization of user-generated videos for sales and marketing by 607 percent.
Key takeaway number four, video marketing applies to small companies.
We’re talking about companies under 200, although small could mean an entrepreneur or partners like us.
They’ve increased the number of videos by 81%.
They’re the ones least likely to afford exorbitant travel expenses.
In the past two years, the car that your sales professional used to rent for $39 a day, including insurance, jumped to $205 a day.
When we travel, we have to look at it from the perspective of, is the possible business revenue worth the cost of the travel?
The good news is that video gives small business owners like us the ability to compete with those larger companies.
We can access video tools as easily as they can, and sometimes more easily because we don’t have to get approval from a manager or VP.
Key takeaway number five: large and medium businesses are focusing on video creation. They’re moving away from external video creation to internal resources.
Small businesses are concentrating on internal video creation.
Big businesses have the marketing budget for TV advertising, but they are just as often using internal video creation.
Fewer people are watching television, and we’ve spread out how we take in information. We get it from YouTube, social media sites, television, podcasts, and email newsletters.
Reaching out to influencers or having your salespeople make user-generated content is not only more personal, but you’re more likely to connect with the customer that you are targeting rather than posting a blanket ad for everyone to see.
You can see how companies are using it.
I have YouTube Premium and I don’t have to watch advertising before, during, or after the videos. But I’ve noticed more of the videos I watch, whether it’s about camping, fishing, boating, or cameras, feature creators who have established relationships with vendors.
So when they say I’m trying out this new technology, DJI sent me. The entire 20-minute video is the equivalent of promotion for DJI’s new product. They’re sponsoring the video.
More companies are moving away from the traditional advertising model.
You’re still going to see advertising on free entertainment, but people are paying premium prices to turn that off.
Besides providing you access to premium content, it is premium content without advertising.
So they’ve got to reach you another way as these channels get progressively smaller for them in terms of their advertising capabilities.
The most common types of videos were brand videos, live videos, and product videos. The most common video distribution channels were social media, sales prospecting and conversations, and customer conversations and support.
Sales communication videos use brand, live, and product videos.
The brand tells you I’m coming from a particular company, in our case, AGK Media.
You’re seeing me live. You’re actually dealing with a live person and I’m getting to talk about my product.
We provide live streaming services, podcasting, and more.
It takes advantage of all three types of video.
We distribute videos on social media channels.
Prospecting and conversations they put in one category, and customer conversations and support in another.
As an example of customer conversations and support, we just had an accident with one of our video production products.
Translation: I dropped the pocket camera and broke it.
I filled out the forms and sent the damaged item to the company.
They required me to contact them by filling out forms. Then they contacted me via emails that were pretty good about letting me know what steps they took.
I never spoke to anyone from that company. I didn’t chat or text with anyone. I didn’t exchange videos with anyone.
It leaves you always wondering. When they sent me an email, it was one of those emails that said do not reply.
After reading each one of those emails, I had a question.
It would have been very helpful to have more communication options.
Many people in the older age group who did not grow up with cell phones or computers have a hard time with the transition to online shopping, banking, and medical appointments.
They are caught up in the middle of the adoption of video communications.
They want to have all of this convenience so they can do everything from home, but maybe they don’t understand the technology, and how to get set up.
This is something that we did for my mom and dad. We set up a home studio for them and now they have high-speed internet. They have a computer, camera, and lighting. When Mom has her medical appointments online, she’s set up for that.
Setting up a studio in your home takes half a day. It is easy as long as you’re willing to adopt that into your lifestyle.
Open up your horizons for these new conveniences so people can deal with you online.
They can make videos for you to answer your questions.
You can see the doctor online.
These things are now open to you.
If this is something that you want in your own home, please contact us, write to support@agkmedia.studio and let us know I need a home studio. I need a setup where I can access online products and services.
Number seven is the average video length.
Here’s something that surprised me because over the life of my video online production I’ve seen watch time fall. We believed if you were producing a video longer than three minutes, nobody would watch it.
But last year the video creation for user-generated videos went up to nine minutes and 58 seconds. This is the second year in a row that the video length went up.
That means your prospective buyer will watch your video.
They expect you to use these technologies to produce high-quality videos, even if it is the equivalent of a sales call. They’re also willing to listen to it from an information perspective.
If you have to communicate with one of your buyers using these technologies, use the highest possible video production values that you can afford.
Vidyard has a free package where you can get up to 25 videos. It guarantees that if you have lights, audio equipment, and a camera, they’ll give you the cloud-based tools necessary to produce and edit a good video.
There are companies out there trying to move towards this technology and if you’re unsure what equipment to invest in, let us know. We consult in that area.
The second thing is they’re expecting information. They’re not expecting a bunch of data.
They’re expecting the beginning of a conversation between you and them regarding what you want out of this experience or this relationship.
It should sound conversational. It should sound knowledgeable, and it should provide information, not data. It should stimulate some sort of action.
So at the end of this conversation, we should provide you with the information necessary for you to take some kind of action, not just give you a bunch of statistics.
Information differs from reading a bunch of statistics.
We could have taken the report, put the pages up there, read you the numbers from it, and you wouldn’t know any more about this technology than you did at the beginning of the presentation.
We will provide you with some recommendations that you can act on.
Take away number eight: When controlling for all video lengths, 54% of viewers watched a video all the way to the end.
I think the effects of the pandemic helped us to increase our ability to sit through longer videos. It also inspired the people making videos to have better production values, to be more interesting, and to connect more deeply with the viewer.
A significant percentage of viewers, 62%, watched 60-second videos all the way through.
You’ll see that companies who advertise on short-form video platforms take advantage of that to promote their products. A lot of the ones that I see on Instagram start with a square graphic. Here’s the product we want to talk about. If you need more information, click this button.
You’re immediately taken to another video outside of the platform.
So create promotional videos, 60 seconds or less, and conversational videos up to 10 minutes, because they’ll watch up to 10 minutes.
It says conversely, only 26% finished a video over 20 minutes long. So that might inform us to get to the point and keep our videos short. If we have more than one thing to talk about, split that off into two separate videos.
Another thing we can think about is whether I could share this message better in a podcast format.
People will listen to longer podcasts because they can multitask.
So think about the length of the videos that you’re making. How much information is too much? Is it information overload? Are you focusing on too many things?
Key takeaway number nine is video analytics.
We are big fans of platform analytics.
Companies are starting to use those analytics as viable information. A lot of it comes as data. They’re getting more sophisticated, but they provide information about what your customers are doing.
In our case, we know that for one of our YouTube channels, 80% of our viewers are male and 20% are female. So we know how to configure that content so that it addresses the needs of both.
Primarily, since most of our viewers are male, the question we have to ask ourselves is, how much do we want to change our content to increase the number of females that watch?
Perhaps we’re better off making a separate channel.
Some of those businesses have used those analytics to decide what kind of content they’re delivering to their users.
The most popular form of analytics was video performance analytics in video calls to action, meaning how did they respond to what you were asking them to do?
YouTube doesn’t provide a button for a call to action. You do it by saying it in your video.
We have posted resource links in our description, but that is not connected to our YouTube channel analytics.
A benefit of using one of these cloud apps, like Vidyard, is they enable you to incorporate a call to action in the video, and then you can track that information in your account.
You can find out how many people open the video. What was the average watch time? Did they respond to the call to action? Did they download the resource?
Not only do they provide analytics that most of the other video platforms provide you, but they also provide you with additional analytics that the other video platforms don’t provide unless you’re paying for advertising.
So if you have an Instagram advertisement for your product, then you’ll get that information as part of your company’s analytics.
If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur, you can grow your YouTube channel and talk about what services and products you provide.
You can analyze each video and your channel, and calls to action can take them to your website.
If you’re an influencer and you’re growing a large audience, then YouTube gives you the ability to put products on your page that people can click on and buy. They can join your membership. There are a lot of little extra things that you can sell if you’re an influencer on YouTube.
The analytics tell me that video hasn’t yet peaked.
When communicating seller to buyer, it still has room to grow.
It is not in lieu of real-time video conferencing. It doesn’t replace that entirely, but it is an adjunct and a very usable technology to maintain a high level of communication with your client.
Video either enhances or improves the online buying experience, whether it’s real-time or via email.
One conclusion we’ve come to is timely, consistent, user-generated videos are worthwhile investments.
When you hear us talk about how to manage your YouTube channel, we say to produce your content timely and regularly and make sure it’s high quality. The same set of criteria applies to user-generated videos like this.
Analytics will play a big role in understanding the return on investment you’ve made in funding and using these technologies as part of your sales process.
Video is a major part of your content marketing plan.
We have a live video-first content marketing plan.
Once you’ve made the video, you now have several types of content. You have the video, audio, text, and images that you can then use as part of your content marketing.
You can compete with any size company by doing a video-first content marketing strategy.
Find video opportunities in your business.
We go live every week and share information that is useful to our target clients.
Where could you apply these strategies in your business?
Does it make sense to put it into your sales organization?
Does it make sense to put it into your customer support organization?
I’ll go back to the example I gave you. It would’ve been impressive if I had gotten a short video from the people working on the product that I sent them to repair.
If they made a 60-second video saying, A. we got your product. B. we’re reviewing the problem, and C. we’ll send you another video when we’ve made that decision. In less than 60 seconds, I could have seen a face and felt more comfortable. They could have put a call to action there that said, respond to this video.
Obviously, you can always use video in sales, but it could be even more important with customer support. You want to have some sort of relationship with your customers.
If somebody is returning a product to you and you have a video they can interact with that says I’m so sorry this didn’t work out for you. Can you tell me what went wrong?
You can learn so much about how to improve your products or how to better style your outreach, your ads, and your sales copy so that you hit the right notes with people. Then they understand what they’re getting, so they’re not dissatisfied, and they like you more, so they are more forgiving.
This kind of customer support provides information that you can use to improve your products and it will help you rise to the next level as a business.
You may end up selling that person something that will work for them. Continue that relationship and they will purchase from you in the future.
This report reinforces what we teach, which is to use video first. Apply it as early and often in your business as possible and reach out to your customers throughout the customer journey with video.
That is going to increase your sales, your customer satisfaction, your reputation, and everything that goes along with that.
Consider using video in your business, and if we can help you with that, set up a consultation with us at consulting.agkmedia.studio.
It’s a free consultation. We’re happy to listen to your vision, and walk you through all the steps necessary and make it happen.
Get a copy of the Benchmark Report at: https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2022/48117/2023-b2b-content-marketing-report-benchmarks-budgets-and-trends
Grab our newest and best course yet, How to Create, Publish and Distribute Content Consistently at http://course.agkmedia.studio. Use the coupon code AGKSAVER to get the course free through November 18, 2022.
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