Video marketing for B2B tech growth with Tyler Lessard, VP Marketing and Chief Video Strategist at Vidyard

By Jodi Norris 02 August, 2021

Video marketing is getting easier and easier with new tech and video platforms, but are customer expectations of video rising alongside? 

On this episode of the FINITE Podcast, Alex is joined by master video marketer Tyler Lessard, VP Marketing and Chief Video Strategist at Vidyard. He has written a video marketing bible, The Visual Sale, and is so good at video FINITE have released a snippet of this podcast as a video. 

This episode covers: 

Listen to the full episode here:

 

And check out more of the FINITE B2B marketing podcast here! 

Full Transcript

Alex (00:06):

Hello and welcome back to the FINITE Podcast. Today we are going to hear from the king of video himself, Tyler Lessard. Tyler is currently the VP of Marketing and Chief Video Strategist at Vidyard – a leading provider of video technology. He has also written a book called The Visual Sale, which teaches marketers how to harness the power of video content, drive marketing results and boost growth. 

And today on the podcast, we’re going to be talking all about, you guessed it, video marketing in B2B. How video has evolved as a marketing strategy, how it can drive emotional resonance, and tips for integrating video into your own B2B marketing strategy. Hope you enjoy.

 

FINITE (00:45):

The FINITE community is kindly supported by the marketing practice, a global integrated B2B marketing agency that brings together all the skills you need to design and run account-based marketing demand generation channel and customer marketing programs. Head to themarketingpractice.com to learn more.

 

Alex (01:04):

Tyler. Hello, welcome to the FINITE Podcast. Thank you for joining me.

 

Tyler (01:07):

Well, hello Alex. Thank you so much. It is an absolute pleasure to be here to talk about video. My favourite topic, of course.

 

About Tyler’s current role as a leading video marketer 

Alex (01:16):

All things video, I should say too, not everybody will be watching this as a video, but some people might just be listening, but your video is impeccable. It’s worth noting for anyone that can’t see you, as we would expect nothing less given your role and what you do. But I’ll let you start then and you can tell us a bit about that in terms of your background and your current role at Vidyard.

 

Tyler (01:36):

Yeah, absolutely. So, my name is Tyler Lessard, I’m VP marketing and chief video strategist here at Vidyard. And I’ve been part of the team here at Vidyard for just about eight years now, which has been an incredible experience. We are a video technology company, we work with largely B2B organisations who are leveraging video in new and creative ways for their go to market programs, everything from awareness and demand gen marketing, video on their website, right through into using video as part of their sales team as a better way to connect with customers. 

And so over that time, it’s actually been a really interesting experience to see this evolution of the use of video in B2B marketing, which we’ll talk about some of the trends we’ve seen there. And then this sort of crossing the chasm of a video over into sales organisations and beyond. 

As you mentioned, I’ve invested quite a bit, rightfully so, being the video guy in my own video set up here at home. But it’s been really interesting and that’s actually been a part of the dynamic that I’ve seen across the market of, we’re all becoming video creators. It’s a reality like right now, we’re making a video. All of us when we’re actually on zoom calls. If we’re recording those, we’re making videos and it’s not going to go away. And so it’s a really interesting time to see video becomes such a big part of our business lives.

 

Alex (02:53):

Absolutely. Well, thanks for the intro. And tell us a bit about your team and structure at VidYard in terms of marketing as an organisation.

 

Tyler (03:00):

Yeah, so the organisation, we’re about 300 people overall. We’re based here in Toronto in the city of Kitchener in Canada. And we’ve been around for just about 10 years as an organisation. And our marketing team hovers somewhere around, I’m going to say 25 to 30 people in total. We have a great team with an in-house creative and content function, which is a big part of that. 

So we have our core product marketing our PR and comms are a segment marketing, our demand gen teams which manage our programs into the markets. And we have a growth marketing team, which is responsible for our freemium models and driving as many users into our product as possible, which we can talk about as well. 

And then we also have our content and creative team with content writers, producers, designers, who all come together to create what I think is some really awesome experiences for our audience.

 

How has the role of video evolved within B2B marketing? 

Alex (03:57):

Cool. I’m going to start by setting the scene a bit and maybe let you just at a top level summarise how you’ve seen the role of video evolve within the B2B marketing landscape more generally. And then we’ll dive into some of the specifics.

 

Tyler (04:13):

Yeah. So it’s been a very interesting evolution over the last number of years. If you think back, let’s go way back to the like five or 10 years ago and video was still a very, almost like elite content media. Not a lot of us were doing it at any given scale. It was seen as something that was expensive to produce, but high impact if used in the right way. 

And so we originally saw a lot of use of in promotion content, advertisements and things like that. And then over the last number of years a few different things happened. First and foremost, the kind of democratisation of video if you will, in terms of its accessibility for us to be able to create and publish at scale. 

Here today, I can record a video with my iPhone that has just about as good a quality, if not as good a quality as we were making 10 years ago on high end digital cameras and the editing software. All of these things have become really democratised. And we can start to create video content now to add much greater scale and a much lower cost. But on the flip side, the expectation of our audiences have also changed. And so the demand side has also increased. 

Of course, we’ve seen over the last few years that the rise of video on social media networks has been explosive, which is driving more and more demand for that content. And also shifting expectations of people as they’re on different channels unlike 10 years ago, even five years ago. They’re now just expecting to be able to learn through video, to meet people at companies through video, and that doesn’t just stop with social media. It goes right through into your website and your content marketing. 

Content marketing isn’t just about the written blog anymore, right? We’re now creating video content to explain ideas and answer questions. Our websites need videos to transparently explain things. So that’s really where I’m seeing the bulk of investment now for B2B companies is on video as an educational medium in that kind of format.

 

What are audience expectations around the quality of video? 

Alex (06:07):

Interesting. And I’m probably jumping around a bit with the questions, but seeing as you’ve just covered it, I guess that point about democratisation and quality is an interesting one. Because I think that, as you say, a few years ago, it definitely felt like the bar was set quite high in terms of the level of polish needed to publish anything. And now it feels more accepted that you can just start talking to your iPhone whilst you’re walking down the street and post that on LinkedIn. 

And I’m sure there’s arguably better ways of doing video, but I guess there’s almost like an authenticity now that is accepted with video that’s actually not that well thought through or planned. And they can almost be more impactful if it’s not as polished and planned. Is that a fair summary?

 

Tyler (06:50):

I was going to say in many cases it’s not only accepted, but it’s becoming preferred, which is interesting. And I’ve seen a lot of actual professional video producers who are now choosing in many cases to record on an iPhone or to simplify the production process to make sure it actually feels more authentic to the audience. Because those sorts of things are resonating. 

And it doesn’t mean that there’s this whole shift to like completely unscripted off the cuff video. That has its place in terms of things like timely social updates and things like that. But even the content that we’re planning and producing. I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say that as a B2B organisation, there’s probably gonna be a handful of key topics or keywords that you’re really focused on as a marketing organisation. You’re probably writing blog posts today for that topic. You’re writing, making eBooks and thinking, could I bring that message, that idea to life, through videos, to explain it in a different way? And in that case, you’re going to plan it out much like you’ve probably got the ebook or the blog. 

You can say, great, I’ve got the core content or the narrative here, but I just want to bring it to life in video to give them not only a different or a new format to consume it, but I can now start to leverage visuals, I can have real people to create more of a connection. I can put our passion or energy into it. I can make it a bigger piece for us. And so you’re still going to plan those out but when it comes to actually producing it, you don’t necessarily need to hire a big agency or put a huge amount of budget behind it. 

It can be as simple as standing in front of a chalkboard with some drawn illustrations and explaining the idea that way. And my final point on that is content quality trumps production quality. Now it’s not to say we shouldn’t think about production quality because we still absolutely want to make sure we’re delivering the right asset, but it all starts today with the content quality. If the content quality is there, people will watch. 

 

What do I do when experts or employees don’t want to be recorded on video? 

Alex (08:45):

Interesting, I agree. And actually what you’re saying resonates with me a lot because it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about on the agency side of my business. And that thought leadership, how do we work video into marketing generally? 

I guess the interesting one is with a blog post or a written form, you can tap into experts who are quite comfortable writing things down. But I find that those same experts are not necessarily the same types of people that are happy to suddenly have a camera pointing at them and to be talking into a screen or a camera knowing that it’s going to be published on the internet. That feels like the one last bottleneck to video, to some extent.

But I guess the more widely accepted it as in the more widely used it is, people become more at ease with videos as a medium and communicating through video. Because I know there’s a lot of asynchronous, I’m sure people use video for similar, but I know like Loom and other tools where teams are collaborating from a support perspective and just from a work perspective, using video is not just necessarily a marketing thing. So in particularly with the last 18 months or so, I guess where maybe we’re used to it now, to recording ourselves in some form or another.

 

Tyler (09:50):

That’s been a really important trend actually. And I don’t want to underestimate that because over the last 18 months, to your point, we’ve got the two sides of the supply and demand have evolved a lot from the audience perspective. Their expectations of what video is and how it feels and all that changed a lot. 

And frankly, today I feel super comfortable recording a video while I’m sitting at my kitchen table with something in the background. Because again, people’s expectations have changed. But again, on the flip side, we are all getting more and more comfortable, right? Some of us more than others talking into a camera, delivering a message that way. And that’s important. It’s a big trend. 

Not everybody feels super comfortable or confident delivering message into a camera and that’s okay. But for a lot of us as marketers, we need to be thinking about, who are those people we can activate so that we don’t have to hire actors when we’re trying to create content. And it’s funny when you talk about getting like experts to participate, you’ll also find the flip of what you talked about. 

There are some who are more comfortable writing things out and sending it over. There are others, take myself as an example, I’m more than happy to hop on a video call and have a conversation about something, much more than I would rather spend time trying to write something out. It would take me way longer to polish a written piece than to actually have a conversation about something. 

So I do find more and more, that’s a big opportunity where we can create this kind of conversational content. We can cut it up, edit it down into something that’s really impactful and use that as part of our content strategy. These sorts of things really are happening right now.

 

FINITE (11:24):

The FINITE community and podcast are kindly supported by Clarity Performance, the digital marketing agency working exclusively with ambitious fast-growth B2B technology companies. Visit clarityperformance.global to find out how they partner with marketing teams in B2B technology companies to drive growth.

 

How can video be used for all stages of the B2B marketing funnel? 

Alex (11:44):

I guess in your introduction, you talked about videos in different mediums across B2B marketing. On a website, video is kind of an educational tool video, maybe as an outreach, used by SDRs or whatever for BDRs to get in touch with people. 

How do you see video being used further along the funnel or lower down the funnel from like a conversion perspective? Because like I said, it can now span the whole marketing spectrum. It can be used in so many different ways with so many different purposes in mind.

 

Tyler (12:13):

Well, it really does. And it’s funny that we still think about it in these like boxes of, where does video fit? Because in reality, this is a really important mental shift for all of us as marketers, as salespeople’s and others. Video is another format to deliver our important messages, right? Just like text is a format to deliver whatever important message you’re trying to put out there. Voice is another way to do that in audio. And so is video. 

And when you think about it through that lens and say, so video is a way to deliver my important messages, you start to think about, when wouldn’t I use a video in my process now. Sometimes it is going to take more effort to create a video than it is to write something out and so on. So I’m not suggesting we should only, or always be using video, but you start to question those traditional norms and you say, throughout the buying process, a prospect is trying to learn about us. 

Think about all those touch points where you’re trying to put an important message in front of them. It’s everything from in our content marketing, where we’re trying to educate people on new topics and help them clearly understand them, right through into our website. 

And you say, when somebody is on my website, what am I trying to explain to them? What are the main messages I’m trying to get across? What are their expectations in terms of interacting with that channel these days? And I’ll give you a great example. 

I’ve seen a lot of companies do this now, but one I’m super familiar with is my good friends at Marketo, many of you will know as B2B marketers. Of course, they’re a part of the Adobe family, but Marketo a few years ago, actually decided to test something out where they said, when people are on our website, today much like many other software B2B companies, the main ‘calls to action’ on their website are things like book a meeting, talk to sales, request a demo, right? 

We all know it, we all do it as B2B marketers. And they said, you know what? What if instead of having ‘request a demo’ as the main call to action all over the site, we changed that to watch a demo or see a product tour. And so they went about, and they tested that and behind it, they created a really beautiful, transparent online video demo experience. 

So now you go to their website and the top right corner, it says ‘see a product tour.’ You click on that much like before. They do pop up a form so you have to identify yourself and they generate a lead, as we all know, but their form fill rate on that is extremely high, because the value on the other side is great, I can watch a video instead of having to talk to a salesperson. 

I actually did a session this morning with a group of CMOs. And I asked the crowd, I said, “if you were on my website and you had two options, one said, book, a demo. And one said, watch a demo. Which one would you be most likely to click on?” And literally everybody said, watch a demo. That’s our expectation as people today. 

So in Marketo’s case, they saw their conversion rate on their website skyrocket because all of a sudden all these people coming to their site were saying, I want to watch a demo, of course I do. And you’re like, of course they do. And then once they identify themselves, they go into this beautiful portal with about 10 different demo videos where the people can self-select, they can learn about their different products and features, and they could binge watch for 10 minutes or up to an hour to learn all these different things about their products. 

And what was really interesting, not only did they see really high conversion rates now on their website, they’re also tracking behind the scenes. They use video to host those videos so we actually track for them that person, which videos did they watch and how long. And then that data flows into their own marketing automation and CRM. So they’re now qualifying people way faster because they know if you’ve just spent 30 seconds watching one video an bounced, or if you spent 30 minutes watching videos, 1, 2, 5, 9, and 12.

And so now they’re qualifying people faster and it’s this totally transformed experience where it’s better for the prospect, because this is what they wanted in the first place. They didn’t want to talk to a rep. They just wanted to see it. But for Marketo as a marketer, it’s a home run because they’re seeing higher conversion rates, more engagement and they can qualify their most engaged leads faster. It’s a simple idea, but you think wow it works, when you just put it through that mentality.

 

How can sales and marketing work together to produce effective video? 

Alex (16:27):

Powerful. So shortening the sales cycle overall, I guess, giving people access to what they want. And I think that’s such a key point of friction, particularly in enterprise SaaS, where you click on the pricing page and then in half the cases, there’s not actually any pricing on the page, which is even more annoying. And then it’s like request demo. 

And then, maybe it’s even more intricate when you’re selling to marketers, because I think we as marketers know that we’re about to go into. We see in our mind exactly the funnels and workflows, and we know how we’re going to be scored. 

And we know we’re going to end up in a HubSpot or a Pardot or Marketo, and we know how it’s going to get kicked onto some kind of sales person to follow up. And I think with MarTech, we’re rolling our eyes before we’ve even begun. We just know what’s coming. And so if you can remove a lot of that then great.

 

Tyler (17:10):

Well here’s the macro takeaway from that is, and this isn’t just about video, right? Like what we’re talking about here is most marketers and sales teams today most, and frankly including my own in many cases, we market and sell the way that we want to market and sell. We do things in a way that we can try to control the experience. 

And we do all the different things that we believe are in our best interest to try to sell to them. Very few of us genuinely flip that and say, I’m genuinely going to market and sell the way that our prospects and customers actually want to learn and buy. If you put that test down, you could mystery shop your own company. That’s the most fun thing to do. Take off your hat in your business and say, you know what, I’m going to mystery shop my own company. 

And I’m going to come in here and I’m going to do some things and really think about the process you’re going through. And as a potential buyer, you mentioned it earlier, what are those points of friction that you’re seeing? Is it really the things that you would want? 

And look for those moments and ask yourself, wow. At this point, if I could just see it rather than have to talk to sales, would that be better for me? And if so, don’t make excuses as to why you don’t do it. Just do it, cause if you would prefer that process, I guarantee you most of your prospects will as well.

 

Alex (18:28):

I don’t know whether you know the answer to this, but I wonder what the sales organisation within Marketo felt or how they felt about that as a process. Because I think it takes a good relationship between marketing sales, but also quite a brave sales team to say, we’re going to step back and just let this happen without us doing it to some extent.

 

Tyler (18:46):

It was a brave marketing team to risk trying it out because I’ve talked to the sales team there and I’ve talked to other organisations that have done similar processes and you’re absolutely right. The big challenge of today, you’re doing book a meeting and then you say everybody, we’re going to change that CTA to watch a demo. 

The sales team is going to freak out and rightfully so because the process they have in place today is dependent on that book of meeting CTA. But as a marketing team, you have to be smart about this and think about, okay if we do this, if we all genuinely believe, and the way I recommend you do this is you actually make it a collaborative process with your sales team and you ask your sales reps, everybody let’s take off our hats as marketers and sellers and let’s put ourselves in the shoes of our buyers. 

You as a potential buyer, what would you be most likely to engage with on the site, this or that? And if they say, you know what, I’d probably want to rather watch a demo, then you go, okay. So we’re building consensus that we think this is the best experience for our prospect. 

But now you say, how could we do that in a way that does not cannibalise our opportunity to have conversations with these people? Cause that’s what you’re trying to have as a sales team, is a conversation with these people. So how can we do it in that way that we don’t lose those people out of our funnel. This is where you need to make sure you then have the right process behind it. 

Because if Marketo didn’t have that form in the first place, they’d have a lot of anonymous people watching these demo videos leaving and they wouldn’t know who they are. Which for some people, they may be willing to try that, but Marketo went halfway there and said, we’re still going to gate them. 

So we’re still going to get those leads and by the way, sales team, we’re now going to send you only those people that actually watch a certain threshold of those videos. You’re going to get more educated leads because you’re going to know the people were sending you have actually already started to self-educate. And at first, a lot of people will be hesitant, but I know a number of the folks in that sales team, I spoke to them after sort of six to 12 months and it was a consistent across the board. They said, those are the people that are my best leads that I up with first.

If I have a lead that came in from another button that said talk to sales and another one that I know watched six of the demo videos, I follow up with the demo video people first because they’ve shown intent and interest, as opposed to that person who said, ‘talk to sales’, and I don’t really know how serious they are. 

So it’s a really interesting dynamic, but it is hard. It’s very hard to change that process. And you have to expect for those first three or four months, there’s going to be a big learning curve. And there may be some things that drop, but as marketers and businesses today, we have to think about the long term and adapting to our buyers.

 

Alex (21:22):

Yeah, interesting. And I guess, I assume that as Marketo, they wouldn’t be doing anything without some lead scoring and making sure they’ve got some data capture.

 

Tyler (21:31):

There was a really neat one too. And that’s why I actually looked back at this example because they measure everything. It’s incredible as you can expect. And they saw not only that huge lift I mentioned in conversion rate, but the other interesting thing that they tracked, and this is actually my favourite stat of it, was that they reduced the time for a lead to go from an inquiry to a qualified lead by six times shorter. 

Because in the old world, somebody who hits the website, they do something and become an inquiry, but then it might be a week or two before they interact with enough eBooks or respond to an email to actually become a qualified lead. 

Now people come in, first thing they do is watch the demo, but then within an hour, if they watch enough of those videos, they’re a qualified lead and they’re sent to sales. And so the velocity of the deal cycle shrunk as well. And you’re like, of course, right? It’s so smart, but those are really interesting nuances that we have to think about as modern marketers.

 

What role does video marketing play in creating emotional resonance with a B2B tech brand? 

Alex (22:27):

Yeah, absolutely. I guess that emotional side of B2B marketing comes up a lot in all of our conversations as this kind of bay, which I think is not always right, but the whole B2C/B2B, stop focusing on features and product. Which is how things work, talk about how I can help the customer. 

And don’t overlook the emotional side as a B2B tech company of your proposition and what it is that you do. I think it’s fair to assume that video can play a pretty key role in bridging that gap, particularly over the last 18 months, where again in an enterprise technology, a lot of pipeline was driven by field marketing and events and conferences and stuff that hasn’t happened. And video is not a replacement for that kind of emotional connection.

 

Tyler (23:10):

Well then of course it allows you to scale it, even independent of library. It allows you to scale, creating better connections with your audience. And I think the important thing in B2B to be mindful of is when we talk about creating that emotional connection or that emotional resonance with our audiences, it doesn’t always mean or need to mean that we’re making them laugh or we’re making them cry, or we’re like doing these extreme things to create this big brand affinity in the world of B2B. 

Honestly, I think it’s as simple as using video as a medium to create meaningful connections with your audience. We’re trying to tap into the emotional side. It’s as simple as you’re trying to create a meaningful connection with them. And video of course plays a big role in that because it allows people on the other side, in many cases, to actually meet and interact with people from our organisation. 

Real people that can create a greater degree of empathy and connection. We don’t really connect with logos and other things. So even that simple thing of having real people in your company featured in your content, there’s also, again with video, you have the opportunity to create bigger, more interesting, more relatable content and scenarios where again, those can create connections for people, right? When they’re seeing real stories of others like them that have solved problems. 

Again, even if it’s things where you’re visually explaining different concepts, even that simple move from text-based to video can create more resonance with people. And by the way, you also become more memorable. There was no shortage of neuroscience studies out there in psychology studies to show how we process visual and audible information. Not only faster than text, 60,000 times faster is what they say, but either way it’s a lot faster. 

But we also tend to store it in long-term memory more readily than we do with the written word. So we’ll often remember parts of things we’ve seen much more readily than we will, things that we’ve read. And that’s important for building that long-term brand.

 

How do you get an organisation’s culture involved in video? 

Alex (25:10):

Interesting. That’s I guess the science-y side of it I hadn’t really thought about, but that’s pretty cool. We’ve talked maybe a little bit about this cultural perspective. We’re getting people bought into doing video, thought leaders, others, not having to pull in actors to do stuff, and actually just getting new people in front of the camera. 

I assume at Vidyard, you have a culture which is pretty much built around video in its entirety. But that might be more of a challenge in other organisations. I think your point was valid that for every person that feels really uncomfortable doing video, there’s actually some people that really love it. So maybe it’s not always an uphill battle, but do you have any tips or experiences of the cultural side of getting everybody on board with video?

 

Tyler (25:53):

Yeah. No, it’s great. I’m really glad you used the word culture because you’re absolutely right. We’re in a point now and actually, if you look back at kind of the evolution of a B2B businesses for the last number of years, over the last decade or 10 to 15 years, many of us have created a culture of content around this idea that we need to be thought leaders in the market. We need to help, not sell, to our prospects and customers because of the way the market is evolving and because of the way people use the internet and social media and so on. 

So we created cultures of content in our organisations where we really lived and breathed that idea of ‘we’re thought leaders’ even right into our sales team, culture, thought leadership as well. And I think it really is important that we start to foster a culture of video so that as the years progress more and more of us feel comfortable, we feel confident in recording and creating video and being a part of video creation processes. 

But many of us are starting to get pretty adept at just doing basic video editing, cutting some things ourselves much like, we make our own PowerPoints or things like that. And I honestly believe that this is going to be more and more an intrinsic part of business as we move forward. And it’s not just because everything’s virtual now, it’s because of many of these different factors of the accessibility. 

And I think just our craving for human connection. So there’s a lot of sort of subtleties to how we do that. Like how do we create that culture of video? We actually talk about it. I’ll just for those of you watching or listening, I’m holding up a copy of my book called The Visual Sale because we actually dive into it quite a bit in the book on video and marketing video and sales and then how to create a culture of video. 

And a few of the things that we talk about come back to even like leading by example within an organisation, having executive level buy in that yes, video is important and therefore we’re going to walk the talk even internally. When we have important company updates, we’re going to record a quick video and send it out to everybody so they can see us and hear us rather than just sending out a text-based email or waiting for a company-wide zoom call. 

And we’re going to show that it’s okay to be human and authentic and that we’re not going to put on a suit and go into the studio, we’re going to record it from our home wearing a t-shirt. And allow that humanity and transparency to come through. So in terms of how you use it internally, and again also then making people a part of the process and actively working with people from your sales team to be featured in your videos. 

Because they know your customers the best, right? And then starting to do those little things where it just becomes more commonplace. And the last really big thing there I’ll just mention Alex, is that I’m absolutely seeing B2B companies more and more hiring in-house video producers or actual video teams now. 

And that is so important to unlocking the power of video going forward. Just like we hired in-house writers to create our own content, in house designers, having in-house video production skills is critical. But those people’s job isn’t just to make videos. They are also your subject matter expert to help everyone else in the company get comfortable and confident with video so they can start to do it themselves.

 

Alex (28:58):

Awesome. I think we’re going to see much more of that. Hopefully I think I was going to use the same analogy of writers and then designers and video. It feels like the natural next step that a lot of marketing teams are going to be looking at in housing. So, exciting. 

And I guess that segues nicely to the final question, which is just where you think the future of video is happening? A lot’s changed in the last 18 months, I think a lot has been, or maybe not change a lot of stuff that was going to happen maybe in four or five year window has happened in an 18 month window instead. But what do you see next on the horizon?

What will the future of video look like in B2B marketing? 

Tyler (29:31):

I think there’s some things we talked about. There’s been much this great shift to almost more conversational style video content that companies are producing for a number of different areas of the funnel or different channels. And I think we’re going to continue to see more and more of that. There are things that aren’t meant to necessarily last a lifetime. There are things to cover key topics that are of interest, get them out there in front of people, let them learn, let them meet us and continue on. 

So we’re going to see more and more of that. We’re also seeing over the last couple of years, this rise of episodic video based series that companies are investing in, particularly in B2B, which is really interesting to see. A lot of B2B companies are doing podcasts also now doing episodic video series. In some cases they do them together and it’s kind of like a video podcast, but a lot are getting really creative with doing a weekly episode, a five minute episode of this. 

We’ve done a number of series and they all work really well for us, but it’s really neat. It’s kind of that like almost B2C lens on it of, that sounds really interesting. Instead of a series of blog posts, what if it were a five-part video series about X? And it’s like, that actually sounds really interesting. It gives people a reason to subscribe and come back for more or sign up for our newsletter. So that’s really interesting. And I think we’ll see more and more of that. 

And then finally, what you were alluding to, which is this sort of continued quote unquote democratisation of video creation and saying it’s not just a once a month thing that we do to create a video. I think more and more social media marketers are becoming adept at creating social first video content content. Marketers are now creating video as part of their content strategy, even demand gen marketers. 

They’ll usually work with a video producer to create things to support their demand programs and sales reps recording and sending their own custom videos and the tools to do that. It’s one of the big things over the last two years is that the innovation and the tools to do that stuff has skyrocketed. So there are amazing tools out there that we can use today to record a video, edit it, put in a sound effect, do something interesting and ship it. 

What used to would have taken a master’s degree in production now it can be done by an everyday business professional. So it’s really neat to see that happening. And I think that’s part of why we’re going to see video just become more and more ingrained in the cultures of our business and how we communicate our messages.

 

Alex (31:52):

Yeah. Awesome. Well they’re exciting predictions. I think you’ve had some awesome bits of advice there for anyone. There’s so many listeners who are probably on the verge of going more towards video or really doubling down on video efforts. And just that initial barrier to entry is kind of getting a bit low and more accessible. 

But I think content like this is what hopefully drives people to experiment a bit more and hopefully they’ll do so by checking out videos as well. Cause it’s a great product. So thank you for joining. Thank you for sharing everything. I feel like we could have probably talked for another hour, but we’re out of time, but thanks again, Tyler.

 

Tyler (32:23):

I appreciate that. Great to be here and can’t wait to see what you all create.

 

FINITE (32:28):

Thanks for listening. We’re super busy at finite building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B technology sector to connect, share, learn, and grow. Along with our podcast, we host a monthly online events, run interview series, share curated content and have an active slack community with members from London, New York, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Melbourne, and many more to strengthen your marketing knowledge and connect with ambitious B2B tech marketers across the globe. Head to finite.community and apply for a free membership.

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