Video can offer marketers powerful insights about customers, says columnist Michael Litt, which is why integrating it into your marketing automation platform is critical.
I’m going to start off with a bold assumption: You’ve stood in front of another person and had a conversation at some point in your life, possibly even in the last few hours. When we talk to other people, we watch their body language — how they hold their arms, where their eyes focus, how they use their hands — to look for indications of how interested they are in the conversation.
Believe it or not, the people you talk to watch you for the same things!
When it comes to B2B sales and marketing, more often than not, our conversations don’t happen face-to-face. That means gathering those non-verbal cues can be really difficult.
We all could stand to know more about our customers and prospects. After all, how can you possibly sell to someone if you don’t know anything about them?
Fortunately, there are ways to read our customers’ and prospects’ digital body language, and we can use marketing automation platforms to gauge insights and interest. Video is one of the most powerful ways to measure digital body language, and it is critical to your marketing automation strategy.
It’s a matter of collecting information and then targeting the right people at the right time based on how they interact with your content.
Not All Content Is Equal
Content has never been more important for guiding buyers along the journey toward a purchase. However, not all types of content are equally valuable.
Sure, white papers and case studies serve a purpose. They can be extremely informative. The problem is, as marketers, we never really know whether our audiences interacted with them. We can tell if someone downloaded the document, but we don’t know whether they read it from beginning to end, skimmed through it or just left it open in a window and never looked at it.
The beauty of video is that when a person clicks the play button, we as marketers can see exactly what they viewed.
We can see whether they turned it off after five seconds. We can see whether they skipped ahead. We can see whether they watched the whole thing from beginning to end. Maybe they even went back and re-watched a particular section.
All of that data adds up to powerful insight. That’s what I mean when I talk about the power of video as it relates to the concept of digital body language.
Now, take that rich video engagement data and feed it into your marketing automation platform, where you can combine it with other information — order data from your ERP system and contact data from your CRM, for example.
Bringing A Fuller Picture Into Focus
Pulling disparate pieces of data together gives you a fuller picture than if you just looked at them individually. That way you can approach the right prospects at the right time.
If you think I’m overblowing the importance of video and marketing automation, consider this scenario: Two potential customers visit your website. First, Greg views multiple blog posts and downloads a white paper. That’s great, right? He’s clearly showing some interest.
Meanwhile, Marie looks at a couple of blog posts, then watches two customer testimonial videos, spends 10 minutes watching a webinar replay, and then watches a four-minute product demo all the way through.
It’s pretty obvious which person is more interested in your product. However, if you aren’t integrating your video data into your marketing automation platform, Greg is going to get a better lead score based on his download of a white paper and multiple blog views.
He’ll be the one who gets passed over to sales as a marketing qualified lead for immediate follow-up. Meanwhile, you’re completely blind to Marie based on a faulty lead-scoring method neglecting the importance of a video view.
Take a look at the difference between lead-scoring models with and without video:
By integrating a video marketing platform with your marketing automation platform, you can automatically push video engagement data into individual contact records. You’ll have a handy record right inside your automation tool to indicate exactly which leads are watching which pieces of video content and how long you keep their attention.
Imagine being the sales rep and getting ready to call Greg and Marie based on the charts above. Marie is quite clearly a better lead. And having seen the video data on Marie, a sales rep has numerous ways to talk to her and follow up on what she’s seen.
Your sales reps will be doing cartwheels for this information. You just have put the plan in place and watch the data — and deals — roll in.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here
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