This guest blog is by Kelley Lynn Kassa, an award-winning marketing and public relations professional. Kelley's current role is Director of marketing communications for High Start Group.
“We need customer references.” This statement can strike fear and confusion in the heart of a sales person. Or, it can motivate them to deliver the references marketing needs.
My experience in working with sales teams to develop customer references range from creating reference programs from scratch for startups to participating in formalized, cross-division reference programs in large, blue-chip businesses. Based on this experience, I’ve developed some general guidelines that will help the marketer to entice the sales team to recruit valuable customer references.
Remove the fear
Being a customer reference can mean many things to many people. It can range from being featured in a video to allowing an industry analyst or third party to examine how a product is being used by a customer. Whether you are asking a sales rep to find a customer reference or a customer to be a reference, you need to realize they may not understand what you are asking.
If the person doesn’t understand what being a reference is to your company, they are likely to simply say no.
Educate, educate, educate
Your sales force is likely your best ally in developing customer references. Cultivate them. Educate them on what you need, what your process is and why it is beneficial for the customer and the sales rep. Ask for a speaking slot at your company’s annual sales event. Build trust and understanding by being transparent with the sales force.
Incentives for the sales force
The average sales person is most focused on sales. Everything else is peripheral. As a result, you need to motive reps to provide you with customer references. The best way to do this is to understand your corporate culture and what would work. Some examples include:
Cash. One company I worked with paid sales reps $200 per qualified customer reference.
Prizes. If you don’t want to offer cash, you can offer non-cash rewards. These can range from company shirts to gift certificates.
Contests. Short on references? Hold a contest – get the sales force competing for most qualified references; highest-value reference, etc. Just remember to factor in the sales cycle; if Q3 is your busiest quarter, don’t try to have a reference contest during that quarter. Look for a slower, nurturing quarter.
Kudos. Don’t discount the value of a thank you. Determine what kind of public thank you will work for your company and your sales team. A profile on a bulletin board might work; a feature in a company newsletter might work. Praising the reference stars can also help to motivate others to participate.
Perks such as Presidents Club. Some sales teams have perks such as Presidents Clubs – earning a trip based on exceeding quota. Qualified references could earn points to help them get that trip to Bermuda.
Annual reviews. Personally, I’ve found this is not the best way to motivate the sales team, but it does work for some companies. Reps are required to generate a certain number of customer references per year, and this is factored into their annual reviews.
In a way, customer references are like annual health checkups: everyone agrees they are good, but few want to go to the “trouble” of getting them. As a marketer, if you want and need customer references, you need to get the sales team excited, interested, and invested in providing you with references for qualification.
Video should be a vital part of your conversion strategy. Why? Video works. It reveals your passion, helps you create a more engaging customer experience, delivers complicated content more easily, etc. I often hear from our prospects: “I know about the power of video, but how can I make it work for me?”. The following 7 tips should enable you to make online video serve its primary function – help grow your business and make you money.
1. Set up a realistic objective
How many visitors do you want to drive to your site? What conversion rates do you want to achieve? Before you decide on these goals, you should look at your current data and trends in your marketing efforts without the use of video. It will help you make realistic projections to define success.
2. Your video should be short
At Pixability, we recommend your video to be no longer than 2-3 minutes. People absorb information much better if you feed it to them in small doses. It is one of those times when “less is more”. If you think it is absolutely necessary to have a longer piece then break it into series. Another solution is to create a longer version and then test the results by gradually cutting it. Check out the examples below to see how much more effective the shorter version of video could be:
3. Create content that is targeted to your audience
Think about your best customers first. What content interests them? You should use this information to create content that targets your prospects as directly as possible. In addition, video should not only match the surrounding content and goals of your campaign but add value to your customers’ experience.
4. Include a compelling call-to-action in your video
A good call-to-action helps prompt the desired behavior from your viewers. It is a critical part of your video content. Our blog on “5 tips to make your video call-to-action effective” might help you come up with some ideas.
5. It matters where you place video on your site
You should keep in mind that the way you position your video on the page sets up viewer’s expectations. For instance, If you place it on the top right it will appear more like an ad. That’s why video sharing sites such as YouTube place their video players on the top left of the page.
6. Video is a marketing asset that you should reuse
Putting video on your site is the essential thing to do to improve your conversions. But you should also distribute it via any channel that is available to you. Put it on YouTube, upload it to your Facebook account or use Twitter to direct viewers to it. You can also use it on many other sites such as Yahoo Video, Vimeo, MySpace, etc.
7. Test, test and test…
Testing is a key to improving your ROI. There are a lot of variables that could contribute to very significant changes in your online marketing results.
The important thing is to vary one parameter at a time. For instance, test your conversion rates with video and without video on your site. This way you will be absolutely sure that it was the introduction of a video that improved your results. Test different versions of your video, test different positions (on the left and on the right of the same page).
The more you play with your video, the more creative ideas you’ll have to make it effective.
We would love to hear about your experience with ROI optimization!
On Tuesday we launched our live video webinar series Pixability TV. Our first episode was “Social Media Video Secrets” with Peter Shankman, a well-known social media guru.
Peter agreed to host the webinar at his apartment (that also served as his office for years). I suspect he regretted it when we showed up with all of our equipment. While we were setting up, Peter fled tweeting: “My office has been turned into a film studio for the @pixability webinar. Cats are in hiding.” In the time it took to tweet, we had already befriended his cats, Nasa and Karma.
During the webinar, we learned:
- what makes your social media efforts effective
- why video is critical for your marketing and what it takes to produce a compelling video (i.e., content, call-to-action, etc)
- the three most common mistakes companies make with video
- how Old Spice created a successful video campaign
- tips on producing quality video
The webinar also featured two video makeovers of videos sent in by the audience. You can watch the entire webinar here.
Please let us know what topics you would like us to discuss in the upcoming webinars. The next webinar “Video Marketing Lesson from the Grateful Dead” will feature Brian Halligan, HubSpot CEO and Founder.
We’re a Mac shop here at Pixability so when one of our favorite local startups OfficeDrop approached us about creating a video for Macintosh legend and startup guru Guy Kawasaki we couldn’t resist.
In 1988, Guy wrote a seminal book about the launch of the Apple Macintosh called The Macintosh Way. The book is a classic for technology marketers and Apple geeks. Especially the chapter on ‘How to Give Good Demo’ is a seminal blueprint for tech companies.
Unfortunately, the book went out of print and was no longer available to technology enthusiasts. Guy fought hard to get the rights to the book back. When he finally got them, he wanted to ceremoniously destroy the printed version and make a digital copy available to the world. You can get a FREE electronic copy of the book if you follow Guy on Twitter and sign up here.
To document this on video we went to the Vintage Mac Museum run by Mac specialist Adam Rosen at Oakbog. We wanted to show how many generations of Macs this book had outlasted. It was a lot of fun filming all of the old Macintoshs, the Newton, colorful first iMac and early iPods. Quite a trip down memory lane for me – I learned to program in Logo on the Apple II in 4th grade and the Macintosh SE was my first own computer back in 1988.
We then got to chop up the book, scan the pages and digitize it at OfficeDrop. There were some dramatic moments because we only got one take for the chopping part. We hope you have fun watching the video!
P.S. - Special thanks to Paul Saarinen who sent us his Newton after a midnight tweet by Guy and to Jeff Berg to told us about the Vintage Mac Museum.
Pixability helps companies – and authors like Guy Kawasaki – market themselves with video. We make it easy by sending you a camera, helping you shoot good footage, polishing it with professional editing and helping you promote the video online. Sign up for a free consultation here.
This guest post is by Gary Lombardo the Director of Product Marketing at Brightcove, the leading online video platform used by media companies, businesses and organizations worldwide to publish and distribute video on the Web. Subscribe to Brightcove's online video blog, and follow Brightcove on Twitter and Facebook.
One of the best parts of my job is the opportunity to speak with organizations using expressive media-- particularly video, as a core, strategic part of their business. I'm fortunate because we have such a diverse group of passionate customers at Brightcove, many of which are entpreneurial start-ups, small companies or larger companies doing smaller projects involving expressive media. (Many just joining Brightcove with the launch of Brightcove Express). I thought I'd take the opportunity to share some of their experiences and the lessons they offer for expressive marketers in a series of blog posts.
One of these companies is telegraph21 (@telegraph21), who is a brand new company that has put video at the center of building their business.
I had the chance to speak to Lauren Kesner O'Brien, Founder and Executive Media Producer for telegraph21, a video magazine featuring the best documentary films and videos from around the world. Lauren, and her co-founder Steffie Kinglake, lead a staff of passionate artists, web designers, journalists, and other creative professionals focused on finding documentaries and films in the far corners of the globe and sharing them with their audience. Their goal is simple: To ferret out the best videos from Argentina to Kenya, and connect ordinary people with often hard-to-find, unique stories captured on video. In doing so, they give flimmakers a venue to promote their work, and give an audience an ability to find non-fiction programming and art videos. They publish new videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and have already created a library of over 40 video assets, all of which are accessible on their site. They just launched their site in January 2010 and have seen steady growth in that short amount of time-- having already blossomed to about 10,000 unique visitors per month. telegraph21 has ambitious plans to continue to grow their business, with video at the forefront in doing so.
telegraph21 offers many key lessons from their early success, but the most important ones that apply to other businesses looking to make video an integral part of their business include:
Establish your brand with your target audience and build your business model on top of that- telegraph21 spent a lot of time thinking about a model for their business, and knew the most important thing they needed to do was to establish credibility and a following with their target audience. Once they were successful in doing so, they could then focus on building a revenue stream, which they plan on doing through video advertising, website advertising, onsite commerce, and co-marketing events with artists and film festival producers.
Find niche, "long-tail" content that you can leverage- One of the most difficult aspects of using video in your business is actually finding content. telegraph21 has been extremely effective in doing so, mainly by keeping the production of video content to a minimum and acquiring the majority of their video content. They limit their self-produced videos to interviews with filmmakers (such as an interview with the director of a documentary called Between the Folds which you can see in the "interview" section below the Brightcove player), which adds color and variety to the featured content from filmmakers. Just as important is finding content that is unique and different-- content that will resonate with their audience. A key lesson learned from telegraph21 is to find niche, "long-tail" content which they spend time identifying and then making it widely available to an audience.
Wrap "value-added" content and social functionality around your video- telegraph21 doesn't just publish their videos, but add additional content and social capabilities around the video to help drive audience engagement. They allow users to comment, rate, discuss, send stills of the videos as post cards to friends, purchase DVDs of the video, and read interviews with the artists of the video-- all of which help create a fuller view of the filmmaker, and a stronger connection with content.
Find an online video partner that is a partner in your success- For an up-start business like telegraph21 that has put video at the core of their business, finding an online video platform company that was vested in their success was key. They did not want to be burdened with having to be the technical video experts or building video functionality themselves, but rather looked to a company like Brightcove to help provide them that expertise.
Watch how telegraph21 continues to make innovative use of video to grow their business (especially if you're a fan of unique nonfiction documentaries)- tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
I had the chance to speak to 
