SPEAKER

Christian Klepp, Alexander Ferguson

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for B2B marketers that helps you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. Each week, we talk to B2B marketing experts who share inspirational stories, discuss our thoughts and trending topics, and provide useful marketing tips and recommendations. And now, here’s your host and co-founder of EINBLICK Consulting Christian Klepp. Alright, folks, welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast where you get your weekly dose of B2B marketing insights. I’m your host, Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help companies achieve shorter sales cycles through customer success stories. So coming to us from Raleigh, North Carolina. Mr. Alexander Ferguson. Welcome to the show, sir.

Alexander Ferguson  00:50

Thank you so much Christian, glad to be on.

Christian Klepp  00:53

Great to be connected Alexander, and I love how we started like having these conversations, obviously also about your area of expertise. But we started talking about Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the big stories, the most frequently misquoted Star Wars quotes, and so on and so forth. But like, let’s get right into it, man, because this is, this is going to be a great conversation.

Alexander Ferguson  01:17

Absolutely. I’m excited about it. Stories are the best place to focus on and video come on.

Christian Klepp  01:21

Absolutely, absolutely. On that note, you are clearly an expert. When it comes to videos. And you know, for this conversation, let’s focus on how to leverage videos for both B2B marketing and sales processes. So from your experience, how do you think videos can help both B2B marketing and sales teams to break through that noise and increase their chances of success?

Alexander Ferguson  01:48

I’m still surprised today when I have to convince marketers or sales folks in the power of video, I assume it’s just a matter of fact. But that’s usually the curse of knowledge, because I’m in it every day for if you’re out there, and you know it already. Great. We’re buddies. But for those that need a quick refresher, I usually have three handy stats that I pull out all the time. 72% of customers say they would much rather learn about a product or service from a video. And even though we as the marketer salesperson may not enjoy watching video all the time, your customers probably do.  Three fourths out of your customers are those type of folks. In addition, though, 95% of a message is retained, but by watching a video compared to it, usually only 10% when you’re just reading text, the amount of information if you really want them to remember what your product or service is about, and why it can help them; then video is that is a vehicle for and but the biggest one that I get really excited about and talking about. We were discussing Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and why those epic stories work is because it pulls your emotion in. It gets you emotionally connected to the character to what’s happening. And that’s where video beats text images by itself. And a lot of times we’re making decisions when we buy certain things because of our own emotions and sales. I know I’m sure we all been trained on that, that we’re, we don’t always use our logical part of our brain. So if you can connect and, and it’s fascinating with the voice, there’s studies been done it actually like bypasses, and gets directly into the motion part of your brain as you hear the emotion in someone or you see their facial reactions, if you can get your customers on camera or your team on camera, they connect with you in a real human way. So there’s so much power, when it comes to using video in marketing and sales.

Christian Klepp  03:44

I can totally tell how much power there is just by the way that you deliver it that it’s like just so much emotion there. No, but those are some really incredible stats. Let me see if I got this right. So you said you brought the 72% of customers who want to learn through video. And that’s a pretty powerful statistic. Right? Um, the other one, which I want to pick your brain a little bit because you brought up the topic of emotion, right? And it is starting to change in B2B. And I think, you know, videos are no exception. But you know, like, people don’t normally associate anything, anything that has to do with B2B with emotion. Right?

Alexander Ferguson  04:24

And that’s so annoying. And B2B doesn’t shouldn’t be boring and emotionless. We’re still human beings, even though we’re marketing to another business, people are still the ones behind it that we’re interacting with.

Christian Klepp  04:36

Absolutely, absolutely. All right. So this next question, you’ve probably seen them all, but like, you know, just top line give us some, some of the most common mistakes that B2B marketers make when it comes to using videos and what can be done to address these.

Alexander Ferguson  04:54

I heard a stat recently at a product marketing Alliance summit meeting, an event that I went to. 70% of content goes unused, 70%. Wow. And that just struck me like what? Hold on a sec. Is that really true? And where they kind of diet dove into it and I found fascinating is, it’s the fact that there’s no context for the rest of the organization and team talk about like sales enablement content, there’s not the right context for them to know how when, where that piece of marketing video or other type of content can be used. And I think that’s a missing piece. A lot of times, like for sales teams, when marketing creates a great video, we deal a lot with video testimonials and customer videos. It’s like what you need to know, at the right time, right place, okay, this, this is the story I need for this particular customer, or in this particular marketing funnel, we’re going to need this type of story or this social media campaign, etc. So the more context you can give to your campaigns, just dramatically reduces that percentage that goes unused. That will probably be one of the biggest ones. The second one I see a lot is focused on optimizing their video for social media platform, they’ll just they’ll create a video, and then they’ll throw up on their website. And then they’ll be like, well, it’s supposed to do social media, haphazardly, without maybe realizing it’s haphazard. Each platform, I may be preaching to the choir here for those marketers out there, each platform has its own unique characteristics, etc. And we’ve been doing a lot of testing, I’m happy to share more and in our conversation of what works and what doesn’t. But that’s just probably the missed opportunities like, oh, we create a video, we put it online, nobody consumed it. Nobody watched it. Yeah. Did you drive traffic to it? And did you optimize it for the right platform?

Christian Klepp  06:47

Yeah, no, that’s, that’s absolutely right. Wow, though, those 70% that was a shocking statistics. There are probably a collection of factors that are the cause of that. Right. But, you know, from your experience, what do you think they are? Is it a lack of understanding of who the target audience is? Most probably? What topics are not just interesting, but relevant to them? Like, why should they care about this video? What’s in it for them? Right? So answering those questions, but your thoughts?

Alexander Ferguson  07:21

Yeah, it’s, it’s definitely the right time and getting the right message the right time, the right place for that particular customer, whether it’s in marketing or sales. And it’s difficult to, to know that off the top of your head. So it’s like, it’s nice. When you create the content, you’ve already given the right labels and context and taxonomy. I think it’s the right word to whatever content you create, it takes a little bit more effort at the beginning. So when you create your content, you have to add that to it. But then it means talk about like evergreen, you’re like, Alright, I know I have this content somewhere for this marketing campaign, or for this customer, my sales follow ups, that I have no idea where it is or how to find it. And that’s where I think a lot gets unused and misses that opportunity.

Christian Klepp  08:08

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I want to go back to something else that you said. And I’m curious, I’m sure the audience will be curious about this. But what have you seen on social media platforms, in terms of video that works and does not work?

Alexander Ferguson  08:24

I would say the first thing that comes to my mind is authenticity. Really is if it feels not marketing-ish. It just feels authentic and real. We’re in an age of Tik Tok right now craze and I even as a video person, I don’t love Tik Tok I don’t really get on it much but I need to I’m understanding of digging into it. And it’s kind of proliferating the rest of our lives even before Tik Tok with Instagram etc. People are consuming want to see real people and not too polished. And as we’re a video, we create videos, we ride that balance of we want it to look good, especially in the B2B world. You want it to be polished you want it to be on brand, but you can get so far I saw a quote and a comment from Dave Gearhart well, who talks about like why does all of our these ad marketing content look so on brand it needs to just fit into where the audience is, if you’re using LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook. The closer you can get to seem or actually is organic content that you’re just connecting as a person to another person, I think dramatically increases in that type of social video and other content to work better.

Christian Klepp  09:49

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Especially, you know, with regards to like the video looking to polish I mean, like, you can probably tell if somebody’s reading or reading some text right, or even the text itself, right? If it sounds too well, mechanical or it’s too like, okay, it’s like corporate talk, right? And a lot of those dropping a lot of that jargon that I mean, I guess, again, it goes back to who your target audience is, right? So if you’re targeting like a specific group of like engineers, for example, that maybe it’s fine to use that type of jargon, right?

Alexander Ferguson  10:23

I’ve, I’ve seen really great videos that have been posted, whether it’s YouTube or LinkedIn, and it’s either just like a screen recording or, and then you see a look at their face in there. And they’re just talking and they’re just sharing value, they’re adding value. And that’s probably the biggest is what’s the focus of your of your content? Or video? Is it: Let me tell you all about me, or is it? Let me talk about you and your problem? And how I’ve seen it being solved, how we’ve been solving and how someone else has been solving it, then that’s the type of content in the B2B world that performs much better. 

Christian Klepp  11:00

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Talk to us about a recent challenge, just one that you and your team have managed to solve for client.

Alexander Ferguson  11:10

Yeah. One of our customers, they came to us, and they really needed a large library, fast of customer, customer stories. And so we were able to build up a library about 18 different customer stories. But the biggest thing they were trying to do is increase, or rather boost their sales cycle, because there was a problem that we wanted to reduce the time it takes for customer to say yes, and sign up and start taking the trial, etc. So they started tracking some statistics, the challenge is, is like getting those stories in the right place the right time. And that kind of goes back to the context piece. So they built out a, effectively a customer stories page, but it was a library of all these videos. But the big thing that they did, I found fascinating and we were talking through it is even putting context on those pages of. Alright, this is the industry that this particular customer is in, this is how they were using the product. And what they did is they then started implementing this into automatic, like email follow ups that would happen with their sales team would do or in their marketing campaigns. And they tracked at like 71% of the opportunities were influenced by say we’re going to these pages that we’re tracking, I think they use HubSpot to see those engagements. But the fascinating statistic was 96% of customers were influenced meaning just of 4% of the entire 100% of your customers, they check them out, they went and saw them. And so that’s what I found fascinating is that most customers are each of us. We want that validation. We were like, Alright, let me just check something out. And it’s the how quickly can you build up this this library of validation that you say, Oh, this is a person just like me. They’re covering a similar challenge. And they’re executing it how I want, how I want to do it. So it’s giving again, that context for your customer to see these different stories and which then leads to them saying, Alright, this is I’m ready. Let me hit by.

Christian Klepp  13:21

Yeah. Those are, those are some pretty incredible results and statistics. And yes, like, definitely, HubSpot was one of many platforms where you can track that kind of engagement easily, right?

Alexander Ferguson  13:33

Yes. Yeah. We talked about later, I can show you all the other tech stacks to…

Christian Klepp  13:39

Don’t you worry. We’re gonna get to that conversation, sooner rather than later. But yeah, just built building on a little bit further. You know, what you said earlier on in the conversation, I’m talking to us about why it’s important to have a video strategy. Right. So why should this part of the process not be? Not be avoided or ignored or skipped?

Alexander Ferguson  14:05

Yeah. Well, the video, yeah, video. Well, it’s funny, we talk about video strategy, and I’ve heard that comment come up was like, either if it’s from the CEO or some other VP or they’re like, what’s our video strategy? And it’s okay, let’s do more video. That’s our strategy. Do more video….. What….video, video is a tool in your strategy. And I mean, as a video person, I’ve always loved to say no, no videos, it has its whole own strategy, you need to have all this just focus on video. Video is a tool inside of your entire strategy. It’s a powerful conversion tool. So really, when you’re looking at your strategy, overall, overall marketing or your sales funnel and figuring out okay, how do we increase conversions? How do we increase trust? How do we reduce the sales cycle? You need to start looking – Okay, where am I inserting video? At each of those different stages because it dramatically can increase those conversions and boosting that sales cycle? If you’re using it, if you’re using it well, and I hate people say we just need a video put on the homepage, and that’ll magically do something. I mean, yes, put a video on your homepage will do something. You just need to know, why is it there? Why and understanding it throughout the funnel site? That’s probably the biggest secret I hear strategy and video. It’s like, doing more videos. That’s not a strategy.

Christian Klepp  15:32

It’s not? Really? (laugh)

Alexander Ferguson  15:35

I mean, you should we all should be making more video. But yeah, fitting it into the rest of it.

Christian Klepp  15:40

Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s part of the it’s a component in the overall plan. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think the other thing that I’ve always heard people say, you know, when we were discussing video is like, yeah, definitely, we should put it there. Because it’s raising awareness. So it’s like, Okay, fine. All right. But is it going to do anything else beyond that? So, in fact, it goes back to a conversation I was having yesterday, I love I love using this French word, because it sounds so fancy, but what’s raison d’etre? Right? What is the reason for being like, why is this video here? What are you hoping to achieve? By putting that out there?

Alexander Ferguson  16:20

And if if you want I can share another kind of goes back to the recent challenge. This is more not for customer for ourselves. And talk about video strategy. We needed more consistent SQLs. Right. So we needed more in the pipeline, we need more calls coming in. And we had done an ebook. Yeah, was a downloadable report that we launched last year, and it worked really well is good. But it’s like, it ended up you know, it only has a shelf life of promoting that. And we put in an ad campaign, and then it started to taper off. And the idea of having to create a new ebook, like every month or a couple months, it’s like, ahhh, that’s a lot of effort time. And, and is that really? How do you create something that people like, oh, my gosh, I need to download this. That’s where I started looking at. Okay, I do want to add more video. That’s not the strategy, though. The strategy is we need a funnel that gets more SQLs. So what we did is, we created a top of the funnel campaign using customer stories that actually ended up generating like a 5x return on adspend. By using those at the top where we ended up, I’m actually planning a whole another like breakdown to share with our own customers like, Hey, here’s your ways to use these same interviews with your customers in new ways, is you start with the problem statement at the beginning. That leads them to then they can see how it’s solved. But it comes back to again context and focusing on your customer. But in that hour, I was really excited about to see okay, we knew we had a problem. We solved it using the tool of video, but the strategy wasn’t hey, let’s just do more video and throw it on LinkedIn.

Christian Klepp  18:00

Absolutely, absolutely. I love how you broke that down into its, you know, into its respective parts. Because that’s, I think, something that people need to hear. Right. Like, where does this fit in? In terms of the overall let’s call it a puzzle, right? What part of the puzzle is this right? How do you make this part of this unified whole? Somehow, right? Yes. Yes. Fantastic. All right. Oh, you’re gonna have a field day with this question. Oh, boy. Talk to us about some of your top video do’s and don’ts. 

Alexander Ferguson  18:34

Yes, I gotta have a lot of, I’ll do, I’ll do two to two do’s and two don’ts, we’ll start with saying we might go further to dues. If you’re doing video for top of the funnel, make sure you have a hook. Make sure you have a hook. And that usually is within the first three to five seconds. If you’re particularly using YouTube, people have the ability to skip. So that’s a natural if you you’re going to need to capture them. But even on LinkedIn, if you’re doing social content, or other types of ads, and you’re just trying to capture their attention. It usually isn’t about you, your company or anything. Sometimes because it’s a visual medium, you might do something funny or visually interesting or stimulating or posing an interesting question to capture their attention. And so make sure you do that. Another do which is something we already talked about is making it personal. Keep making it authentic. And in the B2B world, it’s still so lacking. And it’s crazy to me how often that we just fall into the trap myself included of we have to be on brand we have to sound very professional and all perfect. And granted you’re depending on the size of organization, there may be a lot of rules that you have to follow. But if you can just push that barrier as far as you can go to make it more personal, personable and more authentic than then it’s gonna help you So much. Alright, two don’ts. I’ll give you some two don’ts. Still kind of connected. But don’t make it about you focus on the customer. A lot of videos I still see is all about how great we are, how great we can solve your problems, how great we are; we won this award. And we got funding, we, we did this we did that, like, wonderful, good for you. I don’t care. Your employees are liking your video. But does anyone else focus on the customer focus on their problem. That’s way better attitude. Oh, another thing to not do. Don’t focus on perfection. Don’t focus on perfection. Focus on A|B testing. I am a huge fan. And I’ve been investing a lot in LinkedIn advertising this past 12 months now. And if you wait for the absolute perfect video, and you finally get it out there, you might find it flops, it doesn’t work. And I’ve gone through a lot of flops. And I’ve experienced like, gosh, that was so poor, I thought it was great. And it did not perform. Focus more on A|B testing, creating multiple versions iterating faster, just like you would a text campaign. think the same way in video, you might just have to change your strategy to reduce the quality, I don’t want to say reduce the quality, simplify, there we go simplify it. So you still have quality, but you can do multiple iterations and versions with the same campaign.

Christian Klepp  21:33

Some really great points. And I love that last bit about like, you know, not making it perfect, because all too far too often. Like, even with some of the projects I was involved with in the past, right? Um, many of them were suffering from, it’s this, it’s this, it’s actually not a rare disease, it’s a very common disease called opinion itis. Right? And analysis paralysis, right? It’s a lot of this. And I’m sure you tend to agree it’s a lot of this, like, inside-out approach versus, let’s look at this from the lens of a customer or a prospect and how would they be viewing this video versus Well, let’s just make sure that we get internal buy-in from everybody across seven layers, right. And then once everybody like has their, you know, has their piece or gives their feedback and gives their opinion and ads in their tweet, because everybody then becomes the creative director. And then once that’s done, then launch it. And that’s clearly like an approach that as you know, as you rightly said, is probably more often than not, will not succeed. Right?

Alexander Ferguson  22:43

Yeah, analysis, paralysis or opinion itis you ended up creating a video agglomerative what everyone thinks internally, the video should be, but who, who actually is caring about what the customer is, they might not care what your team thinks.

Christian Klepp  23:02

Exactly. Exactly. No. Fantastic. I have two follow-up questions for you. So one is, you know, you talked about having a hook, so having some kind of call to action. So I’m gonna dig a little bit further here. And like, in your opinion, when it comes to video, what would you say is not a great call to action?

Alexander Ferguson  23:25

Well, before I dive too deep into that, when I talk about a hook, I don’t necessarily call to action, I don’t mean call to action of like, hey, go do this. Now you do need a call to action now your videos, when I often talk about a hook at the beginning, it’s grab, how do you grab their attention to keep listening? And when it comes okay, what is a good hook there? There’s two sides to look at one would be content. What are you saying? And what are you visually stating? Because in social media, like headlines are important. The other side is what are you doing visually? For instance, I we got several campaigns that we were testing and A/B testing ourselves. At the beginning, we’d have like our own team members on camera, and we’d have some cash going like this or happen and you know, putting your hands like you could be wasting a lot of money right now. And it’s that visually well what I’ve seen other people like, like, wave at the cameras like visually cueing them, Hey, I got something or you hold something in your hand or you’ve got a whiteboard and you’ve got a word on it and you circle it’s like, hey, is this what your face is like some sort of visual cue that says, oh, what? it takes you moment to have to think about it and it will more than a minute. It probably could take a little while to figure out what visually could you do that ties to the message because it has to obviously tie to it. And then the second piece I also seen folks do is tell, and this is on YouTube ads, who it’s not for either who it is for who it is unfortunate, like, if you don’t care about increasing your revenue, or if you don’t have the negatives, then you can skip don’t listen to this video and I’ll be like: Oh, I see what you’re doing. But let’s, let’s see what you have to say. So it’s finding some sort of either push back or pull in or visual cue to just grab, like, what what’s going on here? And can work.

Christian Klepp  25:28

Okay, well, that’s definitely fair enough. That’s fair enough. Then that was that second piece, I wanted to go back to you talked about quality. Right? So let’s all appreciate that, not everybody. The vast majority out there, I’m gonna say, are not going to have the budget to have this, like, you know, Hollywood style production. Right? But just okay, in the interest of time, maybe like the top two things that you say, you know, that absolutely has to be there in order for you to produce a quality video. And I’m not necessarily just talking about the equipment, mind you, because you know, that’s only part of it. Right? Like the technology, the software.

Alexander Ferguson  26:35

Yeah. Yeah, I can easily go on a couple angles here. I mean, the first thing always pops in my head as I started 13 years ago, and video of like, good sound matters the most, if they can’t hear you legibly and under understand what you’re saying then the rest of it is mute. No pun intended mute. But, and then the second one would be lighting. I mean, lighting is so powerful. Is the either visually pleasing, or you look like you’re in the witness protection program. I mean, you don’t have to have the best camera at all. But if you have if you can hear what they’re saying. And you can see them clearly natural light, big windows, they’re great. So that’s like on the on the on the actual production side. Is that kind of where you were thinking when you were asking that question?

Christian Klepp  27:17

Yes. Yes. Okay. Absolutely. I love that you brought the point about good sound, right? Because this is something that another guest on the show talked about at length, right? Most people generally these days in terms of like attention span, and what they like to look at and the way they consume content online, they might have a certain degree of forgiveness for the visual aspect. But if your sounds not good, then they’ll zone out. That said, and you might know where I’m going with this. A lot of people also tend to view videos on handheld devices and mobile. So it’s not all on desktop, right? So sound might be an issue, because some of these browsers will switch your sound off. Right? So…

Alexander Ferguson  28:01

 It is yeah, that’s true. 

Christian Klepp  28:03

You address that with subtitles, or what do you do there?

Alexander Ferguson  28:06

Subtitles are your friend. It is it is a whole new craze that in videos where you might probably wouldn’t even need subtitles anymore, you are adding them. And it can bypass the sound issue or a lot of times I’m thinking of a little bit longer form content, or you’re trying to communicate a story in somebody’s willing to wanting to click in here, then sound matters. If if it’s shorter form, then most people don’t click the sound and then they’re there reading and then it comes the importance of you better have closed captioning on it. If if you want to both capture their attention, as well as sustain it to the rest of the video so that they’ll keep reading along with it.

Christian Klepp  28:45

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, Alexander. This is the part of the conversation where we talk about actionable tips. I mean, you’ve given us quite a quite a number of actionable tips already. But okay, let me just set this up. Let’s appreciate that. You can’t do all of this stuff. Like overnight. I mean, Rome wasn’t built in a day, right? But what are some things that B2B marketers and their sales counterparts can do right now, to leverage videos right to use it to their advantage and also to, you know, implement those successful initiatives that they might have? So let’s start by saying, what are some low hanging fruit? What do you think that they should focus on? Off you go?

Alexander Ferguson  29:29

Two things – low hanging fruit one is look at the existing content you already have? And see, I could remix it. Usually, there’s already interviews and content and pieces that that you can cut down and reuse as social clips or as sales follow ups. Hey, check out this. This clip. As we talked about earlier, 70% is goes unused. Take some time, get an intern or somebody go and give some context and review and pull out new clips. The second though, low hanging fruit for videos you already have. I did some tests myself A/B test to find out in a funnel. I put a video on a landing page and just people weren’t clicking on it. You know, and I was like, Why? Why are they engaging with it’s great. One, spend some time on a really great thumbnail. So that’s an option. A lot of people would kind of bypass if we made the video we put it up. But the thumbnail they just use whatever content is already there. Spend some time hiring a designer, or this is what we ended up doing is, use a good video hosting platform that will autoplay with the closed captioning, we’ve already proven in timelines and on social media feeds, people are scrolling, it autoplays in most places. But without sound, but with the closed captioning. And it’s the same thing when someone lands to a landing page, you can have it autoplay, with closed captioning. And I have seen I’ve checked the stats between the two… dramatic then increase on the engagement people just sticking around, because it’s already play. So already playing, you remove the barrier of having to click play, and you increase the number of percentage, also people that will click the button to then hear it and listen more, it just like effortless because it just goes. But it’s not obtrusive, because there’s no sound yet. And most browsers support autoplay, if the sound is disabled, if you enable the sound for autoplay, then most browsers will just pause the whole thing and it won’t work. So that’s a great hack that you can start using for great engagement on your existing video content.

Christian Klepp  31:33

And let me tell you, man, we love hacks on the show. So what were you were referring to, I noticed that, um, this might have been a couple of months ago, but I think YouTube has added that feature where you just mouse over the thumbnail, said video, and it starts to play. It’ll pop out a little bit like it’s almost like, it’s almost like its own separate window kind of just pops out and starts playing. Right.

Alexander Ferguson  31:57

It’s everywhere. Even Netflix. Yeah, you’re scrolling through and there’s autoplay, it’s kind of annoying as consumers like: I just don’t want to play. But it’s the sound, the sound is the noise, right? If you don’t do the sound, then it’s not as annoying. And you’re like, Oh, okay. Get intrigued.

Christian Klepp  32:14

Exactly, exactly. All right. My next question was all of those like, love it or hate it? Right? Like, metrics, putting all this great stuff out there great videos, fantastic content. And then you have to compile this report as a B2B marketer, or even as a salesperson at the end of the month. And you have to show that to somebody and say, Okay, well, this is what we did. So how do you prove that these initiatives that you rolled out are working? What should people be looking at? What should they be paying attention to?

Alexander Ferguson  32:50

Three things. The most obvious one I think people come to is, is how many people play a video, but kind of connected it, I look at it as watch time I use Wistia. That’s the VLC platform, I really like that you can track watch time and engagement and how it drops off and based on per IP address, lot of cool things. But almost every video platform will have some sort of ability to check watch time. And that’ll help you gauge the content itself. If people do they like it and how they’re doing it. If they click on to play it or not, that’s, that’s a big one. Because that’ll tell you these are some networking, if you’re using, not the autoplay, if the autoplay works, then you can pay attention to see how long they watch. Another one would be just time on page connected to that video was versus no video. And there are a lot of stats to prove that when you had a video to a page, you increase watch time, time on page dramatically, because you have that more visual content that people can engage with. The last one I look at is, is is not always directly tied to the video, but the video plays a role is your conversion rate your click through rate to your next major action item that you want them to do on a page before and after. Because most video platforms, you know, put a link in the video. There are some newer technologies, but people are usually browsing the rest of the page. But check that’s a standard to pay attention to is your click through rate when you add a video to the mix. Because the whole point of adding videos, it increases the conversions. I am a big proponent and believer that video will increase that final conversion, which is the goal of all of our marketing and sales efforts. So those would be my top stats to check the metrics.

Christian Klepp  34:35

Yeah I know, those are those are definitely great points there. And especially like, click through rate and also watch time. I mean, like I think if I were to apply that to the world of podcasting, it will almost be like you’re, you’re looking at the download rates or the number of downloads and subscriptions but you’re not necessarily taking them very seriously. Let’s put it that way. What you are looking at, back to the point that you brought up, is you’re looking at the completion rate. Right. So similar to a video, how much time are these people investing or how much of the episode or how much of the video did they actually watch before they say ok I’m done? Right?

Alexander Ferguson  35:19

My cautionary note to that one. Because I love and I’m always curious about watch time is someone doesn’t have to complete a video to still make a conversion, right? So the ultimate metric is conversion. And some people don’t need to watch the entire video to be convinced that I need whatever you have. So don’t get afraid if people aren’t completing your videos, I actually have a lot of people that like, get, you know, halfway through like, oh, yeah, no, no, I got it. I get it. I’m excited. They don’t need to watch the rest so that there’ll be just my only cautionary point you don’t…. That isn’t the ultimate metric to track watch time.

Christian Klepp  35:57

Yeah. Well, that’s a really great, great point that you brought up because I believe that too. It’s like, you know, you don’t have to always have like, necessarily 100% completion rate. Right. Fantastic. Okay. Wow, getting excited about this next question, because you brought up a few of them already. But like, what is your what is Alexander Ferguson’s go-to tech stack for all right, pay attention box.

Alexander Ferguson  36:26

There’s, there’s a lot to look at here. Both from creation to the video after it’s created. How do you put it together? And then how do you post it and share it? I’ll start with the very end of sharing it. Wistia and Vimeo are my two favorite video hosting platforms. Wistia mostly for the statistics and the final like marketing piece, Vimeo, for whoever internal review, and sometimes in certain places for sharing with customers. Another big tool love is Otter. Everyone usually I think at this point has a transcription tool. They like Otter.ai though, when I have lots of interviews, a lot of content that I need to pull out great, more video, I’ll get that transcribed. There’s some other good tools but Otter is one I’ve been using. When it comes to video creation. We have a team of video editors so it may or may not be relevant for you we love Final Cut. That’s what happens to be wait on. But a fun tool that we’re into is enhancing videos, that if it’s very low quality, like it was recorded poorly and low lights or screening, we used to call Topaz AI that enhances it. There’s a there’s a web version of another company similar thing it’s called neural dot love that enhances the video. There’s also a great website I think it’s called background remover. So if you if you need to remove a background it can like get you a nice clear background put something behind it. Headliner. App is a cool one too. They will put a thing on the top if you want a closed captioning clip champ is another website that can help easily create that those final social media versions of content. And one last one fun if you’re when you’re less on the on the video is that QuillBot. QuillBot it’s if you need to rephrase or rewrite something in another place, whether it’s your own script writing other stuff, I find that a very helpful tool to when you need to rewrite. Rewrite the same words in a new way.

Christian Klepp  38:19

I love that name. Because you know it’s like quill it’s like okay, Shakespeare alright. Quillen Inc, yes, well, that was a great list. And I have to say that Otter and I have a great understanding. We definitely use Otter and also Headliner because we you know, we put up these video snippets for the podcast interview. And that’s such a great tool to use. Man, Alexander, we could have gone on for another five or six hours here, man, this is such a great conversation. But thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So all of you listeners out there. Listen back to this interview and take notes and then go out there and make these amazing videos that you can then implement in your B2B marketing and sales initiatives. But please, quick introduce yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you, especially when it comes to video.

Alexander Ferguson  39:13

You got it. So I’m Alexander with TeraLeap. I’ve been 13 years in the video industry I’ve actually co-founded three brands probably served over 500 organizations at this point, 1000s of videos made plenty of ones that did not work… Then I’m like why did you customer decide to make a video like this? And now kind of where I am I’m on a mission for people to realize that customer videos are the best one of the best marketing content you can create. Probably way better than any other video ideas you have. And we exist at Taraleap.io Tara Leap – one R. We actually own the domain for both Rs and connect with me on LinkedIn. I am there all the time messaging and creating new content. I’m planning on sharing a lot of stories of how I’m using our own customer videos in our marketing efforts running campaigns, how I’m running on LinkedIn, we also have a great report for those that want it on how do you get customers to say yes to doing a testimonial video. We’ve got I actually wrote a whole bunch of email templates of like how do you message them and explain to them – this is why I need it or and how do you get the right time the right person the right incentive. So we got a great guide that I’ll send you the link ,Christian and maybe you can put in the show notes people can and take a look at it.

Christian Klepp  40:29

Fantastic. Fantastic. I will be sure to have a look at that one. Because we do not have video testimonials, you know from either our show I know, I know I’m bowing my head in shame. (laugh)

Alexander Ferguson  40:42

I’ll make it happen.

Christian Klepp  40:44

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Take care stay safe and I’ll talk to you soon.

Alexander Ferguson  40:49

Thanks so much. Bye bye.

Christian Klepp  40:51

Bye for now.