Chances are, you are familiar with, or even already incorporating marketing automation as a core aspect of your marketing stack. Now, you’re are looking for ways to do more with it. Whether you’re working in a high-growth tech company, or maybe in an established organization looking to expand its brand recognition; your company will almost surely be using a marketing automation platform to streamline, automate, monitor and optimize your marketing initiatives.
Integrating video hosting platforms and marketing automation platforms can get you there.
Let’s break it down:
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A brief rundown of marketing automation
Most popular forms of marketing automation rely on the principals of inbound marketing. The standard M.O for inbound marketing entails the following cycle:
Using SEO, PPC and social marketing, prospects are drawn to the company’s website or landing pages. Once there, they are met with content. They will be gently driven to fill a form, becoming an identified marketing lead (or contact) in the process.
Then, a nurturing process begins. The newly-branded contact is added to email campaigns until he or she reaches the marketing version of the promised land: Obtaining marketing qualified status (i.e. they reach the point where they are ready to be handed over to your sales team).
Throughout this cycle, pertinent contact-related information is fed back into the marketing automation system, triggering various processes and actions. These will come in the form of personalized messages and additional content. The latter will be offered to a prospect at opportune times, in the attempt to maximize engagement. This content typically includes various types of videos ,such as product demos, testimonials, and webinars.
How to incorporate marketing automation and video
Video marketing automation has 3 main pillars.
Lead generation – The use of video to convert visitors into marketable leads.
Lead nurturing – The use of video inside email campaigns to achieve the following:
- Drive buyers into their next buying stage.
- Make your videos “work harder” by utilizing them on every touch-point.
Lead Scoring – The use of video data to segment, qualify leads (and later score them). This will enable you to distinguish between leads that are ready for “sales treatment”, and those who aren’t.
Generating leads using video
Some video marketing platforms, such as Cincopa, allow you to capture a viewer’s email as he or she watches the video. This is done via “on-video form” experience. Then, they enable you to create a new contact on your MAP as he or she engages with online video content, resulting in a major increase in conversion rate.
How about this idea:
Forget about asking a site viewer to sign up for yet another white paper by filling up a webform.
While it may prove successful at times, it has become an industry staple and somewhat of a nuisance to site visitors.
Why not try and convert them through a far-more enticing form of content? Gating video content has proven to achieve conversion rates that are 40% higher than standard web forms.
Cincopa’s on-video MAP forms can be used not just for lead capturing. You can also leverage them towards progressive profiling of contacts. This would mean that only fields that have missing CRM data will become mandatory to fill in order to access gated content.
Nurturing leads using video
Lead nurturing is another crucial marketing facet that is revolutionized through video. Sending the right engaging piece of content at the right time, usually in the form of an email, is the difference between engagement and indifference.
Don’t be fooled by open-rate metrics. The one sure-fire way to know whether you still hold some relevance among leads is click-through-rate. And, surprise surprise, video has proven to be a game-changer in that regard as well.
Embedding video in emails generates 200%-300% higher click-through rates. It would be almost criminal not to properly incorporate it as part of your marketing automation efforts and overall strategy.
According to HubSpot, nurturing emails with a video thumbnail can increase click-through-rate by over 150%!
Segmenting leads using video
When you integrate your MAP with a video platform you gain the ability to create and analyze segments based on video viewing.
As not all of your contacts are at the same buying stage, it is imperative they receive content that fits their position along the marketing funnel. This is critical if you hope to successfully push them down the funnel.
Let’s break it down, stage by stage:
Awareness stage: A prospect realizes he has a problem, and is in need of a solution. Prospects will often download a piece of gated content or reach a blog post. There, they will typically submit their email to get free downloadable content.
Feed your prospects educational material so they can learn more about you, your company and your solution.
Consideration stage: Your prospect will be assessing all possible ways to solve his or her problem. Now is when the prospect will look into content that is linked to specific companies or vendors. This content will typically come in the form of the sought-out company demo video, brochures or whitepapers.
Feed your prospects explainer videos, webinars and an overview about what you can offer them.
Decision stage: Your leads have reached the finish line: This is when your prospects are comparing solutions to find the best fit. At this point, they will request a demo or trial access. Additionally, your prospects will likely seek out customer stories and case studies. Seeing whether you’ve succeeded in helping customers whom shared a problem similar to their own will greatly impact their decision.
Feed your prospects in-depth demos, testimonials, and customer stories.
Here’s an example of how video and segmentation can provide valuable insights:
This segment consists of contacts who showed high levels of webinar engagement. It will tweak lead scoring or nurturing campaigns. That way, more contacts can be successfully pushed down the marketing funnel.
Using video viewing metrics in workflows
Let’s gain a firmer grip on how injecting video into automated nurturing campaigns can truly revolutionize your marketing initiatives.
Using a platform that integrates video data within your marketing automation system, such as Cincopa, you can know exactly which video was watched and for how long. Then, you can send the appropriate follow-up email. The latter will be based on the kind of video a prospect watched and the kind of engagement levels he or she exhibited.
Video emails (or, as they are sometimes referred to as in-email videos) can direct recipients to a video embedded within your MAP-generated landing page. Alternatively, they can link directly to a brandable video landing page, generated by your VMP (video marketing platform).
Here’s a look at HubSpot workflow that has video engagement as an enrollment trigger
and a trigger for future interaction.
Let’s break it down:
Trigger:
Your contact has successfully submitted his or her details in the form that pops up after your landing page video.
Rule:
Has your contact passed the halfway point of said video?
If she or he has:
Sales should be notified to approach said contact
If she or he hasn’t:
Send out another consideration stage piece of content, like a customer testimonial video, to continue to nurture.
Qualify and score leads using video
Lead scoring is a strategy companies employ to set quality leads apart from those who will probably not mature to a contact.
By attaching numerical values to potential prospects, automated lead scoring rates each interaction a lead has with your company.
These include watching videos (including a breakdown of percentage watched), video emails opened, video emails clicked, on-video interactions such as form submissions, clicks on calls-to-action (CTAs) etc.
This is possibly one of the most powerful yet less understood features of video marketing automation. Every company needs to assess for itself and learn how to score specific viewing actions.
There is no one-rule-fits-all regarding lead scoring. Different companies will decide who qualifies as marketing qualified (MQL), or sales qualified (SQL).
That being said, video incorporated into that structured system can be an amazing prediction of buying stage and intent.
Here’s how you can score leads based on video engagement,
by integrating Cincopa with HubSpot.
Final thoughts and takeaways
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
With Cincopa, you can completely overhaul your video and marketing automation strategy. By combining video with your attribution measurement, you can expect to see tangible results. You will yield significantly higher conversion rates, gain considerable insights and assume video super-powers which you once thought were impossible.