Unleashing the Power of a Video First Marketing Strategy
Theo Hildyard and his team at Brightcove are approaching video-first content and analytics and why the way forward for marketers is to think and act like a media company.
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>> Welcome to PIPE Line Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today, our show, and as always,
is brought to you by our friends at Qualified.
Go to Qualified.com to learn more about the number one conversational sales
marketing platform.
Today, I'm joined by a special guest, Theo.
How are you?
>> Very good. Thank you.
Very good. Thank you for having me.
>> Yeah, excited to have you on the show, excited to chat to Manjin,
talk about Break Cove and all the cool stuff that y'all are doing.
Let's get into it. What was your first job in to Manjin?
>> Yes. I'm my first job in marketing really,
because I started Life as a Product Manager.
Product Manager working for a technology platform company,
and we were trying to verticalize a bunch of solutions on top.
It was very much a product management role,
but it bled into product marketing very, very quickly indeed.
I then spent the next five years doing some fairly deep industry solution
product marketing roles,
where we were shaping go-to-market messaging,
target persona, and ICPs, and so on.
Then that led to a demand-gen path,
three or four or five years.
The key thing there, I guess,
is that when you start as a product manager and a product marketer,
you have a really deep appreciation for what the go-to-market is,
and what the business is trying to achieve as opposed to what
demand-gen campaigns are trying to achieve.
I think going the route of product management to marketing into demand-gen
is not a bad way to go if I can run this.
>> Yeah. We were talking about that.
That's one of the reasons why we started the show,
is this understanding that every CMO is now a dimension leader.
At this point, we all are beholden to pipeline,
and a lot of people grew up in product marketing.
It's that blending of the product marketer plus CMO.
>> Exactly.
>> It's like pretty much what makes a modern CMO.
>> Two seconds.
>> Tell us a little bit about your role of Break-Ove.
>> Yeah, sure. So, I'm VP of demand-gen at Bright-Cove,
which encompasses a global campaigns team.
It encompasses four regional marketing teams.
We break the world up into the Americas in the APAC in Japan,
and it also includes the customer marketing team,
the partner marketing team, and unusually,
and it also includes the marketing operation and analytics team.
So, it's quite a lot.
It definitely does not include the comms team,
or the creatives, or the web, and other bits and pieces,
but yeah, there's quite a lot in there.
>> Let's get to our first segment, the Trust Tree,
where we go and feel honest and trusted,
and you can share the steepest, darkest marketing secrets.
Tell us a little bit more about Bright-Cove,
the company, and who your customers are.
>> Yeah, sure. Bright-Cove is a streaming technology platform,
and we say streaming.
While we're often thought of as a video platform,
we're actually using the word streaming more often nowadays,
because a video is too narrow for where we are today.
We specialize in both video and audio.
Our core mission is to drive the highest quality,
most scalable and secure streaming technology platform
for companies, brands, and creators.
The key point for creators is we're targeting those creators
that are looking to own their own digital futures,
as opposed to seed that to a third party.
We broadly speaking target to addressable markets.
The first is media companies.
Media companies clearly, video streaming in general,
is their product.
We help the media companies
basically deepen the engagement they get with their audience,
expand their reach, and more fully monetize the content
they have by offering monetization options around
advertising, subscription, transaction, and so on.
The second big sort of buckets, if you like,
in our target market is enterprises.
We help enterprises build, you know,
comprehensive streaming content strategies,
so that they can basically attract new audiences
and sell more products.
But it's not only the sort of external side of it,
there's also the internal side of it as well.
It's about using streaming and video to engage
and motivate employees.
Now, those kind of words kind of make sense,
and you might think, well, that's fine,
but, you know, really, truly, why should enterprises care
so much, because they're not actually monetizing
the video itself, but, I mean, video is everywhere.
It's ubiquitous.
Now, research shows that, you know,
90%, 97% in fact, of recent video viewers
would be more receptive to sales communications
from a business after consuming their video content.
So it's incredibly important that enterprises
get on board with video as well.
And you asked us about our customers.
I mean, we have an incredible global customer base,
both on the media side and on the enterprise side.
On the media side of things, there's news call, masterclass.
If you go to our website, you'll see, like,
South by Southwest there and a bunch of others.
And on the enterprise side of things,
even though you've got big, big retailers and manufacturers,
for example, like Home Depot and Ford.
For your buying committee, for your personas,
for those types of organizations,
obviously, hugely different types of organizations,
what does that buyer persona look like?
Yeah, exactly.
We're targeting two very, very different buying personas
simultaneously.
So on the media side of the house,
we're talking about the actual producers of the content.
And on the enterprise side of the house,
really, and truly, it's marketers like myself.
So, you know, I mean, interestingly,
I am customer zero for BrightCoat,
because my organization is a big, big user of BrightCoat,
and a big, big, big, big, big adopter
of the sort of video first content marketing strategy
that I was talking about a second ago.
So on the enterprise side of the house,
it really is marketers,
but there's also an internal comms element as well.
So if you are communicating with large numbers
of internal stakeholders, be they employees or franchisees,
think of a car dealership, for example,
then yeah, we've got just as big a play there
as we do with the marketers.
So two very distinct personas,
we do very, very different sets of messaging for sure.
Can I say we'll get into this in a little bit.
I love the way that if you go to BrightCoat.com,
it says, I am dot, dot, dot,
I want to dot, dot, dot, dot,
and under I am, it says a CMO, CTO,
a media company, comms professional, director of marketing,
director of acquisition, director of video operations,
and event producer,
what a brilliant way to just point right at it.
That's so cool.
- Yeah, yeah, thank you for that.
That's a very recent addition to our website,
and I would love to take the credit for it,
but it was not my idea.
But yeah, it's a fantastic intro to the website for sure.
- Yeah, very, very, very cool.
Well, and it gets this persona piece,
especially when you're selling to different ones,
like that's why it's so important to start
with those sort of things,
because if you're selling to totally different people,
like they do not want to be sold the same way.
- Yeah, that's exactly right.
And prior to having that navigation on our website,
we relied on either products or solutions,
labeling to guide people to where they want to go.
But the problem with that is we're often using
our own internal terminology for those labels.
So people wouldn't necessarily know,
they wouldn't identify with the way
the right code describes itself,
they'd identify with the way they describe what they need.
So it was very, very hard to get people to the right pages
when we were just having product and solution pages,
which was why the entry became the way it is.
- It's great, I love it, very fun.
- Thank you, and so relevant for the persona conversation.
And what does your marketing team look like?
What does that structure look like
to go after those accounts?
- Yeah, sure, so I guess to understand the team,
you need to understand the marketing strategy first.
So maybe if I just quickly touch on that,
so the sort of starting point for our entire marketing
strategy, if you like, is that we as a company
are deeply, deeply targeted, count focused.
So the entire go-to-market is target account focused.
Now, I say the entire go-to-market is talking about
target account focused and not necessarily using the term ABM,
'cause I think that the label ABM is problematic,
because it implies that it's a marketing strategy
or a marketing fad, and we're definitely not doing that.
Our entire organization is orientated
around a very, very discreet set of target accounts.
The second pillar of the strategy, if you like,
is that B to B marketing is becoming more B to C-like.
And we have a deep, deep belief in the fact
that what B to C companies do extremely well
is they treat the buyers as individuals
and they personalize particularly well,
and they personalize at scale.
And what B to B marketing organizations have typically done
in the past is treat people as if they are,
as sort of if you like, just a contact associated
with an account, and it's the account that we're marketing to.
And I think that's a mistake.
I think you need to account,
you need to market to the person as if they're an individual.
So target account, more B to C-like,
and if you like, the third pillar of the strategy
is around content and how video content
is the most effective content that we can have.
People, it's quicker and easier to absorb the information
and people retain the information better.
So you've got those three core pillars there.
And our marketing organization is orientated
to deliver exactly that.
So the company itself tears its target market
into strategic tier one and tier two accounts and other.
And the sales team does exactly the same thing.
We've got strategic account managers
and then we've got new logo teams who target tier one and two
and then we've got account managers and CSMs
who have tier one and two customers.
So the go-to market is tiered, the sales team is tiered.
And then marketing, the marketing organization
is structured in exactly the same way.
We have four regional marketing teams
who go after the new logos, both the strategic
and the one and the two level.
And then we have customer marketers
who are very, very focused on working with these CSMs
and the account managers to basically mirror
exactly that same structure.
So the marketing organizational structure, if you like,
is driven not just by aligning to the sales structure,
but that in itself is driven by what the company is doing
and the company is being highly, highly targeted
and tiered into strategic one and two.
- Amazing, that's fantastic.
And I'm glad you went into the strategy piece there
because it does inform all of this.
And so specifically within your demand strategy,
how do you think about that sort of
as like a nested thing within it?
- Yeah, sure.
So it really boils down to .2 and .3 of our,
of the company-wide strategy that I was saying earlier.
So B2B marketing needs to get more B2C-like
and video content is king.
So our demand-gen strategy is heavily influenced.
And maybe it's because we sell to media companies,
but our demand-gen strategy is heavily, heavily influenced
by the fact that media companies actually do two
and three extremely well.
They treat you as an individual, they personalize
and they make extremely effective use of video.
So what our demand-gen strategy is effectively trying to do
is help us think and act like a media company.
And that's indeed what we were saying
in our marketing pitch to marketers as well.
It's the enterprises need to start thinking and acting
like a media company.
And what does that mean?
Well, first of all, it means investing
in really, really compelling thought leadership video
that is really clearly organized into topics or themes
or ideally channels.
So a solid content marketing strategy
that is most definitely video first.
Our content isn't entirely video first, by the way.
Obviously there's a need for text and print and PDFs
and what have you, but we're probably 60/40
on the video side of the house.
So a really compelling video first thought leadership
content strategy organized by channels.
The next part of the demand-gen strategy
is to actually own the distribution of that content,
which for us means owning our own channel.
Don't dump that content on YouTube,
create your own channel and become a genuine destination
for thought leadership.
Have people come to you?
Not necessarily because that in itself is valuable,
but if they come to you, they are your audience.
You own the audience and you own the first party data.
And that is absolutely critical.
And it's another thing that media companies
do extremely well as well.
So all of this basically adds up to creating
a Netflix style experience.
In our case, we call that Play TV.
And that Netflix style experience is for enterprise marketism
to distribute thought leadership and own the audience
and own the first party data.
But like with a media company, it has subscribers.
In our case, they're free, but that's not the point,
but has subscribers.
It has interactivity with things like likes and dislike buttons.
And perhaps most importantly of all,
it has really, really robust video engagement analytics
so that we can actually understand what thought leadership
and what message people care about and what they're drawn to.
And that does two extremely important things.
It tells us how to shape our content marketing strategy
in the future because we know what people care about.
But it also gives our marketing automation platforms,
which are now more personalized than they were in the past
because we're being more beat to see like
as opposed to be to be like.
It gives our marketing automation platforms
exactly what they need to deliver really, really
personalised follow up to our prospects.
So this is all to say that there are basically things
that media companies do extremely well.
We've learned that because we work with them day in day out
and we've learned that actually if you combine that
with the heart with personalisation at scale
and treating people as individuals,
you suddenly find yourself as an enterprise marketer
having a demand-gen strategy that looks
and feels like a media company.
How do we get people to play TV?
It's the usual stuff.
We've got to play advertising.
We've got paid social.
We've got search engine marketing.
We've got email marketing.
We've got content syndication.
The usual stuff.
But that's if you like the tactics, the mechanics of it.
All the fundamental idea is we want to be a thought leadership hub
and we want to own that hub and we want to own that audience.
I mean preaching to the choir as somebody who makes video
podcasts for a living.
Exactly.
So obviously I love all that stuff.
But I think a million great things that we'll sort of dig into here.
But first and foremost, just like the power of video
that it converts better, I think that this is something
that historically video is very expensive.
So it was so hard to get it right.
Because you just didn't have as many swings at the bat.
Now that has shifted a bunch and so video is much cheaper
to create than ever before.
But I would say now you could actually
have a video for a strategy like you do like we do at Caspian.
You know, like qualified does.
All the innovative companies.
But having a video for strategies is actually
a very real thing for your content.
Whereas like it might not have been.
Might not have been that way five years ago.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think what's changed is two-fold.
First of all, the skill set required to operate.
OK, everyone to second actually.
So if I was to go back, you know, sort of maybe five-ish years,
video in demand generation, paying an agency $15,000
to come up with a sizzle video.
That's right.
You know, that would be an agonizing process
where you sort of draft and redraft the script.
They would then go away and do the visuals,
and then you'd glue it all together.
And then you'd have maybe a, I don't know,
a 45-second sizzle video that you would put on your website.
Now that is not what I'm talking about here at all.
But I would say, you know, I would say relatively recently,
we've started to realize, and I'm going to say,
we, I mean, collectively marketers have started to realize
that actually, you know what, it's not that difficult
to have a space inside my office that I can set up
as a makeshift studio.
And in fact, it's not even that makeshift.
It starts to look and feel like a pretty decent studio
for not much money nowadays, because the cost
of the equipment was for them.
And then there's a whole bunch of,
I'm going to show my age here, but there's a whole bunch
of Gen Z's who are coming through,
and they understand that the skill sets are incredible.
It isn't as difficult or as expensive to hire people
that understand the technology and can do a really good job
of video production as it was, as it was, let's say 10
to 15 years ago.
And actually, I think it's much, much more accessible
to have a space that you can have inside your office
to shoot the videos.
So all of a sudden, you know, everything from, you know,
internal comms, town halls, through to your earnings calls
with investors, you know, through to, you know,
recording thought leadership videos of you interviewing
customers there in your own space now, are done for,
you know, relatively quickly and relatively efficiently
and relatively cheaply as well.
Much more accessible than it was in the past.
You know, and I think, I think that people get a little overboard
or perhaps they just sort of like,
boil the ocean a little bit when they talk about, you know,
breaking a video or a podcast or whatever
into like 150 different assets and all that stuff.
If you can do it and know how to do it, that's great.
And all that stuff, that's great.
The idea that, you know, you could take a 50 minute video
and turn it into 150 different assets, like trust me,
like, we're on a couple of days, it does, you know,
things like that.
I get it, but I think that first and foremost,
just the idea that you're trying to make something
for an audience that is good, that is video first,
that has personality, that's pulling insights out of them,
that are unique, that are potentially unique in that moment,
that are unique to a period of time.
Like, all of those things are very bespoke things
that is hard to replicate.
Whereas like, writing a blog post, as we've seen with Chad JBC
and all this other stuff, that writing a blog post
and getting much answers is much more easy to replicate.
And so like, how do you scale these type of experiences
where you're co-creating with your customers,
with your prospects, with influencers?
Because that stuff is better, like, one plus one does equal three,
right?
Having like, locking your writer in the room and say,
like, write a listicle about the, you know,
10 best demand gen activities, like,
it's just not gonna be as good as when you get a few brains
together, looking at the problem from different angles
and sort of co-creating it.
Yeah, yeah, now, absolutely.
I mean, we've done a lot of, you know,
we've experimented with a lot of different video formats
and the conclusion is most definitely
that short form and medium form.
And when I say short, I mean, sort of, you know, up to three minutes
and medium form, let's call that up to 15 minutes TED Talk style videos.
I mean, they are by far the most preferred format of our audience.
And so you end up thinking, well, hold on a second.
So we know that 15 minute works.
And then we've got all of this effort going,
this is just one example.
We've got all of this effort, for example, going into webinars, you know,
there was especially doing COVID, there was a relentless pressure to do, you
know, a webinar a month, possibly even more.
And then they're live.
And the live element is good because you do get the sort of audience
participation at the end of it.
You do get the interactivity at the end of it.
If that's how you've structured your webinar, of course.
But there's a lot of effort and a lot of time to produce the webinars
and people are on the hook for a live performance, of course.
You could, and indeed we have, make the choice to turn that webinar format
into something that feels a little bit more like a 15 minute video,
a 15 minute video, TED Talk style.
Host that on your own Netflix style experience, group it by themes,
group it by channels, and all of a sudden you've turned a webinar strategy
into something that looks and feels like a media company.
And it's just in our experience, it is simply more effective than the webinars.
It's a lot more scalable because you can produce more of them
and they live on, if you like, in a library.
Sure, you can put a webinar on demand, but no one's going to engage with a web
inar on demand.
They just don't do it.
So you put all of these short and medium form videos on a channel,
if for one to the better word, and you get a lot more life out of them
and a lot more value out of them.
So yeah, I mean that's just one example.
Going back to your original point, that video seems scary.
It isn't as onerous as it thinks.
Any other thoughts on any other stuff that people do for sort of this video
content strategy
that you see that y'all are doing well or maybe some other mistakes that maybe
you did make?
I think some of the things that are often overlooked but are terrifically
valuable
is the video engagement analytics.
So it's helped a lot if you own your own channel and you're harvesting your own
first party data
with a decent set of video analytics.
But I often think about the old days where we would sort of send out an email,
encourage someone to go to a landing page and fill out a form and then download
a PDF.
And we wouldn't necessarily know if they had, I mean we'd know that they
downloaded the PDF,
but we wouldn't know whether they'd sort of look to the content page and then
thrown it in the bin
or whether they read the whole thing cover to cover and forwarded it to like 20
colleagues, like we wouldn't know.
And I get that there are technologies nowadays that help with that problem,
but just taking that as the sort of typical sort of a state of affairs.
One of the things that video engagement analytics does extremely well is if you
've got,
if the person is known to you for a start, but if the person is known to you
because they're a subscriber of your channel,
you know exactly what they're watching and you know exactly how far into the
video they're watching,
how far into the video they've watched.
So it could be 10%, it could be 75%, it could be 98%.
If you can then feed that into your MARTech stack, you can do some amazing
things.
So the first thing you would do is you would feed it into your intent models,
whatever vendor you have for buying intent,
you know, that sort of ABM platform vendors, you would absolutely have video
engagement feed the AI and machine learning
driven intent models that you're probably procuring from an organization like 6
cent or demand base.
Especially if you've got a video first content marketing strategy,
because if you've got 60% videos on your website and that's not feeding your
intent models,
then there's a massive problem there.
So the very first thing you would do is feed it into your AI and machine
learning models.
But the next thing you would do is feed it into your marketing automation
platforms.
If you know that someone is watching videos that are heavily orientated towards
user level how-to's,
then serve them up more of that with your personalized outreach.
So if you know that they're sort of, if you know that they're consuming content
around monetization models for videos,
you know, A-VOD versus S-VOD versus T-VOD for example, you know what to serve
them up.
So you can be very, very targeted in your demand and gen efforts because you're
harvesting really rich data on what people are viewing.
And I think that's the kind of, that's the kind of the next step after creating
your own channel and then sort of,
you know, stocking it with really, really good thought leadership content and
then building up a brand as a thought leader.
And then you go and use it actively in pipeline generation.
It takes a bit of time to get there.
You know, there's a lot to consider there.
Like most of the A-B-N platforms don't understand the concept of video views
yet.
They don't have a data structure for video engagement.
They have a data structure for email opens and for clicks and for time on page.
They don't have a data structure for video views.
So there's a bit of work to get that up and running, but it's tremendously
powerful.
Yeah, it's a great point.
And you know, it's like these are the sort of things that will get solved over
time.
But for right now, there's no easy answer for it.
I mean, we deal with that all the time with podcast writers.
Like there's just right now, right this second, it's very difficult to do that
stuff.
But there's a few cool technologies out there that are allowing you to get
creative, to see who's listening a little bit more.
Which is really exciting.
Okay, let's get to our next segment.
The playbook where you open up that playbook and not talk about the tactics to
help you win.
Obviously you've talked a ton about some of the tactics.
But those three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items,
where are you spending some of that money?
Yeah, sure, exactly.
So the very first thing has to be customer marketing.
We've spent a lot of time and effort recently on customer marketing.
And we break that basically down into three, if you like, three sort of pillars
The first would be campaigns.
We're trying to do a much, much better job of marketing to customers as
customers and not marketing to customers as if they're prospects.
And that takes time and effort.
But we're putting a lot of effort into that.
And that's most definitely an uncuttable line item.
Along with campaigns in the customer marketing bucket is advocacy.
So we're also spending a lot of time getting our building deeper relationships
with our customers.
Not only at the sort of buyer and exec level, but the sort of senior stake
holder level, but also at the grassroots practitioner level.
You know, we want a much broader array of customer advocates that will write a
review for us in G2 crowd or Gartner peer insights or stand up on stage and
advocate for us.
You know, so there's a lot of work happening in customer advocacy and there's
also a lot of work happening in the third pillar of customer marketing, which
is community.
Put a lot of effort recently into building our community, not just as a sort of
, if you like a community portal where people can go and ask questions and get
answers, but it's also a place where we would have, you know, private groups
for some of our more verticalized customers,
like sports teams and leagues or performing arts centers.
It's the place where customers would make suggestions on our roadmap and people
would vote on them.
That sort of thing.
So the first thing that's uncomfortable is customer marketing for sure, for
sure.
The next thing that's uncomfortable is in person, intimate, experiential events
So Bright Cove is extremely lucky in our customer base.
On the media side, we have fantastic customers from sports, performing arts,
theater, museums.
Think of sort of really, really big events that you might encounter on the
global stage around tennis or golf or motor racing or horse racing, orchestras,
opera houses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And they are fantastic, fantastic vehicles or fantastic organizations to
partner with, to actually host experiential events where we might bring
anywhere between 20 and 100 customers and prospects together, as opposed to
just, you know, having a, you know, renting a restaurant or going to a ball
game.
So in small, in person experiential events with our customers and combining
customers and prospects, so must.
So that's number two and the third one is a bit of a surprise to us. I mean, it
's not, you know, we, we used to do a lot of content syndication and we spent a
long time trying to find an organization that would allow us to do video
content syndication.
And the content syndication is for a long time didn't really know what we were
talking about. They didn't really have the platforms for it and they didn't
really understand it.
We eventually did find a content syndicator that understood video content synd
ication. And we used that to basically have, I would say, three minutes snippets
of a medium form video, which is going to be around 15 minutes.
So we would just content syndicate the shorter version and it itself would
click through to the longer version on play TV, our channel I was talking about
earlier.
And we ran this, I would say, in the back half of last year, maybe for Q4 and
it was tremendously successful. We had a fantastic hit rate.
People weren't just consuming the content because of content syndicate synd
icator sent it to them. They were actually clicking through to play TV and they
were spending time on play TV as well.
They were browsing our thought leadership repository and actually spending time
viewing the videos that we had there, the sort of medium form ones. Not only
that, they're an extremely senior bunch.
I think we have more sea levels in Q4 through video content syndication than we
had in the previous three quarters combined. I mean, people responded really,
really well to it.
So that was a bit of a surprise because I wouldn't have put content syndication
in my uncutable bucket. Had that not happened, but it did happen and it's most
definitely in there.
That is cool. Yeah, it's not something that we've seen a ton be popular.
Definitely more than the most cuttable budget item piece. So that's pretty
fascinating.
That's exactly right. That's exactly right because people aren't syndicating
video. You see, they haven't got the thought leadership channel in the same way
I mean, you mentioned qualified earlier with qualified plus, I assume you're
talking about. So, you know, if you have that, then video content syndication
is great.
If you do not have that, then what you're essentially, you're syndicating is a
good old fashioned PDF, which is less interesting. That generally does get cut.
You're right.
What about things that you're moving away from are most cuttable?
Yeah, the most cuttable is most definitely the sort of sort of alluded to
earlier, but the good old fashioned emailing, a cold list that you bought from
a data provider and you send them an email inviting them to a form.
And if they fill up the form, they can download a PDF. Like, I mean, that's
just, you know, that smacks of a marketing a decade ago and there's no, there's
no place for that at all.
I'm not saying there's no place for email, by the way, email is terrifically
important, especially if it's personalized.
But the idea of sort of text based content living behind a gate, I think, is
dead. It's just not helping for buy.
You know, we firmly believe that, you know, people are choosing to remain
anonymous, much, much deeper into the sales cycle and they're responding best
to video.
So we have to accommodate that. We have to basically ungate. We have to provide
video content for a start. We have to get our thought leadership out there
using video as the medium.
And then we have to ungate that as much as possible.
And then, and then basically just sort of, you know, drive people to it and
watch the engagement. Now, you then, of course, have to trust that they will
raise their hand and engage with you at some point.
They can't remain anonymous forever. And, and, and the idea that where this
strategy can fall, fall down is that you might then lull yourself into a place
where you sort of, or build it and they will come and you're forever sitting
waiting for this anonymous traffic to convert.
Now, that's a mistake. Don't do that. Definitely don't do that.
But I do believe that you have to give the content away, allow the anonymous
users to, you know, become knowledgeable about what you're trying to say and
then they will come to you eventually.
And if they don't come to you eventually will, Hey, what guess what? There's
tons of martech that will allow you to gauge anonymous interest and understand
where the anonymous, which accounts the anonymous interest is coming from.
And that then primes your outbound engine. So I'm not suggesting that, you know
, we, we sort of, you know, build it and they will come and just sort of sit back and wait for people to raise their hand. I mean, you do then have to understand which accounts are showing engagement,
albeit anonymously, and then use that to prime your BDR and selling machine to
actively go after them as well.
But yeah, for me, what's fading is a good old fashioned gate with an email that
sends people to download a piece of content.
You could just use that money on paid ads. And like it's cheaper. Like, that's
the thing we will we have seen, you know, we run paid ads for thousands of
episodes.
It's way cheaper to run paid ads to content. And it is to run it to, you know,
a value, you know, by now, sort of situation anyways.
And it's way cheaper to drive to a series rather than to an individual asset
because the series like compounds over time. So you can continually send people
at a series with new episodes.
You can, you can retarget them. And they're like, Oh, there's a new episode of
pipeline vision. That's great.
Whereas if you're promoting the same exact ebook over and over again, it's a
one off asset.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Any other campaigns that are potentially interesting that you've ran over the
past year or so.
We experimented a lot with HTML 5 in display ads, not just to have the ad be
dynamic and move a little bit, but also to have it be personalized to the
audience.
That was that was pretty effective.
Other campaigns that would be wildly effective.
They're not necessarily on the digital side of things. Actually, I'm going to
go back to the sort of experiential, small, in person events. So, you know,
that there's a couple of must have big trade shows that we do.
But then, you know, there's a lot of value in having, you know, 50 people in a
room at a museum or at an opera house or what, you know, at a motorsport event
or whatever it might be.
And I would say some of the best traction we've got with our prospects and
customers is getting them to those events.
Now, the digital, because it's very, very targeted, but it's not necessarily
leading to lead gen necessarily because we're ungating anything.
It's almost as if the digital builds up enough momentum and awareness for
bright code that when we do tap them up and say, do you want to come to this
great theatrical event to New York?
People are more likely to say yes. And the link between those two things is
very, very fuzzy indeed and it's very, very difficult to prove.
But I am a firm believer in the air cover. If we ungate everything, which
really believes that's the right thing to do, what your digital effectively
becomes is air cover.
And it doesn't just make engagement with our videos on PlayTV better and for
people more likely to subscribe and for when we do outbound to them, they're
more likely to pick up the phone.
But it also makes getting people to these small experiential events easier as
well.
And I would say that's probably the best thing that's happened. That's probably
the most interesting sort of development in our campaigns over the course of
the last year, the fact that those two things are coming together.
Because let's face it off the back of COVID, everybody was racing back into the
big wide world and I sort of feel like exec dinners and sort of getting
together for drinks was the main drive behind everything, but it wasn't
necessarily a cool, really edgy experience that they wouldn't otherwise get.
And I think that's the difference.
And I think that there's there's a real desire for human connection and there's
a real desire to be at home and be lazy. Like those two things like the two
wolves that sit within us that fight constantly.
And if you can get the connections as a digital sort of, hey, we're going to
send a one in chocolate tasting to your house and it's going to be you and six
other CMOs and she's got to show up in your pajamas.
And there's so many different sort of like ways to do it. And I think to create
a portfolio of those type of experiences is really important because people
engage in different ways.
And then I think that that's where people get so draconian in the way that they
think about their marketing is like, Oh, well, we know that, you know, wine and
chocolate things work really, really well digitally.
And it's like, yeah, but if you're allergic to wine and don't want to don't
want to eat chocolate at your house because you know that's when your kids go
to bed or something like that like you're never going to consume that type of,
you know, event.
So I think that it is so much about running those type of experience
experiments to say, Hey, we're going to do this thing. Is anyone interested in
this?
If we were to put this together, which was you all want to go. Those are the
sort of things that I think you can do more experience experiences with. And
then I would add one other thing about the gated content, which is gate cool
stuff, gate tools, gate, a freemium, like version of your product gate.
Like going to a physical event, like gate stuff that actually costs money. Don
't get stuff that's free. Like don't get content. Right.
Yeah, I always think if I always think if we want more eyeballs on a message
that we are trying to push. Don't get exactly. How do you view the website?
So, well, notwithstanding your point from earlier about the entry being very,
very cool indeed. For me, I think the website needs to have at the very, very,
very, very top a clear statement on what we are and what we do.
I really can't stand companies that use verbiage on their website like industry
leading solutions to optimize customers journey is or whatever like those words
are utterly meaningless. And I think a very, very clear statement at the
absolute top of the website on what you are and what you do is super important.
Personally, I like the movement and the video, I would say that because we're a
video company. So lots of movement, lots of color, lots of, you know, not
overly static.
And the next thing for me about our website is or any website for that matter
is if you do buy into the philosophy of ungating, you need lots of lots of ways
in which you can capture leads.
And the actual lead capture point where people do voluntarily raise their hand
need to be super accessible and they need to be really, really easy to complete
. Now, for us, that is a chatbot.
We've gone down the chatbot route, as have millions of others where, you know,
book a meeting is good, but live chat is even better.
Yeah, so for us, very, very clear statement, lots of movement, lots of video,
lots of lead capture points, chatbot being the preferred form, not preferred
for excuse the pun, but the preferred form, not a form.
And I guess the final thing I'd say is that the personalization point, I
mentioned at the very, very top, like the idea that B2B marketers need to treat
B2B buyers as individuals, not as a contact within an account and you're
marketing to the account.
And so I would like to deploy as much personalization as possible on the
website. Don't make it your generic video that, you know, talks about, you know
, whatever it talks about, you know, same thing if you've got a performing arts
organization on your website or a retailer or a manufacturer.
So I think at the very least, industry level personalization, where you're
adjusting the content and the messaging that's on the page based on someone's
industry, if you can get down to the account level and you want to, you know,
you want to welcome
Ian directly or even welcome, you know, a company directly. I think that's
great too.
Let's get to the dust up. We're talking about healthy tension, whether that's
their sales teams, your competitors or anyone else.
Have you had a memorable dust up in your career?
Yeah, so I'm not really a kind of dust up kind of guy like big standing.
Everyone gets out of their chair, you know, they're one step away from throwing
punches. That's not really kind of who I am.
But I have had quite a few examples where, you know, a series of unfortunate
events lead to a real breakdown in the relationship for a breakdown in
communications.
And I've got to be honest, it typically happens with sales because I'm in
marketing and that's typically where the tension where the tension exists. And
I've got two examples for you.
The first is around the fact that when our marketing is as targeted as it is,
no one at Bright Cove sees it.
So search engine marketing is about the only marketing we do that is not
targeted to specific accounts and we're a medium sized software company.
So we're definitely not advertising in airports or doing any out of home
advertising.
So, you know, it's all very, very targeted and our own people don't see it.
And that leads to this impression that we're not doing any marketing because,
you know, some people don't understand the targeted nature of digital nowadays.
And so I'd say one of the first sort of breakdowns in communications would be
around the fact that, no, no, we are actually doing marketing and you have to
really sit down and explain to people where the marketing is happening and how
it's manifesting itself.
And the fact that you're not seeing it is not a problem. In fact, it's a good
thing.
Because if you were saying it would be wasting money.
Yeah, exactly.
That's exactly right.
The second, if you like, breakdown in comms or serious, unfortunate events is
it's around ABM and it's why I said at the top of the call, I don't like the
term ABM and I don't think it does justice to what is actually happening.
Because, you know, if you deploy ABM, you're not deploying a marketing strategy
or deploying a company wide go to market strategy where all of the sellers and
all of the BDRs and the entirety of marketing need to be focused on a specific
set of accounts. And you know what, that might change quarter by quarter. So it's not a one and
done either.
And that level of collaboration and coordination is terrifically hard to get
going and to make successful.
And I would say one of the biggest, if you like, series of unfortunate events
that didn't quite lead to a dust up, but nevertheless, is around how I as a
marketer have a two, three, four, six quarter time horizon.
Whereas the sellers might have a one or a two quarter time horizon.
Totally. So when I think I'm implementing change management to make sure we're all on
the same page about how we're all going to do things differently in the future
and target this specific set of accounts.
I'm thinking about that as a two, three, four, six quarter project.
But the change doesn't take effect. It doesn't bed down because the sellers
think the sellers have to live quarter by quarter. They have to be in the
quarter.
So I would say, you know, getting the change management that's required to
really, truly deliver ABM has led to a breakdown in communications and tensions
for sure.
Are people getting out of their chair and throwing punches? No, thankfully. But
, you know, it's a complicated problem to navigate for sure.
But Theo, our time to close is only, you know, whatever, 71 days. So, so
shouldn't we be doing campaigns? They get as deals like right now, we can close
them in quarter.
It's like, no, because that person, you know, has been watching our show for
the past two years.
Right. Yeah. So they just weren't ready to buy.
Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right.
That always reminds me of the 10 year overnight success, right? It's like, I've
been doing this for years. And then all of a sudden, now it's a hit.
Speaking of hits, let's get to quick hits. These are quick questions and quick
answers. Just like how quickly qualified helps companies generate pipeline.
Tap in your greatest assay website to identify your most valuable visitors and
instantly.
And I mean, instantly start sales conversation. Quick and easy. Just like these
questions go to qualified.com to learn more. Theo, quick hits. Are you ready?
Yep. Ready. What's a hidden teller skill that's not on your resume?
A hidden skill that is not on my resume. I am going to go for the fact that I
can light a fire with a flint.
That's good. How about that?
Yeah.
Do you have a favorite book, podcast or TV show? Yeah, it's undoubtedly apart
from this one, apart from this one being my favorite of all time.
Smartless has to be smartless. Do you have a favorite non marketing hobby that
helps you be a better marketer?
Yes, I do actually a favorite hobby. It's not really necessarily a hobby, but
it's something I do outside work.
I'm a scout leader, which means I have to deal with children a lot.
And that makes me extremely good at dealing with salespeople.
It's a great point. I'm an Eagle Scout. My brother is just about to be the
scout master of my own nephew's troops.
So he's already hitting me up. I'm going to be teaching Fish and Marabaj here
at some point.
Great. Great.
Theo, final question here. What would be your best advice for someone who is
running demand-gen for the first time?
Yeah, my best advice for someone that's running demand-gen for the first time
would be to truly embrace the whole video first content marketing strategy and
the channel that underpins it.
I mean, I have to say that, of course, because I work for Brightcove, but I'm
not saying it because I work for Brightcove.
I'm saying it because I am customer zero of Brightcove and I'm living it.
The video is simply the most effective content medium we have. And I know I've
already said it once on this podcast, but I'll say it again.
It's quicker and easier to consume and people retain the information more
readily. And that is the gold standard for demand-gen.
I could not agree more. Theo's been absolutely awesome having you on their show
For our listeners, go to Brightcove.com. Check out that nav bar. You can just
select IM. You go CMO.
Please, it's all right there. Check it out. Check out PlayTV. Any final
thoughts? Anything to plug?
The only thing I'd say is to it to the enterprises out there, think and act
like a media company. It's the way forward.
I love it. Thanks, Theo.
Thank you very much, Ian. Have a good day.
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