Podcast Episode #29: Building an Effective Video Marketing Funnel

On todays episode of the Web Video Marketing Show, Matt Childs from Vidcaster joins Ryan Spanger to discuss video marketing funnels. Listen in to find out what sets some marketing tools apart from others and how to build the most effective marketing funnel.

Episode Notes

• [02:23] Ryan introduces todays guest Matt Childs, the VP of sales and marketing at Vidcaster
• [05:28] Matt tells Ryan why using video in marketing is so effective for him
• [07:37] Matt talks about what differentiates Vidcaster from other video hosting platforms and discusses its useful features for businesses
• [12:37] Ryan and Matt discuss ‘what is a video marketing funnel’ and Matt talks us through setting one up
• [13:47] Matt raises an interesting point about the effectiveness of lower production value videos
• [16:58] Ryan asks Matt about the reasons behind a lower production value video being more effective in some cases
• [19:23] Matt gives us an example of what a video marketing funnel might look like for a hypothetical company
• [21:05] Matt talks about case study videos and how they can be most effective
• [22:31] Ryan discusses video analytics with Matt, how viewers interact with video and how important it is to use the data to better connect with customers on an individual level
• [26:31] Matt tells us the metrics that he feels are most important when dissecting video analytics
• [29:11] Ryan brings up automated marketing platforms and discusses with Matt how these tie into the marketing funnel, Matt talks about the best automated marketing platforms that intergrade with Vidcaster and which one applies to what business
• [33:28] Matt tells us how Vidcaster integrates with the Salesforce system
• [35:11] Matt gives a last piece of advice for people just getting started with a video marketing funnel

Podcast Transcription

Ryan Spanger: Hi, this is Ryan Spanger. About 12 years ago, I started a video production company in Melbourne, Australia called Dream Engine. Making videos is a huge passion for me.

In this podcast, I’ll be sharing with you a lot of the ideas and techniques that I use in my video production business. I hope you enjoy the show and it gives you clear, actionable ideas that you could implement in your business right now to improve your web video marketing and build a stronger connection with your audience.

Ryan Spanger here with Episode 29 of the Web Video Marketing Show. Keep listening because, on this episode, I’ll be talking to a video marketing expert who’ll explain the ins and outs and building an effective video marketing funnel.

If this is the first time you’ve heard the podcast, each episode we go deep on one area of video marketing. My aim is for you to come away with ideas and strategies that you can implement in your business right now to help you connect with your audience more effectively.

To the long time listeners of this podcast, I want to thank you for coming on the journey with me. I also want to particularly thank that people who’ve reached out and made contact, given me feedback on the podcast, asked questions, and, generally, just let me know that you’re out there listening and that you’re enjoying it. I love doing these podcasts, and I’m particularly excited about this episode.

Probably the biggest change that I’ve noticed in the video production industry in the 15 years that I’ve been doing it is the way that video has moved from the idea of one-off to episodic. What I mean by that is, back in the day, companies would commission a video and it would go out on DVD or VHS before that and maybe be played in the lobby and would cover everything in a general sense that people would need to know about the business.

It was the equivalent of a brochure. They’d make the video and that would be it. They’d use it for years and years until the suits and haircuts went out of style and came back into fashion.

These days, video is increasingly episodic. What I mean by that is it’s part of an ongoing conversations. Rather than being a one-size fits all approach, it’s unique and focused and meets the audience where they are. It’s become part of a stream of episodes that build up, give the audience just the information they’re looking for at the right time. What drives this type of communication are marketing automation platforms backed up by advanced video hosting systems.

Today on the show, I’m going to be speaking to Matt Childs. Matt is the VP of Sales and Strategy at Vidcaster, which is a video hosting platform or, as they describe it, a video experience platform. I think that’s a really cool way of describing it.

Vidcaster is a platform that helps you use videos strategically in your business with things like lead generation, customer support, and training. It also gives you really powerful analytics information.

Matt has a background in sales and marketing. He’s worked with a lot of early-stage startups in the software as a service space. Matt also has a strong background in video, having worked with many companies using video and sales and marketing campaigns. This is part of why I’m so happy to be having this conversation with Matt.

There’s a lot of filmmakers out there who can create beautiful images and captivate us and tell great stories. On the other side, there’s no shortage of marketing gurus who are out there singing the praises of video and developing amazing strategies, but there’s actually few people who really cross the boundaries as seamlessly as Matt does and really integrate the strategy, production, marketing, and automation into a coherent approach.

It’s this place where this different disciplines meet that’s so exciting to me. Videos become the default way that people like to get their information. Through using marketing automation tools and video hosting platforms like Vidcaster, you can do some pretty amazing things.

Hey, Matt. How are you doing?

Matt Childs: I’m doing great, Ryan. Thanks for having me on today. Great to talk to you.

Ryan Spanger: Excellent. It’s great to have you on the podcast. Matt, firstly, I’m interested to know why video? Was there a sort of a light bulb moment for you? What was it about video that’s got you excited?

Matt Childs: I love that question, Ryan. For me, I discovered video really at an early age. For me, video was always a form of entertainment. I never really saw it as a business tool.

In my early 20s, I worked in a number of startups here. I’m based in San Francisco, California. We were providing web-based software.

If you think of the cloud … Today everybody knows the cloud. They trust the cloud. If your data is hosted in the cloud, it’s secure.

When I started selling cloud-based software, people didn’t trust the cloud. They didn’t even know … It wasn’t called the cloud. People didn’t know what that was. A lot of consumers, and even businesses, had been burnt coming out of a dot-com boom. There was this lack of trust for businesses that were providing services over the internet. Really, the only form of integrity that we had, or, really, our storefront was our website.

You really had to, as a consumer, or a purchaser of software, you had to trust that voice on the phone. There was no real other way to build that comfort or trust.

One of the things that we did at one of the early startups I was at is we brought in video. We found that video was a very, very powerful tool. If we could get our CEO or other people that were involved in our business on camera talking about how our software worked, or even our customers talking about the success that they had with our products, that would build a level of trust for our buyers and prospects that would really bridge that gap that we had before. We were no longer just a business with a website selling some software hosted up in the sky and the data centre. We were now a tangible, real business with people behind it.

That’s what video brought to the businesses that I’ve been involved with. It got me thinking, “Wow! This is extremely powerful.” It set me off on my mission to do what I do today.

Ryan Spanger: Cool! That’s a great answer. You’re working at Vidcaster now. I’ve given a bit of background.

Most of the listeners here are familiar with YouTube. Some of them are familiar with Vimeo. They’re also familiar with Wistia. I think a lot of the listeners actually don’t know that much about Vidcaster. Can you tell us a bit of background about Vidcaster?

Matt Childs: Yeah, absolutely. The solutions you mentioned are great. You’ve got free solutions that enable individuals and small businesses that don’t have budgets to get video up on the web and hosted at little or no cost. Then it gives them a tool to bring that into their website. Great solutions – Vimeo, YouTube.

Wistia is also a great solution. They provide a really solid video player at free to almost no cost at all. Businesses can build a branded video player and bring that into their sites. If they want to go deeper, they can use that to drive SCO value and other benefits that video SCO or video brings to a web property.

How Vidcaster is different is we looked at how video has been used over the past 5 to 10 years. We found that video is used in so many different business processes and so many different ways, but one thing remains the same across all those different experiences, and that is that video has always matched with either a website or a web page or a landing page.

What Vidcaster’s done is we’ve taken the site level component and we matched it with a video player. The 2 of them together is a winning combination.

If you’re going to launch … Say you have more than 10 or 15 product videos and you need somewhere to put that on your website, the traditional way would be to go upload those videos to a solution like Wistia or YouTube and then you would go and you would drop all those embed codes into that site.

As you create more and more content, the code gets messier and messier. Then you run into some issues now with mobile devices in the scale of a responsive design and other things along those parameters.

With Vidcaster, since we’ve matched page level components with the video player itself, we allow businesses that believe in video as a course strategy to just publish video and have it automated on the page. Then we can control things like playback and responsive design and all the other elements in one platform.

We’ve also built this nice, core platform that’s built around the site to plugin to all these other different technologies. You may have, as an example, a CRM system, where you’re tracking a database of contacts. Wouldn’t it be great if you can understand which contacts are viewing specific videos?

Being able to make connections to a system like that or a marketing automation system, even a payment processing system. If you wanted to charge for access to videos, you would need some way to process that payment.

Vidcaster integrates with over 40 different technology providers. That’s one of the cool things about having not only the video player itself, but also controlled over the page. I guess probably the best analogy would be it’s kind of like a Windows computer versus a Mac or an Apple.

Windows, you can get any type of hardware that supports the Windows system and you can install windows on it. It may work great, but sometimes it may not because there’s other components with that hardware that are not synced because Windows will then say, “Hey,” they didn’t put this together. They don’t control the hardware and the software; whereas Apple does. They control the hardware and the software. It works seamlessly. Vidcaster is kind of the Apple in that case, if that makes sense.

Ryan Spanger: Yeah, it does. That’s more integrated. To really break it down for people who might be using some of these other platforms which, as you mentioned, work really great for what they do, what are some of the opportunities that people have to now go beyond those platforms with Vidcaster? What are the main things that Vidcaster does really well that you might it more challenging to do with some of the other platforms?

Matt Childs: Yeah. I think a lot of folks are at the stage where they’re realising that video is valuable, just at a basic level. We’re putting video on YouTube. If it plays back on the website, it’s probably … If we position it correctly, it’s going to increase conversion rates, it’s going to increase time on site.

What I think that most folks don’t realize is that video is actually a 2-way mirror. If you have the right technology in place like Vidcaster’s technology, you can actually watch the people that are watching your video. It’s kind of weird to think about, but when you bring in the analytics and identity tracking and even the cookie users based on some certain actions, whether it’s them clicking on an e-mail that has a link to your video or them filling out a form within the video, we can now track what those specific viewers are doing, who are they, what content are they watching, inside a specific video, what are the topics of the content they’re watching within that video. Those are the types of possibilities that Vidcaster brings at a very basic level.

That can impact all kinds of things from sales processes to understanding which leads are hot and which leads are not. It can impact training where you’re delivering video content to employees, which employees watch those videos, which didn’t, or even more, if you want it even tighter, if it’s a certification process, who’s certified and who’s not. That’s what the analytics bring.

Then, I think, at a higher is a lot of the security layer stuff. If you produced a series of videos and you don’t want anyone else to see it except for a select audience, today that might be very complicated to rule out as not a developer or a technical person. You maybe would go embed those videos on maybe a secure WordPress site or something of the sort to achieve that; whereas, with Vidcaster, you can rule that out instantly and have that user management control that access.

There’s a lot of different scenarios. It just really depends on how deep you want to go with video and really what is that business process where you want to plug video into to add some benefit there.

Ryan Spanger: Okay, cool. We’re going to talk about a video marketing funnel and basically break it down for the audience what it is, how to set it up. We can relate that to how you do that with Vidcaster. First of all, can you explain to the audience what is a video marketing funnel?

Matt Childs: Yeah. Video marketing funnel, to me, is kind of like your content marketing funnel. It’s basically the same thing. You’re trying to lead folks through a path of self-identification and also, basically, a narrowing path to get them to raise their hand at some point to take some sort of action, a conversion point. That conversion point could be a sale. A conversion point could be a subscription. There’s some sort of conversion point that you want to lead people down.

There’s different types of content at each cycle of the funnel. Very much like if you were to go, say, design a drip campaign or some sort of automated workflow and you had just blog post and other written content, you would look through that content and you say, “What do we need to create for people that are just finding out about our brand?” It’s going to be really basic information about and really high-level information about solving a specific problem.

Then the next piece of content is going to be a little more specific. Then it’s going to get more and more specific, then it’s going to get really direct at the end. Same can be related to video.

What we found – an interesting fact, looking at all our customers – is the video content that actually converts the most is the content that’s not heavily produced. It’s the screen-recorded presentations of how I do this or how do I do that and the more technical how-to type videos.

When you look at a funnel, there could be conversion points anywhere along the line, but I think, when you’re producing video, you want to start high-level, and that’s where you’re addressing a business problem. You want to produce content that maybe poses questions to the audience. You want to get then a level deeper and you want to talk more about maybe specific case studies on how you’ve done it for other folks, how you’ve solved that problem.

Then you can narrow down even further and maybe even tease them with some … If you’re selling software, as an example – that’s an area I know really well – maybe you can provide some how-to support videos so people can actually see what is going on with software. Then, at the very end, then you can bring in the more polished content. That kind of like certifies the brand. At that point, it’s ready for the sale.

You can somewhat argue that that might not be the optimal structure for their business. That’s just what I have seen that works. I think it’s different for every industry and niche that you work in.

You just really have to do a lot of testing. You have to see, out of the videos you produce, what’s converting, in what stage are those folks that are enacting that video converting.

Ryan Spanger: Yeah. I think that’s a good point that it’s important to create a funnel that’s suitable for your business and your audience. I, often, with our video marketing funnel, break it down into these three stages of lead capture, nurture, and conversion.

At the top of the funnel, we’re mainly creating, distributing video that’s going to get people’s attention and give them something useful. It might be a mini course, it might be how-to, something that’s going to get their attention and give us their e-mail address so we can start a conversation.

Then, in that nurture phase, it’s often things like news updates, ongoing contents, blog posts. Again, useful things that we can keep that discussion going.

Then, in the conversion stage, it might be things like examples, case studies, and with a more heavy call to action. At that stage, we’re actually driving them to then make that decision. Each video, through that phase, is actually quite different.

That’s the mindset that I think is important to start cultivating, that it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, that it’s different types of content that you’re going to be meeting people with compared to ones you really have that conversation going.

Matt Childs: Right. That’s exactly right. Yeah, it definitely will be … It will be different for everyone’s business. I think it’s just tweaking and trying to understand. It’s a lot of trial and error, A/B testing. It takes time, but it’s worth it. Once you crack it, that formula, then you can expand on that and you can really wrap up your production video, using videos as a core channel for that.

Ryan Spanger: I was interested in your observation that often the less polished videos are more engaging. Is that because there’s more authenticity there? What would you say causes that?

Matt Childs: Yeah, that’s what we found. We found that a lot of times, especially if it’s a public video, the folks that are buying software or needing to solve a problem are going to Google first and they’re saying, “How do I do this?” or, “I’m trying to solve this problem.” By typing that in and finding a video that it maybe not the most sexy video in the world, but maybe a screen capture of some sort of demo, they’ve now found something that’s closest to the problem right away.

Then, from there, they’ve somewhat built some trust and then they can push their self into more, I guess, formal content, if they wanted to. Then, it might go to an explainer video. They’re like, “Wow! This solves my problem. Who are these people? Let’s go to their explainer video and find out.”

That’s really what we found. It’s mainly the technical video, the how-to, the less polished that works. I think it’s more human instinct when you see if it’s someone talking on camera about a topic that you care about and it looks like it’s filmed with an iPhone, but the person on camera is saying something that really hits home to you, you’re like, “This is really authentic. I can kind of relate to this,” versus some super polished video that’s telling you what you think that you need to know about something. At least that’s what we’ve seen.

Ryan Spanger: I think that’s a good point. I think there’s a place for highly polished produced videos which might be on the homepage which have the same production values as your logo and your website and they have that wow factor and then videos on your blog, or nurture sequence that might be more spontaneous, more immediate, fact-based FAQ sort of questions, where if they’re a little bit less polished, it actually just feels a little bit more direct and authentic.

Matt Childs: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan Spanger: Maybe we could give a bit of a case study. Let’s say there’s someone listening from a marketing agency and they’re planning their video marketing funnel, could you talk us through some of the stages of the funnel and maybe some types of videos that they could produce and distribute at each stage of the marketing funnel?

Matt Childs: Yeah. I’ve looked at a number of different funnels based on the different industries our customer worked in, are working, and served. Typically, you may want to start with … It obviously depends on the business, but at the very high level how-to videos. It doesn’t have to be super polished, but if it’s an agency working with a big brand, you may want to start with a polished version of kind of a how-to. It doesn’t have to be a 10-minute video. It could be a 1-minute video, it could be a 90-second video, whatever it may be.

I would start at that real high level. Give the viewer something they can take away, some sort of value. That’s the kind of content I would produce there. From there, I would start to lead them down more that path.

Just like I had mentioned from our web visitor that goes to search on how to solve a problem, they find that how-to video, you’re starting to build trust. The next level deeper than that is, “Okay, who are you?” That’s where the explainer would come in. I think that’s more on the next level.

As they work tighter down the funnel, maybe you want to have other videos that are not so much how-to, or it could be a how-to on other related topics that that solution or that company solves. Then, from there, once you’ve got their buy-in, if you can track them – and we can talk about tracking in more detail, if you want to – you could see if they’re actually engaging with that content. Then maybe you want to automatically serve them up another video that’s a little more directed, as you mentioned, like a case study, something that tries to fill out. These buyers, are they at that point in the process where they’re ready to see proof and look at those cases, customer case study videos?

I think it’s extremely important to have very polished customer success stories or case studies. I think that that type of video, it cannot be casual. I know a lot of folks are shooting in hallways. I think that’s fine for educating sales teams and other people internally, but I think when it comes to someone in the sale process or leading themselves down a video marketing funnel, when they get to that success story, they need to see a really polished, strong story not only from the content perspective but from a production standpoint as well.

Then, from there, I would lead them into any of the closing type content you would have. These are things like, “How do I get started?” or any of those more polished videos that you would add, if that makes sense.

Ryan Spanger: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve talked about the video marketing funnel. You’ve given us some examples of different types of videos you can use at each stage of the process. You mentioned tracking and analytics. Tell us a bit more about how you actually track the videos.

Matt Childs: Yeah. Tracking and analytics, I think, is probably one of the most important parts of video marketing. Marketers love this stuff. We love our stats. We love to know what’s going on.

This is where the idea of the 2-way mirror, being that video player, being able to watch that viewer, identify who they are, and then relate those actions back to either a marketing department, a sales team, or even a content marketing team. We only want to produce content that has results. Tracking the results is super important.

This is where it actually gets really fun as a content marketer because you can start to plugin tools that you’re using today in other areas of your business, like marketing automation systems and CRM systems, and all kinds of different analytics systems into the video. You can start to track which contact is watching which video and, based on that viewership or that play event, then triggering either an e-mail, an action – whether it’s a phone call from a sales rep – or even another video.

If I go to watch a video on how-to, because I found this video through Google search, at the end of the video, it’s asked me for my contact information. I say, “Sure. Why not?” Then the next stage, I go on and I watch something about how to get started.

That behaviour probably tells me that, as the viewer, I’m probably ready to talk to someone potentially. Being able to know that, relating that information to the right resource at your company to call that person and then also having that contact’s information using a lead gate, that’s the type of situation you want to be in.

If you didn’t have that tracking and we didn’t have those systems working together then you would have never known. It would have just been a view. If it was on YouTube, you’d say, “Okay. I got a view. That’s great.” How would you know where they’re at?

By having automation systems, having videos on your own domain hosted with a solution like Vidcaster – just to plug Vidcaster for a second, but there are other solutions out there that do this – you have that visibility, you have that control. It should impact certain business goals that you have in a positive way.

There’s a number of solutions out there you can integrate with. The really cool thing about Vidcaster is we looked at all those marketing automation solutions and we pulled them a lot of the features that they have, minus a lot of the e-mail tracks and stuff, into our platform because we found that … And we work with a lot of larger companies.

Our biggest customer I can talk about is VMware. The department that handles video marketing at VMware is isolated from a lot of the other marketing business teams. They don’t have marketing automation. They don’t have access to those systems.

Vidcaster can provide that small team that handles the video the same level of intelligence that we would with a full-blown marketing automation system. Then they can take that and they can pull the data and do what they need with it.

I would say pairing marketing automation and your contacts that you have today with video is extremely important for tracking clear ROI. Once you start to see those ROI numbers then you’re going to definitely invest more money and resources in video.

Ryan Spanger:  Cool! Just to reinforce what you’re saying there, using a professional hosting platform gives you the opportunity to track viewers on an individual level. As opposed to something like YouTube where you don’t know the behaviour or each individual person, once you tag someone then you know what their actions are.

We track things like engagement rates, how much of the video people watch. We also track the number of videos that individuals watch. What would you say are the most important metrics that people should be tracking?

Matt Childs: Yeah. I like to look at … I think there’s a number of metrics, but you want to understand, out of all your content, what are the videos that people are watching because you may have a lot of videos and you may think a certain video’s valuable, but if no one’s watching it then it’s irrelevant.

First, I’d find out what content is actually driving views and then, from there, within those videos, what are they watching? Is there a strong drop off a minute into it? Are they skipping ahead to the end of the video? That will give you some info on your content and also how engaged a viewer is with that content.

Then I would look at conversion rates. If you’re using litigating and you have some way to convert viewers, like how Vidcaster has our platform configured, then you can see, “Okay, what videos are actually converting folks? What people, at the end of the video, are saying, ‘Wow! I’ve got to learn more. I’m going to give you my information.”

I look at that because those converting videos will tell us that the content that we’re producing there is very meaningful and very powerful. I would look at that.

Just to touch on the YouTube thing, I think YouTube is a great place for building a brand. You get your videos out there. People find out about you. It’s really … It’s not a great place for building a business. Meaning it’s not that easy to convert folks, unless you’re paying for a YouTube video ad or something. Those are actually proven to be pretty powerful.

If your business is trying to drive folks back to your website, and that should always be the goal of YouTube, “How do I get someone back to my website where they can take action and convert to become a new customer?” I would look at that content on YouTube and then look at the content that you’re using in this solution like Vidcaster and I would make sure that it’s not the same content, but they play off of each other. You can lead people from YouTube back to your website where the business is being conducted.

Ryan Spanger: Absolutely. I think often the misconception is that people don’t think of YouTube purely as a channel. It’s another way of distributing your videos, but it’s not a strategy in itself.

It’s probably a lot better for B to C than B to B. I think, often, business operators and marketers actually overestimate the power of YouTube and they’re not sufficiently familiar with these sort of video marketing approaches.

We’ve talked about the video marketing funnel. We’ve described some of the types of content that you can create and how you can use tracking and analytics to monitor engagement. The missing link that you’ve mentioned is using a marketing automation platform to bring it all together because, obviously, it’s going to become incredibly complicated and unwieldy if you’re deploying these videos individually. You actually need a system to be able to bring it all together.

What are the best marketing automation platforms that connect with Vidcaster?

Matt Childs: Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a lot of marketing automation systems out there. I feel like marketing automation is really hot in recent times. It’s becoming more accessible to smaller businesses. In the past, you’d pay $50,000 to $60,000 annually to get access to this type of technology.

Now we’re seeing solutions like HubSpot and Marketo and Pardot, which is now a part of Salesforce and ExactTarget. Those are all solutions that integrate with Vidcaster, even Silverpop. There’s Eloqua as well. There’s a number of these folks out there.

If you’re a small business, I would say look at something like HubSpot. HubSpot is a great platform for small businesses that are looking to get started in automating their communication and their marketing.

If it’s more advanced and you’re a bigger organisation and you have a marketing team of 3 or 4 people at least, then I would look at something like Marketo or Eloqua, even Pardot, to handle that.

These tools basically enable you to automate another body in your business. There’s a lot of upfront work needed to set it up in terms of configuring e-mail templates and workflows, but once you set it up, it can really take on the role of another human being, whether it’s people filling out forms on your website and auto e-mail being generated that’s personalised to that person for a timely follow up, or whether it’s triggering e-mails based on links that they’ve clicked on on your website, you want to create that impression that you’re very attentive to your buyer’s needs.

What we find out is that, really, you have a critical window, about 15 to 30 minutes after someone’s come to your website requested contact, where you can really get them on that emotional wow moment where they come to your website, they realise that, “Hey, this might be a good fit,” you need to hit them right away. If you’re out busy, at a meeting or you’re on the phone, and you’re a smaller business then you’re not going to be able to get to them.

Automation, marketing automation, will allow you to trigger automated personalised e-mails and follow ups with these people so you can capture their business.

Then plugging video into that is just another component. It’s another content type. Is the serving video relative to what people care about through auto e-mails? The tracking and the automation of behaviour, that’s a big part of marketing automation is analytics and really trying to understand what contacts are doing what, whether it’s with a video.

That’s how Vidcaster integrates with these solutions. It ties in to our video technology and it relates play events. If someone press play, or it could be a “Hey, Bob” at Vidcaster.com press play then he press pause on this video then he ended up completing the whole video, we want to know that. Then we can know, within that video, Bob clicked on these two chapters.

There’s things like interactivity which we didn’t go into in detail, but those types of behaviors in a video like a menu system could relate back what specific chapters that Bob clicked on. That, through the automation, each of those chapters could trigger workflows and events within the marketing automation system.

Ryan Spanger: What you’re heading towards there is late scoring, where, based on their activity, you can qualify these leads and then take the appropriate action. If someone is watching lots of videos, they’re watching them right through until the end, if they’re watching the videos that are more in that kind of lead conversion funnel, that’s a clear indication that they are hot prospect and it’s time to follow them up.

In my video production business, Dream Engine, we work with a lot of larger corporates who use Salesforce. How can they connect Salesforce with something like Vidcaster?

Matt Childs: Yeah. I think Salesforce plus Vidcaster is a pretty amazing combination. Vidcaster has a couple of integrations with Salesforce depending on how you want to configure it. One is the pass contacts from a video lead wall, what we call lead wall, which is really in video form, to Salesforce to create a new lead record. If you’re generating leads off the video and these are new, unidentified leads or contacts the that can push directly into Salesforce.

The other way is to monitor … Or, sorry, relate user behaviour to a specific lead or contact within Salesforce. Vidcaster has a section or an object that is created in the lead record and contact record, it’ll allow the different play events to be streamed. They’re graphically represented. They’re heat maps.

If I go to click on, Ryan, on your lead record in Salesforce, I could see all the videos that you watched related to Vidcaster. It’ll show the events, it will show me how many you watched, how much of it you watched, and if you rewatched certain things.

I think that’s important for anyone using Salesforce, before they get on the phone with a contact or a prospect, to see, okay, what has this person done lately and being able to see it graphically within that lead record. It’s just a pretty powerful thing.

Ryan Spanger: Absolutely. Matt, we’ve covered a lot of content today. For listeners who are now familiar with this process, but, I guess, have taken on a lot of information, what would you suggest is the next step? What can they start thinking about in terms of actually implementing some of these ideas?

Matt Childs: Yeah. There’s a lot to think about here, obviously. Some of the stuff we talked about is pretty advanced. I would recommend, if you’re just getting started, to start very simple. I would start with outlining your content funnel, your marketing funnel, and what content you think or know is needed to lead people down a process, or contacts or prospects down a conversion process.

I would start there. Then, from there, once you’ve implemented a basic level of that, I would then decide on what type of information or reports that we need.

I love to work backwards. What do I need to know? What do I need to know about my videos? What do I need to know about the people that are doing it and how does that impact my business?

I’d ask those questions first about your video and in your strategy. I’d write those down. That will tell you what type of data you need to gather to really be successful with that. Then I would go out and look for a solution, whether it’s Vidcaster, whether it’s a hybrid of YouTube and some other stuff, or even a solution like Wistia. Then go out and shop based on what information you need to know and what you need to achieve.

Then you can start to bring in the marketing automation, the CRM, and all that advanced stuff, but you’ve got to get that foundation, that process, and that structuring first before you get advanced.

Ryan Spanger: Matt, for people who want to learn more about you and connect with you and Vidcaster, where’s the best place for them to go?

Matt Childs: Yeah. I welcome any conversation. You can find me on Twitter, @Mattychilds on Twitter. You can e-mail me directly on matt@vidcaster.com, or visit us on our website, vidcaster.com and feel free to reach out to me directly. I’d be happy to chat.

Ryan Spanger: Cool! Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I can’t emphasise enough, to me, how exciting this stuff is. It’s pretty revolutionary. The thing is that we’re at really such an early stage in the evolution of this stuff. If you can get on to it and start implementing it in your business, you’re going to get a real head start because this really is the future of video and marketing.

Matt, thanks so much for coming on the Web Video Marketing Show. You’ve really shared some great information.

Matt Childs: Thank you so much, Ryan. It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan Spanger: Listen, I hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast. Remember, the question for you is how can you implement some of these ideas that Matt’s talked about into your business? Think about what’s the next step for you in building your marketing funnel, your video marketing funnel.

As always, if you’re enjoying the content I’m sharing with you on the podcast, I’d love to get your comments or feedback, either on webvideomarketing.com or on iTunes. To really show your love, give the Web Video Marketing Show a 5-star rating on iTunes. I’d really appreciate that.