Insights from Jimmy Gagnon of Vidyard

Apart from tailored messaging, you can learn a lot about a prospective buyer based on the videos they watch and how much time they spend consuming them. In our Spotlight for Revenue Leadership event held this month, Jimmy Gagnon, director of sales at Vidyard, lets us in on how businesses can leverage video analytics to drive sales and boost audience engagement.

It’s Not Just About Views

Looking at the total number of views and shares gives you a general insight into how many people are consuming your content, but this only tells you so much.

Accordingly, views and shares aren’t the only metrics to track in your video marketing strategy — there is a wealth of wealth of insights waiting to be discovered when you dig deeper. In the intermediate measurement stage, Jimmy says that this is where you can start looking at different facets of conversion and actually interpret specific viewer behavior like play rates, viewer identity, and viewing duration.

Once you’ve identified these, you can explore the metrics that have a direct impact on your revenue and pipeline. These include conversion rates from CTAs, where the views are originating, and attribution rates — metrics that let you know whether or not a particular video is effective, or where it works within the funnel.

Why Tracking Videos Matter

From a sales perspective, tracking videos matters because it helps your sales reps further understand lead behavior, and how potential customers are consuming information as they move down the funnel.

Here are some examples: Lead 1 lands on your website, downloads and reads white paper, then peruses through your blogs. Your marketing team hands that lead to your sales team under the assumption that this lead is highly engaged.

Lead 2 reaches your website, watches a high-level brand awareness video, proceeds to watch product demos, customer testimonials, and walkthroughs. But, your marketing team might not give this lead to your sales team, because it may appear that the prospect only watched a couple of pages before disengaging.

In these examples, Lead 2 might actually be more qualified and have more potential to convert, because they‘ve educated themselves about your brand by watching your videos. While a superficial analysis focusing only on views might not capture this engagement, a more comprehensive analysis of viewing behavior can reveal promising leads.

Cadence Audits

For companies using sales acceleration tools, Jimmy says that it’s very important to understand where you convert throughout the engagement cycle. Going through cadence audits helps you identify the best time is to use video in relation to the lead development stages. “If you think about it as a funnel, you’ve got different material that educates a little bit differently,” Jimmy explains. “Once we see that pattern, you can identify which step is historically your biggest converter and add video to that.” 

So, if you have a historically high 10% conversion rate for a given point in time, adding 2% more that can be attributed to video is already a huge gain. You can also identify the steps or days that have the lowest traction and use video to generate more engagement.

Sales Coaching with Video

Positive customer experience cannot be rushed, so your sales team must be able to understand the experience leads are having at a given point in time. Jimmy recommends centering the following questions as part of the sales coaching process:

• Which reps are creating and sending the most videos?
• Which reps are getting the most views from their videos?
• Which reps are closing the most deals where video is involved?

With this data in hand, you’ll better understand terms of engagement and conversion rates per sales rep, you’ll have insights into what strategies or trends are working for your top performers, and then you can cascade these down to the rest of your sales team. By empowering your sales team to understand this data, they can make intelligent decisions on when to deploy video, in real-time.

Key Takeaways

Whether your sales team is just starting to use video or has been doing so for a long time, Jimmy suggests focusing on two key aspects:

1) Adoption metrics, to track where your sales reps are in the conversion cycle and what they’re doing to drive sales.

2) Engagement metrics, to measure if prospects and customers are viewing your content. Integrate these two to your current systems and tools to yield a more comprehensive client profile, and ultimately drive the revenue and growth of your business.

Jimmy Gagnon shares even more about using video analytics for smarter selling in his session for our Spotlight on Revenue Leadership event.

[su_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/pvTzOpWE1WY?t=28″ mute=”yes” title=”Using Video Analytics for Smarter Selling”]

Photography by Sara Kurfeß via Unsplash