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The next evolution of marketing is upon us.

The sharp uptake in consumer use of messaging apps, the shift in content consumption from text to video and audio, and the finally consumer-ready advancements in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and voice recognition all signal that marketers and consumers alike are in radically new times. Everytime consumer behavior evolves, marketers have new opportunities that were never before available.

I was talking to a colleague the other day about these changes, and she noted how endlessly marketing channels shift. “There aren’t many other fields where the game reinvents itself so often,” she said.

“That’s because we fuck everything up,” I told her.

Let me explain.

Scorched Earth Marketing AKA “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”

There is a desperation at play in most marketing organizations. A low grade panic to solve for short-term needs  —  the lead goal that month, for example, or a choice media placement. Attention is as fleeting as Snapchat videos, and for many companies, grabbing a moment of it can feel like gasping for oxygen. I get it. I have been there myself, so I’m not passing judgement.

The enemy of remarkable marketing is impatience.

There is so much competition for attention these days that the moment a blue ocean channel or new marketing strategy opens up, marketers flock to make the most of it. At the root of the problem is the channel-based mentality that causes us to obsess over hacks and mechanics more than a great message and engaging experience.

Early adoption is a good thing. It can be the breath of fresh air marketers and consumers alike are looking for. And typically the early days leveraging a new channel or format in your marketing strategy are as pure and innovative as they should be.

But then something happens. We cross the line into a sort of scorched earth marketing mentality where we forget the reason consumers were drawn to that channel to begin with — and we beat the living daylights out of it.  We start to solve for our own goals, instead of our customers’.

New channels emerge in part because we marketers ruin old ones.

Our earnest exploration of emerging channels all too often turns into rabid gaming of the system if we aren’t careful. And consumers, exhausted by our antics, are forced to move on to find new communication and content channels free of spam and brands. It happened with email. It’s happening with content. And if we think messaging and video are any different, we’re kidding ourselves.

How We’re Messing Up Content

Remember when content first emerged as the antidote to disruptive advertising and direct marketing? It was eye-opening.

Before content, if you were a marketer you were primarily using email and advertising to gain prospective customers. Those were the channels and, oh, did marketers use them. They so overplayed them that consumers began to adopt technology to filter them out. They blocked ads. They set up inbox filters. They reduced the noise and took control of their own purchase process. Much of that process began not with the company but on Google, where a buyer would do all the independent research they needed before making a decision.

So instead of pummeling buyers with ads or email, smart marketers started to create useful content designed help the consumer rather than sell them. If good and relevant, this content would find its way to the top of the search results page and, without costing the company anything in ad spend, deliver a compounding stream of incoming traffic.

The world of ebooks and webinars took shape in earnest. Let’s offer something of true value that consumers would otherwise pay for in exchange for nothing but their contact details and permission to reach out.

It sounds silly today because of how commonplace ebooks and lead forms have become, but it was genuine and mutually beneficial at the start. It was a new way of interacting with online consumers when quality, trustworthy information was scarce.

But then we (marketers) scorched the earth.

The volume of content went up, the quality often went down. Content farms popped up. And brands started to fund the spread of bad content through paid channels. As content offers increased, they became less valuable, and then they crossed the line into utter noise.

Good content still exists, but you have to sift through an awful lot of cheap content to get to it. So where did we go wrong?

We over-solved for the long tail.

The long-tail of search was what initially made content so exciting. You may not have had enough authority to win a top spot in the search results for highly competitive keywords, but there were any number of keyword variations you could shoot for.

It was field-leveling. I get it. I pitched it. But the problem with solving for keyword variations is there are thousands of them out there, which means you have to make thousands of attempts to capture that traffic. All of that has lead to high volumes of mediocre content.

We’re guilty of this too. In the past, we created hundreds of individual blog posts mapped to long-tail keyword variations that got repetitive. We didn’t realize how much it would all add up and clutter the internet.  Since then, we’ve implemented a strategy to update old posts with higher quality and updated information instead of launching into a new post and to redirect repetitive or irrelevant content.

On our Sales Blog, we’re focusing on topics over keywords, mapping each new post to a larger topic or pillar page. This creates a more organized site architecture that’s easier for Google to crawl and index and signals our authority on a subject, rather than a bunch of long-tail keyword variations.

While marketers were busy filling the web with content, Google also got smarter about how it handled search queries. Updates to the algorithm enabled Google to start serving up content that better matched searchers’ intent — not just their keywords. With this in mind, exact keyword optimized content only addresses a sliver of the question and isn’t going to help you get found in the same way it once would have back in 2012.

SEO has changed. It doesn’t reward content for the sake of keywords anymore. SEO in today’s world comes down to architecture and quality content more than it does keywords. And this is a very good thing for readers. It means that instead of writing mountains of content, our new goals should be about creating more value out of less content.

How We Risk Messing Up Messaging

Facebook Messenger will be the next great marketing channel, and it is arguably the best way to engage with the Facebook community as a marketer. My first reaction when I started to see messaging rise as a communication channel was, “Thank god you can’t buy Messenger accounts like you can buy email lists.”

This is an important point: You can’t buy and sell lists of Messenger addresses. You can’t be spammy or impatient in the same way that is possible via email.

That said, marketers are inventive. We can still mess up messaging.

We have to resist the urge to treat messaging like email. This is not a mass communication channel. It’s not a high-volume communication channel. Messaging should be reserved for short, on-demand, personalized exchanges. They should be triggered, whenever possible by the customer, not the company.

Email is company driven. Messaging is customer driven.

Even with behavior-triggered marketing automation, email is still pretty much a guessing game of what the recipient will find interesting. Messaging apps and the bots that live within them allow the recipient to pull the content they want from your repository. It can be completely custom. You can and should have endlessly differing content subscriptions with endlessly differing cadences based uniquely on the person at the other end. That is the promise of messaging: A frictionless exchange that gives the user exactly what they’re seeking and nothing more.

As marketers we need to respect Facebook’s ecosystem and the experience of the conversational UI that is a messaging interface. Let’s have bots help us deliver rich, personal, and helpful experiences. Let’s use Facebook Instant Articles to load web experiences within Facebook instantly. Let’s give our prospects and customer exactly what they need and nothing more.

Ok, so lets say we all agree with that in concept, here’s where our resolve will be tested. Messaging conversion rates are incredibly high right now. Like … gold rush high. In early experiments we’ve run at HubSpot, we’ve seen 4X the conversion rate on Facebook messenger versus email.

HubSpot’s Messenger bot allows prospects to book a meeting with a sales rep.

There’s a reason those conversions are so high right now. It’s because marketers haven’t yet eroded the trust of consumers on messaging. For the sake of everyone, let’s keep it that way.

If appeals for a better customer experience aren’t enough, consider this. At this time there is one company that largely controls messaging. Facebook has the keys to the castle on more than 1.2 billion users. Its primary incentive is aligned with the happiness of those users. So if Messenger gets abused, Facebook could turn around and remove this option for marketers. And they’d be right to do so.

Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report outlines the potential of messaging for businesses.

How We Risk Messing Up Video

Remember when infographics first became popular? There were infographics on everything.  Infographics on account based marketing. Infographics on geo-political conflicts. Infographics on world octopus day and shades of poop. Some were interactive and meticulously researched. Others were little more than powerpoint slides and poorly sourced. The internet was absolutely littered with them.

Source: Google Image Search

Infographics became so prevalent over the past 10 years it prompted Megan McCardle, former senior editor of The Atlantic, to call the whole practice a plague, writing:

The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don’t care whether the information in their graphics is right … just so long as you link it.

We can be better than this. And we have a chance to be. Today, we are on the verge of the same reckless abandon happening with video.

Video, once a resource-intensive format has become vastly simpler to create. Marketers can stream video at the touch of a button, and pre-produced videos can now benefit from everything from free b-roll sources to voice over marketplaces. This democratization of video production has come just in time for a mobile- and social-led surge in video consumption. The combination of the two creates the perfect conditions for marketers to run amok.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but, let’s make video responsibly.

A responsible video strategy starts with being specific about why you’re making a video in the first place.  How does this video fit into your marketing strategy?

Is it designed for top-of-the-funnel awareness? Build it to be native to Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram (Pick one — don’t one-size-fits-all it). Solve for time spent watching. Don’t try to drive conversions — drive interactions.

Is it designed to inform buyers on their way to a decision? Incorporate it into your sales process. Wistia, Viewedit, and Loom all offer quick video recording solutions to create custom explainer videos for your buyers. Use it as a way to save your prospects time with the basics before hopping on a call. Record a recap video after a demo. Solve for personalization over anything else. These videos should feel like a direct portal into the customer’s sales rep or account manager.

Don’t know? Don’t make a video.

Want it to solve for all of the above? Really don’t make a video.

HubSpot’s Marlon De Assis-Fernandez puts his cartoonist skills to work in a prospect video.

Just because a format has gotten easier doesn’t mean we should run it into the ground. Videos should be an integral part of our strategy rather than an add-on or afterthought.

In the past, we’ve made videos just because someone said, “We need a video!” It felt flashy and impressive to have a video for a campaign launch. But because we didn’t consider if video was really the right format for a particular story or how someone would actually discover the video, we saw disappointing results and ultimately, decided it was a waste of time.

The problem isn’t that video isn’t effective or valuable. We just didn’t ask the right questions before pressing the record button.

Let’s Save Ourselves From Ourselves

Every time people flee from overcrowded channels into new untouched ones, companies crop up to build on them. But evolving with customers is less about predicting the next big marketing channel and more about seeing through it to the customers on the other side.

It’s time we stop obsessing over channels, and start focusing on the people within them. Because if history has demonstrated anything, it’s that what’s new now may be scorched earth tomorrow. So yes, dive in. Explore every new channel that comes our way. But more importantly, look at the bigger picture of what the adoption of a channel says about how people want to interact with each other and brands.

Let’s make our mark on marketing by doing it the right way.

 

One of the most controversial phrases in the marketing today is, “pivot to video.”

It strikes fear into the hearts and minds of writers, as we worry that our skills will be replaced by the looming popularity of videos.

Luckily, our research has shown that audiences still want to read blog and news content.

But the fact remains: People want more video content, too. So how can marketers get started creating videos that help spread the message of their brands just as effectively as the written word?

We’ve created a framework to help you figure out where you should focus your efforts when creating your first marketing video, and which type of video to start with. All quiet on set? Let’s dive in.

How to Get Started With Marketing Videos

Before you start filming your first marketing video, you first have to determine what the goal of the video will be. Ask yourself these questions to start narrowing down how to get started on video marketing:

1) What resources do you have?

Let’s evaluate what resources you’ll have to create with.

• Do you have an audio/visual production team that can film and edit the video, or will you be doing it yourself?
• Do you have enough budget to hire a freelance video producer? Or to purchase equipment and software to create and edit the video yourself?
• How much time do you have to devote to filming, editing, and promoting your video?
• If you don’t know the first thing about producing videos, do you have the time (and patience) to take courses, or teach yourself how to use filming equipment and editing software?

The headcount, budget, skill level, and time you have at your disposal will determine if you’re able to invest in creating a high-tech, animated video, or if you should produce a more lightweight video of a talking head to start out.

I asked HubSpot Multimedia Content Strategist Megan Conley what she recommends for marketers just starting out, and she noted the importance of allotting resources to make your first marketing video as comprehensive as it can be.

“The last thing I want is for someone just starting out to create one of those slideshow-style videos with photos accompanied by text and a soundtrack,” she explains. “The world needs far, far fewer of those.”

It’s possible to create exceptional video content with a smartphone and limited skills — you just need to make sure you’re creating one for the right purposes and media. More on that later.

2) Where does your marketing funnel need the most help?

If you’re not sure what your first marketing video should contain, take a look at your marketing funnel, and evaluate where a video could be of the greatest help.

“Company explainer videos are good options, but too often people put a lot of time and resources into that and then don’t create anything afterward, because they didn’t have a comprehensive plan,” says Conley. “Or, they create that first — before they have any real experience — and it’s not as great as it could be … and will probably have to be redone later.”

In case you need a refresher, here’s the Inbound Methodology:

Ideally, you’ll have videos at each stage. But if you’re time or resource-strapped, choose the stage that needs the biggest boost.

Take inventory of your inbound funnel and identify where it needs the biggest boost. Here are some ideas for videos you could make to help each stage achieve its respective goal:

Attract Stage

If you’re having trouble generating leads at the very top of your funnel (TOFU), you might want to make an explainer or animated video to attract visitors to your website via organic search and social media. (Click the links to skip down for examples of each type of video.)

An eye-catching animated video, or a comprehensive breakdown of a trending topic in your industry will draw people to your social media platforms and blog pages. Conduct keyword research and review topics that are trending to choose a subject that’s captivating to your audience, and create a video that answers a question for potential leads. Then, if your video satisfies their queries, they will keep watching (or reading) to learn more about you, and — hopefully — convert.

Here’s an example of a TOFU explainer video we created to drive traffic from our YouTube channel to a new research report on a topic we want our audience to learn more about from us: topic clusters.

Convert Stage

If you’re having trouble moving leads along your funnel to get them to try a product demo, free trial, or download a free tool, you might want to make a demo video first.

During the convert stage, leads have provided their contact information, but they might not be ready to get on the phone with a salesperson to talk about buying a product. So if you want leads to take steps closer to the bottom of the funnel, consider creating a video demonstrating how to use one of your products or services to achieve good outcomes. Then, leads might be more interested in trying out one of your free products or requesting a demo — moving them further down the funnel towards your sales team.

Here’s a demo video we produced showcasing a new tool available in our free CRM. The video shows, rather than tells, the benefit of using the tool, and it might make people want to download it and check it out.

Close Stage

If your sales team is having trouble closing leads and making the sale, you might want to make a customer case study or testimonial video.

Your brand advocates are the best form of advertising for your business, because people trust other people’s recommendations — it’s the principle behind social proof. By showing a real person and a real business that have been positively impacted by your product or services, leads might be more interested in signing a sales contract — because the video has proven your company’s value.

Here’s a testimonial video featuring happy, successful customers — talking specifically about why they chose our product. This is helpful for generating awareness of HubSpot, but it helps make a case for why people should choose us over another product, too.

Delight Stage

If your customer success team is having trouble retaining and delighting customers, you might want to make a how-to video first.

Most customers today want to quickly and easily find answers to their questions by searching for the information online. If they can help it, they want to avoid getting on a call — they want to save time and solve the problem themselves, with help from a comprehensive knowledge base on how to use your product or service.

A how-to video showing how to do something helps customers succeed on their own time. It doesn’t have to be about how to use your product — it can focus on a widely useful topic that’s helpful to your customer and sows good faith with them.

Here’s a how-to video that breaks down how to create a Snapchat geofilter. It’s not HubSpot software-specific, but it’s important to always be helping, and this video helps anyone — including our customers — get to the next level with their marketing efforts.

3) Where are you posting?

Based on the answer to the question above — where does your funnel need the most help? — you should be able to determine where your first marketing video should live once you’ve filmed and edited it.

Attract Stage

If you’re trying to attract people to learn about your brand — possibly for the first time — publish your first marketing video in a blog post, on YouTube, or on social media. That way, visitors will come across your content — and your brand — while conducting online searches or while checking social media news feeds.

Convert Stage

If you’re trying to convert prospects and move them down your marketing funnel, include your first marketing video in email campaigns, on your brand webpages, or on a landing page that prompts leads to download software or request a demo.

Close Stage

If you’re trying to help your sales team close prospects, share your first marketing video in two places: on YouTube and other social media channels to increase general awareness and word-of-mouth recognition, and on your website wherever you discuss your customers’ success stories, or why customers should choose your brand to achieve their goals. Videos can show — rather than tell — potential customers about your value proposition.

Delight Stage

If you’re trying to help customers succeed using your product or service, share your first marketing video within your knowledge base for customers so they can quickly and easily access the information they need to get the job done.

8 Types of Marketing Videos to Create

Here’s a quick rundown of the different types of marketing videos you can start creating to achieve results anywhere in your marketing funnel.

1) Demo Videos

A demo video can — you guessed it — demonstrate how your product or service works by taking viewers on a tour of your software, unboxing and testing a product, or showing a user setting up a product. Here’s one of my favorite examples — an unboxing video from Casper:

2) Brand Videos

Brand videos showcase your company’s vision, mission, or products and services. Brand videos build awareness around your company, attract your target audience, and help establish your brand as a thought leader and influencer in your industry. Here’s an eye-catching example from Slack that’s all about its philosophy and product:

3) Explainer Videos

Explainer videos tell a story by breaking down a topic or problem for easier, more digestible understanding. These can be used at the top of your funnel to explain terms and concepts in your industry, or you can make a brand-specific explainer video all about your products.

Vox nails explainer videos — here’s one I loved:

4) How-to Videos

How-to videos teach your audience something new to help them achieve their goals — hopefully, with help from your products or services.

Here’s a how-to video from Adobe Creative Cloud about how to use its products to make fun, shareable GIFs:

5) Animated Videos

Animated videos can be a great format for tricky concepts that need visuals, graphics, and captions to be properly understood. Here’s an incredible video from Tech Insider that animates the depth of the ocean:

6) Case Studies and Testimonial Videos

One of the best ways build trust is by creating videos featuring your happy customers. After all, customers are your best advocates. Customers can talk about their challenges and how your company helped them meet their goals to convince future customers to follow suits.

Here’s a supercut of happy Evernote customers in one of its videos:

7) Live Videos

Live videos can give your viewers a behind-the-scenes look at your company. Broadcast interviews, events, and presentations live in real-time and encourage people watching to comment with questions to get a conversation going — and prompt them to share.

Here’s a live video we streamed here at HubSpot with a behind-the-scenes look at — what else? — our team filming a video.

8) Ephemeral Videos

Ephemeral, or disappearing, videos can live on social media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. Like live videos, they can show a more authentic, behind-the-scenes look at your brand, and you can use them to promote time-specific campaigns and events with your audience through different channels. Follow HubSpot on Instagram or Snapchat to check out our latest stories.

What was the first marketing video you ever produced? Let us know in the comments.