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It seems like every year is labeled ‘the year of video’ by one expert or another — but 2017 could well have the best claim yet. Of course, it’s no secret that video content has become staggeringly popular. And, as with most marketing trends, the more consumers have watched, the more marketers have spent.

Brand new research released by Wyzowl suggests that video is more effective, more widely used, and more popular among consumers than ever before. The survey spanned across 311 unique respondents — both marketing professionals and online consumers.

Some of the highlights include …

The State of Video Marketing 2017

1) Video is helping businesses achieve key business goals.

Firstly, there was a modest year-over-year increase in usage — 63% of businesses are now using video, compared to 61% this time last year.

But what really stood out was how these marketers felt their video had helped them achieve key business goals:

• An almost unanimous 97% said that video had helped them increase user understanding of their product or service.
• 81% linked it to a direct increase in sales.
• 76% felt that video had increased traffic to their website.
• Over half (53%) said video had helped them decreased support call volume.

83% felt that, overall, video gave them a good ROI — which, again, compares favourably to 76% a year ago.

It looks like video will continue to become more widespread. Unsurprisingly, 99% of businesses currently using video reported that they plan to continue into 2017. And, what’s more, 34% of those currently not invested in video plan to start during the coming year.

2) Video remains popular with consumers.

So, what of consumers? Well, it’s little surprise that video remains incredibly popular. In fact, 79% say they’d rather watch a video to learn about a product than read text on a page — up from 69% twelve months ago.

Indeed, video remains a potent way for consumers to find out about new products, too. 91% have watched an explainer video — a short, elevator pitch-style introduction to a product or service. And an enormous 84% said that they’d been convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand’s video.

3) New video opportunities continue to emerge.

While video adoption continues to ramp up, there are still huge opportunities for marketers who want to use video in new, interesting ways. Trends such as Facebook Live (used by 19% of marketers), Snapchat (8%), Instagram video (26%), 360 video (12%), and virtual reality (7%) are all available and within reach to marketers, but have all been slow to be adopted.

This opportunity is underlined by the fact that, in all these cases, the majority of marketers reported enjoying success with these techniques.

4) Conversational voiceover tracks are becoming more popular.

Voiceover tracks are almost omnipresent in brand videos – but we’re seeing a move away from the formal ‘radio voice’ that’s always been so widespread. A huge 83% of consumers reported finding an informal (chatty, laid back, conversational) voiceover track that communicated like a friend or family member, more relatable and persuasive than a traditional, formal voiceover.

Wrapping It Up

All the data suggests that 2017 could (at last) be the year of video. Marketers are spending more. Consumers are watching more. And the only question is: When are you getting started on your next video campaign?

It’s no secret that creative agencies aren’t big fans of the pitch deck.

Gene Liebel, the founder of New York-based agency Work & Co, summed up his feelings about pitch decks pretty straightforwardly: “They’re the worst.”

Pitch decks have become increasingly reviled in recent years, with many agencies declaring their restrictive and unengaging format as an inherent enemy of creativity. As one anonymous agency millennial told Digiday, pitch decks can cause “you [to] think differently … like if an idea doesn’t fit in a neat little bullet point or a clean slide, it’s not good.”

Despite the general animosity towards pitch decks, they aren’t going to go away overnight. Not every pitch your agency makes is going to come in the form of a crazy stunt. Sometimes, a pitch just demands a straightforward, no-frills presentation. And you’ve got to bite the bullet, swallow your creative pride, and open PowerPoint. 

Designing a solid, persuasive pitch deck that won’t put your audience to sleep is easier said than done. People are notoriously terrible at focusing on slide-by-slide presentations, so your deck needs to cut through the clutter and communicate your points in a way that your audience can understand with minimal effort. 

To help make your next pitch a tolerable — maybe even enjoyable — experience for everyone, we’ve put together a list of six basic guidelines for designing engaging decks. 

How to Design a Pitch Deck that Doesn’t Suck

1) Make your text extremely legible.

That guy who forgot to wear his contacts today and somehow ended up in the back row of the conference room? Yeah, he needs to be able to see your slides just as well as everyone else. 

The significance of creating extremely legible, easy-to-read slides should not be underestimated. It’s more than a matter of aesthetics: If your slides are at all difficult to read, even people with 20/20 vision are going to quickly lose interest and zone out.

They didn’t come here to expend effort — they came here to be spoon-fed. And it’s your job to make your information as digestable as possible. To keep the focus on your content, stick to big, bold fonts on highly-contrasting backgrounds. 

Don’t do this:

This font color doesn’t contrast enough with the background, and the text size isn’t large or clear enough to be read comfortably from a distance. Don’t make your poor audience stare at this for too long. 

Do this:

This font is big and bold enough to be seen from the back of the room, and it contrasts well with the background. When all else fails, a bold sans-serif font is the way to go. 

2) Tell a story.

When we process information in list format, the basic language-processing areas of our brains get activated. Scientists call these sections Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, and they’re responsible for translating words we see or hear into coherent meanings — but they don’t help us stay interested or retain information. In other words, bullet points don’t usually produce a very exciting reaction in our brains, leaving the rest of our minds to wander.

When our brains are given a story instead of a list, things change — big time. Stories engage more parts of our brains, including our sensory cortex, which is responsible for processing visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli. If you want to keep people engaged during a presentation, tell them a story.

“A story takes all the senseless data that the world provides and turns it into something meaningful,” said Jonah Sachs, the creative director of the communications firm Free Range Studios and author of Winning the Story Wars. Centering you presentation around a story, instead of a list of facts or figures, is essential for keeping people interested and leaving a lasting impression.

Don’t do this:

This information might be impressive, but it isn’t likely to stick with your audience when presented in list form.

Do this:

Weaving your impressive case study into a story is much more likely to have an impact on the audience. 

3) Break everything down into extremely simple parts.

When it comes to pitch decks, it’s time to wean yourself off of bullet points. Although they’re still better than slapping a dense paragraph of text onto a slide and calling it a day, they can be overwhelming, and prevent your audience from really absorbing your main points.

You might think you’re already simplifying your content, but take it a step further. Each slide should convey a single, simple idea — not a multiple ideas, not a multi-faceted idea, and not an idea that requires a degree in rhetoric to meticulously decode. 

If it seems like you’re making things way too simple, then you’re on the right track. Remember: not all your talking points need to occupy real estate on your slide deck. Save the slide space for the big ideas, and talk your way through the rest. 

Don’t do this:

These points might seem simple, but they could be broken down even further and separated onto different slides. 

Do this:

There’s nothing difficult to understand about this simple, straightforward slide. 

4) Make the points obvious.

The point of each slide should be obvious. Your audience shouldn’t have to work to understand what’s going on, especially when graphs or charts are involved.

Any information you include on a slide should be immediately translated for the audience, even if you think it speaks for itself. Ask yourself:

• What point are you trying to make by including this piece of information?
• How does this fact or figure connect back to your main premise?
• What do you want the audience to get out of this slide?

Don’t do this:

While this graph clearly shows growth, the point doesn’t obviously tie back to your premise. 

Do this:

The title on this slide tells the audience exactly what they should take away from the graph, directing them immediately to the conclusion that benefits your cause. 

5) Focus on the prospect’s challenges, not yourself.

It’s safe to assume that your prospect has spent some time researching your agency, so there’s no need to waste valuable presentation time talking about your accomplishments or accolades. 

You aren’t just convincing the audience you’re amazing at your job — you’re convincing them that you understand them, and that you’re the best person to help them overcome their unique challenges. 

The business pitch consultants at Blue Lobster recommend asking yourself a few questions to focus your presentation around your audience:

• Who is the audience?
• What is their problem?
• How can you help?

Don’t do this:

While this is all very impressive, it doesn’t express an understanding of your client’s problems or delve into how you can help them. Plus, your prospect probably already found this information from a quick scan of your agency’s website.

Do this:

This slide shows that you’ve done your research, and expresses a clear value proposition to the prospect. 

6) Supplement your deck with additional materials.

Even when it makes sense to use a pitch deck, you don’t need to spend the whole presentation talking at your audience. “We expect teams to use presentations as a visual aid to a narrative or conversation between them and their audience, not as prose-focused documents to be read,” said KBS co-president Matt Powell. 

Powell encourages his agency’s team to supplement classic pitch decks with additional materials, such as “handouts, prototypes or posters to encourage discussion so the presentation and the presentation deck are not seen as one and the same.”

To keep your audience receptive and awake, consider adding some of these more engaging elements throughout the presentation. 

What is your agency’s stance on pitch decks? How do you keep them fresh and interesting? Let us know in the comments. 

The whole lead generation process is tough — especially when you only rely on traditional methods. Sending cold emails and scraping together lists can be incredibly demoralizing because, let’s face it — most of those people don’t really want to talk to you.

What if you could still reach your lead generation goals using methods that actually add value for your prospects?

Start generating more leads from your website today with HubSpot’s free conversion tool, HubSpot Marketing Free.

This utopia of lead generation is, in fact, a possibility. To walk you through some of the different options, we’ve detailed several examples of modern lead generation methods below. These ideas provide valuable information to prospects that helps them instead of pushing them to buy from your brand. 

How to Generate Leads: 15 Tried-and-True Lead Generation Ideas

1) Collect and share success secrets from thought leaders.

Want to provide unique value in your content? Start by reaching out to a thought leader in your industry. By interviewing an expert to uncover their secrets, you prove to potential customers that you’re dedicated to delivering the best advice out there.

Below you’ll see Groove’s take on this approach through its interview with the CEO of The Foundation. The folks at Groove frequently interview successful founders and ask really specific questions that everyone can learn from. Then, Groove shares those interviews with its potential audience on its blog.

Not only is the interview with Drish chock-full of quotes, lessons, and actionable takeaways for entrepreneurs, it also features an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) with the interview subject in the comments section. This touch helps further Groove’s reputation as a source of expert information among its audience.

2) Make awesome Help videos to solve an issue for prospects.

Help videos can solve a real problem for potential customers in a format that’s both entertaining and easily digestible.

A video hosting and analytics company, Wistia, has a whole series of help videos for companies that want to shoot videos, and it compiled all of those videos into a useful learning center. Here’s one of Wistia’s videos and articles about how to film videos with an iPhone.

Because Wistia is a video hosting platform, publishing content strictly about how to use its product would only apply to people who were already customers. Videos like the one above, relevant to anyone who has an iPhone, help the brand create value for people who may not even be familiar with Wistia. If they learn something useful from Wistia once, they’re more likely do it again, and may eventually come to the site ready to purchase a subscription.

3) Create a quiz.

Offer a quiz to your website visitors as a creative way to learn more about them and obtain their contact information. The goal is to “bargain” the result of the quiz in return for a new lead, which can be very effective when done right.

A great example of this comes from Eastern International College. It created the following quiz to help students make a proper major selection.

The quiz provides valuable information for students in a unique and interactive way. Then, when they fill out a lead information form, they provide specific information about themselves, which Eastern International College can then use to counsel them about the school.

4) Provide best practices for a challenging tactic.

When you explore a marketing tactic in a blog post or ebook, you want to know what others are doing to have success with the same method. Compiling those best practices into a list is incredibly useful to the marketer looking to get started in a particular arena.

For example, HubSpot created a comprehensive list of SEO best practices from a variety of experts, which aims to help its target audience achieve a greater return on investment from content marketing.

The ebook provides a ton of value for readers trying to crack a complicated marketing strategy, and in exchange for their contact information, they get insider tips from a variety of expert sources.

5) Show what’s working for you.

Writing a transparent post that pulls back the curtain on something you’ve seen success (or failure) with can prove interesting to potential leads. Other companies going through a similar stage of growth — or approaching your size — can gain a lot of inspiration from posts like this, and ultimately avoid making the same mistakes.

Check out this report from Classy below. In an effort to provide an insightful resource, it created this analysis of how its blogging strategy had evolved, and what the brand had learned, over the course of 1,000 posts.

This blog post from Classy, a fundraising platform for nonprofit organizations, pulls back the curtain on its learnings to share it with the broader content community. It’s helpful for a blogger in any industry, and prompts readers to download the strategy guide as a final CTA.

6) Create a useful spreadsheet.

Compiling a spreadsheet of resources takes forever, so if someone else does it for you, it’s easy to see the value.

Heinz Marketing created an easy-reference spreadsheet out of a cool infographic (a map of the marketing technology landscape) and made it available in return for an opt-in.

Different people have different preferences about how they like to consume content, and by making the information more easily accessible to its audience, Heinz Marketing made a highly valuable piece of content that helped to generate leads.

7) Offer a deep-dive answer for a tough question.

You can find the answer to any question you might have on the internet. But how many really good answers are out there? Taking the time to create an in-depth, step-by-step article that answers a burning question for your prospect serves as an opportunity to generate a lead. After all, the company that provides the best answer will often get your business, right?

A great example of this method in action comes from the folks at Interact. In an effort to explain how to make quizzes, Interact created the following in-depth blog post which dives into heavy detail about how quizzes can build an email list.

Email marketing plays a huge role in content marketing success, and this blog post provides a helpful breakdown of how to use quizzes to make emails more interesting. Interact’s audience will keep coming back to the blog for more insight and instruction and might eventually purchase products from the trusted company.

8) Create a worksheet that simplifies a process.

There are tasks in every business that are best suited by a worksheet. For example, a software company might use a worksheet to formulate a marketing strategy. By providing a simple worksheet for people to fill out — and trading that worksheet for an opt-in — you can create a mutually positive relationship with prospects.

Here’s a great example from GoDaddy. It created a template for reviewing your website that’s focused on content and design. You can take a look at how GoDaddy did this below.

This blog post provides a ton of valuable information. Then, readers have the option to share their information in exchange for the worksheet. This worksheet converts because it’s helpful and makes visitors want to get more information from a great resource.

9) Create a list of useful tools.

It’s easy to brag about the tools your company offers, but when you take the initiative and explore other helpful tools your audience could be using, it proves that you prioritize their success over your own self-promotion.

In return, you are also attracting the kind of audience that is looking for solutions like yours, which could drive leads. Below you’ll find a great example of this in action from the Content Marketing Institute.

The Content Marketing Institute is dedicated to providing advice for content marketers, and this checklist is chock-full of guidelines and other tools the reader can use. Because the guide is so comprehensive, if the reader gets what they need, they’re likely to return to the blog, and even subscribe, to get more helpful information in the future.

10) Compile examples for people to learn from.

Finding effective examples to learn from can be extremely valuable, but also very difficult. A list of best practices in your industry is an excellent way to drive prospects to your domain where they can opt-in.

Kapost put together “The Kapost 50,” a list of top B2B content marketing examples, as a resource to inspire site visitors to opt-in and be successful with their own marketing strategies.

Content marketers are looking for examples of brands creating content well, especially in the B2B space, and the Kapost 50 calls out particular examples of top content every year. The blog post drives traffic with its clever site copy, and the brand inspiration and helpful examples make visitors want to keep coming back for more.

11) Create a valuable email course.

A well-developed email course is like gaining access to a real class — for free. For busy marketers, this type of offer can prove to be really valuable.

This approach tends to work well for in-depth topics that really should be learned in a class-like environment. Check out the course from Buffer below. Buffer gives away 25 social media strategies in 25 days in exchange for an opt-in.

Buffer created the email course to repurpose blog content into smaller, more digestible pieces. The email course helps people with different content consumption styles get the same valuable information that’s on Buffer’s blog, and it helps Buffer generate new leads to engage with over email.

12) Host a giveaway.

Giveaways are one of the most successful forms of lead generation. However, a giveaway can also lead to a bunch of junk leads and waste your time if not done in a logical way.

The trick? Make sure what you’re giving away is something people actually want. For example, eWebDesign put together a giveaway of conversion rate optimization (CRO) software that is highly useful to its target demographic.

The giveaway generates leads via email subscriptions and social media engagement, and it’s a win-win for eWebDesign. Whether a user wins or loses the giveaway, they will continue to engage with the brand in hopes of winning future giveaways. Meanwhile, eWebDesign can grow its email list to continue outreach to subscribers with more targeted content about CRO.

13) Create a template to simplify an everyday process.

There are certain templates you use everyday in business — employee schedule, content calendar, market research sheets — that can be a pain to build yourself.

As a marketer looking for lead generation ideas, creating those templates for your customers is the perfect way to begin a strong relationship that can end in the prospect actually buying your product or service.

Need inspiration? Check out the marketing budget template from TrackMaven below:

Every marketing organization needs to set a budget, and this template from TrackMaven makes that job a little bit easier. For TrackMaven, the template helps get its brand in front of more people to continue nurturing them with relevant content.

14) Offer a free trial.

Free trials of a brand’s services help get a prospect’s foot halfway through the door. If the trial helps them and provides great value, they’re more likely to purchase the full product and become a customer. Touchless buying is popular among prospects who want to stay online and off the phone. By creating a free trial, a brand’s site can do its own selling and encourage buying in a low-pressure way.

Here’s an example of a strong free trial offer from BuzzSumo:

BuzzSumo presents a wealth of information on this offer page to make the case for why brands should use the product. The page is loaded with examples and data about BuzzSumo to answer all of the prospect’s questions without them having to pick up a phone and speak to a salesperson. Best of all, the trial doesn’t require the user to enter their payment information, so users who sign up don’t have to worry about an unexpected credit card charge.

15) Make a checklist.

Who doesn’t have a running to-do list that sometimes gets a little bit too long? If someone runs a content marketing strategy, you can be sure there’s a lot that goes into it. Neil Patel created a handy checklist that marketers can download and use for easy reference at work every day. 

Patel uses the article to prove his brand’s expertise on the subject to encourage checklist downloads, and he answers reader questions in the blog post comments to engage with readers and make his brand seem even more helpful.

Whichever lead generation strategy you experiment with next, make sure the content is useful to your audience so they’ll return to your website again in the future. For more lead generation ideas, check out HubSpot’s guide to generating more business here.

Have you experimented with any of these methods? What tactics have you found to be effective? Share with us in the comments section below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2015 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.