V-cast with Jimmy Newson:Lead gen strategy for video marketing

Host: Richard Fallah, CEO at VBOUT.

Guest Speaker: Jimmy Newson, Marketing Director at New York Marketing Association | Inbound Sales & Marketing Consultant – HubSpot Sales Partner

In this episode of top marketer podcast, we interview Jimmy Newson, to share with us all you need to know about putting together a Video marketing lead generation strategy for your businesses, without overthinking it.

We cover things from aligning video length and content to the buyer’s journey as well as your main KPIs to track to check the effectiveness of your campaigns.

A little background on Jimmy:

As the marketing director of the New York Marketing Association, Jimmy Newson is a multi-certified inbound marketing and sales consultant as well as an author of several eBooks including “The Real Importance of Inbound Marketing” and “Your Customer Buyer’s Journey.”

Jimmy Newson is responsible for helping his customers generate high-quality leads and increase their bottom line. Through his coaching and consulting, he effectively teaches businesses how to initiate effective online marketing strategies.

Who’s Jimmy Newson?

Jimmy is a marketing director of the New York marketing association. He’s also a multi-certified inbound marketing and sales consultant, as well as an author of several books, including the real importance of inbound marketing and your buyers journey. Jimmy is also responsible for helping his customers generate high-quality leads and increase their bottom line. Through his coaching and consulting, he effectively teaches businesses how to initiate effective online marketing strategies.

As you may notice, Jimmy is using his own personal brand as the agency name as well.

What do you do?

I’m an inbound marketing at inbound sales consultant. I used to work with an agency that handled about 400 clients across multiple verticals.

Consulting is really where I think I find the best value or the value I can deliver to my clients so I will eventually go form an actual agency, but I currently deal with my clients, both as a consultant and a deliverer of services.

How many clients do you manage on average?

I currently manage about 20 clients. A lot of them are either on retainer or I do a lot of repeat business with them for one-off projects.

But like I said before, with the agency we were with, I was in charge of about 400 clients.

When you say “video marketing”, can you tell us exactly what that means?

Video marketing is basically just like any other marketing. You’re using video as the medium or source to get your information out there. So you’re still talking to a persona, trying to figure out what the message should be.

There’s a lot of things we’ll talk about and in regards to what I see, people are not getting it correct, but video marketing is about leveraging marketing using video as the platform.

Is it more like continuously having a strategy to create videos and push them through your network?

Exactly. So the LLC people produce a video and use that as the entire strategy and this is not right. Would you produce one blog post and use that as entire video? Would you create one landing or even one content page on your website? I don’t know. The video comes in many shapes and sizes; it’s like everything you do. You just have to determine what’s the goal that I’m trying to do and the best way of making that happen, therefore the video is definitely not a one-time thing.

How would you approach video marketing as a lead generation process?

There are many types of videos that you would need to implement in your overall video marketing strategy, but for a lead gen aspect, it’s about qualifying the person so it’s almost like a landing page but in a video format, where you’re initially addressing the issue, confirming that they are in the right place and now, the next step is that we have a possible solution for you because you got that four to seven seconds to keep them watching it. If not, they will feel that they’re in the wrong place.

I always start videos that are lead gen and I’m very specific at saying “lead gen”, and not something else with the questions. And the questions are: are you having? Do you have? You know immediately that I want to get one of two answers: “Yes or No”. You know when people are free, but what about those who say “No”? I say that these are not the people you’re looking for. Anybody that says yes meaning that you hooked them, so your next job is to continue feeding them and giving them the information they need and then, hopefully they will get all the video to the point where they are ready to take the next step.

One thing I do see people fall short on is that call to action. Be very specific about what you want them to do next, because that is your lead generation opportunity. You give them all the information and say “Okay, thanks for watching my video.” You just educated them and gave the lead to someone else as you told them what they needed to do. And now, they are going to go back to the internet and the case is like “Alright, now they know what to do, how do I find the right person to help me do it? Give them the opportunity for you.

Do you have some recommendations as for where the next step would be after they showed initial interest in the video?

If you do a proper assessment of the content and marry it with your buyer persona which should have a buyer’s journey to it, you will then be able to determine what’s the ideal next step to recommend. The first video that you describe is an awareness space video so you mentioned two things: First, is a ten minute video that dives deeper and second, the call to action which is to do a consultation. Well, the 10-minute video is your consideration stage and the consultation is your decision stage, so these are 2 options that you’re giving them.

Therefore, some people will continue to go through the journey, while others may be convinced enough to just bypass the consideration and go straight to the consultation. Now it’s your job to close them, thus you have to test. Everything is about A/B testing. Most people think that they should only set it up and go. So, it’s not a “set it and forget it” but a “set it and now let’s see how we can improve it.” Because you can’t come into this thinking “Okay I know exactly how
it should go” because you don’t. You know what we think may work well for selling our product is not the reason why the person who bought his product thought about in the first place. If you’re not communicating with them and asking what their problems are and the ways you can provide help, you won’t be able to identify the right type of content that you should produce.

So it’s really a testing thing and you should start somewhere… If you understand your market and personas, try implementing different things, such as giving them options, push them to a next video which is further down the line, a little bit more in-depth. And at the same time, try to get them on the phone or get them to contact you.

Is doing a bi-directional funnel where you ask visitors to book their consultation at the end of the first video, a potential approach to testing?

Yeah, because as mentioned, you never know people who fall into the buyers journey at different stages, so I mean there’s a situation where I know for myself personally; I will watch an initial video because I’m looking for something and I’m so intrigued and convinced about it to the point that I don’t need to watch anything else. I know enough about the situation, where I’m just going to be alright and want to get on the call right now because I want to know if I can do it and what I need to do. If you don’t give me that chance, then I have to go somewhere else to figure out how to do that.

So you definitely want to give them the opportunity to understand, which is pre-qualifying them. But at the same time, you never want not to give them the opportunity to reach out to you directly. If you’re using a landing page with the video, you can do that with A/B testing; the video can still drive them to the next step but, there can be a button to go for a consultation immediately, so they can bypass if that is an option. However, it will be a very low rate as not everyone is going to do it. Ultimately, if the client is worthy for you and clicks through there, you will pay for your whole campaign.

What KPIs would you recommend to measure when implementing a video strategy?

Track how many people watch the video, the play rate, how long they watch the video, the engagement and where they are engaging with the video. It also depends on what platform you’re using.

I use Wistia a lot because I think that’s a platform that allows me to do a lot more than just a YouTube would do. I also use YouTube and Vimeo. It really depends on your platform and you have to determine what you want to do with your video. Some video platforms with CRMs allow you to score if you have a bigger team and you’re passing your qualified leads from your marketing department to your sales department.

The four major KPI’s for me are the plain of the video, the play rate, how much time of the video they watched and the engagement.

When somebody produces content, do you recommend them pushing that video to Facebook videos, YouTube or Vimeo? And is sharing the same video a good or bad thing for SEO?

Unlike typical content where you can’t take the same blog post and publish it on multiple web sites, video is totally different. You’re able to post a video on Facebook, Wistia and embed it in YouTube because they don’t necessarily look at it as duplicate content and these platforms serve different purposes.

Also each channel has different options. For example, in YouTube and Wistia, it’s more like the annotations but for Facebook, we try to get the link into the description other than text, and detect the closed caption which is definitely important for several reasons: first, for SEO value, as YouTube can’t determine what the video is, and the captions help understand that. Also, a lot of people play videos with the sound off at the beginning.

To leverage sociability from video and content itself, putting the caption and transcription in the description is recommended.

As far as the duration of the video, what do you recommend in order to start pumping content?

There are six types of videos that I do on average. The first is about your “/welcome” (About video), which should be anywhere between two to five minutes.

The second one is your traffic generating video. The third one is your opt-in video so if you use a landing page, you can definitely use a video there to help drive conversion rates and that video could be about a minute on average. Then the next one is “Thank you” videos which are usually between 30 and 45 seconds, and the final video is your sales video. I have a sales video that’s 20 minutes long and this serves somewhere in line of your buyers journey.

I’ve sold a $1000 package on my “About video” because I didn’t talk about the product itself but about my mission, purpose, who I am and who I help. Therefore, it’s not necessarily about your product but rather about who you are as a person. People buy from people they like which is what video allows you to do, that’s to get out there and be seen in the corporate world.

Have you made any mistakes that you should advise people to avoid?

I think the biggest mistake people make is just videos are going to do all the work and I actually use a great analogy where I say “I will sell a video to someone. I will do the video.

I will come back in six months to see if we can do another video for them. The video didn’t work, what happened?” They say “ I put it on YouTube and got like three views, what’s up with that?” I would be like “Okay, let me ask you a question: here’s a stack of nice beautiful business cards, here you go… are you going to put them at the edge of your desk?” They say “why would I do that?” I say “that’s what you did with the video”.

So, it’s still only a tool. You have to take that tool and put it somewhere, give it to partners, run an ad against it and put it on page that has a lot of traffic. People have to see the video in order to catch fire, so I think that’s one of the first things I see is a mistake where they just don’t understand how to leverage the video. The second thing is the paralysis sets in; they think they need a big setup and all these lights and cameras.

As for the audio, it has to be top notch and clean, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is the message and purpose. If you’re not on point with the purpose and the message of the content is not top-notch, then they won’t care; you will be missing the mark and people are gone before you even get pass five seconds anyway.

Any other advice would you like to share with them?

Just start and think about content; people usually struggle with content when it comes to video. So search for sources to get content. First, if you have a successful blog or something else, reproduce that content itself as video, because in another medium, it’ll also work very well in video.

Second, if you have customers and you’re always interacting with them, look through your emails and see what questions they’ve asked and then turn that into content.

If you have a sales chain, talk to your sales team and ask them what questions they get all the time that seem to be repetitive. That’s content; there are tons of places going on forums as well as places to get and find content that appeals directly to your target market and then build from there.

Thank you Jimmy Newson for the great interview.

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