As you traverse the most highly-trafficked sites on the web, you’ll have noticed something over the last two years: Text content is being replaced by video in as many locations as publishers can manage. Gone are the in-depth write-ups with incidental 30-second news reports, replaced by long, on-camera pontifications introduced in 35 words, max.
So no, perhaps it’s not entirely fair to call video a secret weapon, at least in any generalized way.
But in the area of growth hacking or lead generation (lead gen), pipeline development or whatever moniker du jour you care to put on finding new sales prospects -- video has crossed a rubicon in 2017, becoming a shockingly enticing strategy for creating valuable top-of-funnel conversations.
You may have already received an example or two of these in your own inbox. An earnest-enough market development representative sends you an email, embedded at the bottom of which is a picture of their smiling face, holding a small whiteboard with a greeting to you -- by name. Like most people, once I saw this, I couldn’t resist the temptation to click to see if they had really created a pitch, especially for me. Call it professional curiosity. Sure enough, there was enough personalization in there for me to feel like the person had done just enough research into my business and needs that perhaps they did deserve a response.
For those of us in the lead gen line of fire, one of the tallest hurdles to clear is getting a target to actively engage with us. There are a million and one tricks to get them to read a solution brief, download a whitepaper or even play a demo video on the web site. But getting them to reach out and actively engage in conversation is the MacGuffin of lead gen: the goal that is always pursued but never fully decoded.
I should note that I’m typically near immune to new gimmicks. If you’re thinking about sending me a pair of 3D glasses to view a personalized website or a flashlight to illustrate how you can "shed light on my challenges," well, let me save you the price of postage. On the other hand, I love to let the marketplace help me decide on programs that really work. For instance, I’m not a huge fan of webinars, but I love running them because apparently, most people find them an appealing and valuable way to gather information. As a professional marketer, I’m delighted to offer programs to my target market that wouldn’t work for me.
But how would it work to take a program that did work on me and roll it out in my own campaigns?
As it turns out, the cost of the experiment is low in today’s world. Given that the technology gave me only the platform -- not the actual assets to tempt targets to pick up the phone and call -- the time spent and the price paid seemed, and seems, reasonable. Training is remarkably simple, as it largely consists of showing individuals how to use their camera, ensuring their handwriting works on a whiteboard and confirming they get core messaging enough to make the little 30-second snippets to include in their emails.
And so, before you know it, you’re flinging video attachments out in your prospect-targeted emails. And wouldn’t you know it, they are B2B-targeted catnip. Based on an admittedly small sample size over the first 30 days of operation, the click-through rates are way beyond anything you would expect to see in a classic outbound email campaign.
A word of warning: How long these nifty little bundles of joy will continue to get the job done is a question very much at the top of my mind. It feels like the novelty of the approach is currently such that it tickles the curiosity of all at first glance; but will it stand the test of time or become like those ghastly “are you too busy to respond, or are you perhaps being chased by a hippo like the person in this photo” email clunkers that refuse to die? With luck, the video goodness will stay with us, and we will come up with ever more intriguing ideas for how to use them and create enough visual interest to encourage interaction.
Either way, video has the potential to be the growth-hacking secret weapon for 2018 -- whether it makes it to 2019 is a mystery, the answer to which only time will tell.
