Video marketing can be a hugely beneficial aspect to any inbound marketing campaign. Agencies that harness this power in their clients’ marketing efforts are simply going to have an advantage, and in this competitive landscape, that advantage can be the difference between getting your clients more business and allowing your clients to stall. The more success you can help your clients garner, the more likely you are to continue receiving your retainer, meaning video marketing can be the powerful tool that fuels not only your clients’ success but yours as well.

How Video Marketing Can Bolster Any Inbound Marketing Campaign

Why Is Video Marketing So Powerful—Especially Today?

It’s no surprise that people are increasingly busy, and reading articles, blog posts, web copy, and other word-based content takes time. Video, on the other hand, allows you to build credibility and trust (arguably even more so than with written content), and it allows your consumer to get that information in a shorter amount of time.

Simply put, this means the potential customer is more likely to view video content than read written content, and that video content will ultimately be more impactful, engaging, and successful than written marketing material.

Also keep in mind that you want to vary your clients’ campaigns to tailor to different learning styles and engage as many people as possible. Since many people are visual learners, video is a great opportunity to get your point across both quickly and effectively.

Video truly builds powerful connections with your buyer personas because video content is relatable and easy to understand, and it yields that always-important engagement and personalized experience for your personas.

Video Marketing Is Easier Than Ever

While video production used to be complicated, time-consuming, and technical, advances in technology have increasingly made this video production easier and more accessible to more people. As an agency, you have a distinct opportunity to take advantage of these technologies and translate them into your clients’ inbound marketing strategies.

Again, the greater success you can help your clients reach, the more successful your agency will ultimately be, and incorporating video production into your inbound marketing strategies is one key way to produce those successful results.

How to Use Video Effectively in an Inbound Marketing Campaign 

To maximize the utility of these videos, produce visual content and then use that content in a variety of ways. That is, when it makes sense, make sure to repurpose content within web pages, blogs, e-books, and more. This can be the whole video or just select parts of the video. In this way, video can be used effectively throughout the buyer’s journey.

This does not mean, however, that you should create one video and be done. Much like written content, multiple videos can be created with different parts of the buyer’s journey in mind (top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel). For maximum efficiency, you want to ensure you’re getting the most out of each video produced by repurposing where appropriate. 

Also like written content, videos still need to incorporate sound inbound marketing strategy. That means the following rules should be followed:

• Target videos to specific buyer personas.
• Address buyer persona objections and answer buyer persona questions within the content of the video.
• Add calls to action at the end of videos to funnel viewers to another video, blog, or landing page.
• Use videos to accomplish SEO goals and lead generation through social media accounts, blog posts, home pages, landing pages, and more.

Producing the Video Content: What Matters Most? 

You might be thinking that your agency specializes in inbound marketing but not video production specifically. The good news, however, is that creating high-definition video is possible now with relatively inexpensive cameras and lighting systems.

Of all production elements, remember that lighting is the key. To be effective in an inbound marketing strategy, overall production value does not need to be of a professional caliber. Even a talking head with a static background can offer all those mentioned benefits as long as the lighting and sound quality are good and the content addresses legitimate buyer persona concerns and acts as genuinely educational material.

Tools to Improve Your Clients’ Video Production Value

• Wistia -This marketing tool offers tons of benefits. It includes calls to action within the videos; it integrates with HubSpot, allowing analytical tracking of your video data; it’s competitively priced; and videos can be securely stored on the Wistia site.
• Adobe Premiere Pro – This software is ideal for video postproduction, allowing you to fix lighting or contrast issues and skyrocket the video’s final production value. After learning its initial logistics, it’s also not overly complicated.
• B&H – This is one of many places (online or onsite) you can buy cost-effective video equipment.

A quick online search will also reveal a multitude of sources with tips and tricks for improving your video production skills. Many of these services and tutorials are free, but there are also pay services for more comprehensive educational material.

Video Production Benefits Every Aspect of Inbound Marketing

Like any good piece of content created within an inbound marketing strategy, a well-done video is effective for both marketing and sales. This is not a tool that should be created or utilized exclusively by one of those teams. Just as effective content can bridge the gap between marketing and sales and help those teams achieve shared goals, so too can video content.

In this way, sales should be involved and have input during the strategy that goes into video production as well as actual video creation. Nobody knows a potential customer’s objections better than a salesperson. Utilize that knowledge to create videos that are effective at every stage of the sales cycle and drive those leads seamlessly down the sales funnel to the next stage.

Video creation can understandably feel overwhelming if it’s not your agency’s area of expertise. There are, however, two important things to remember. One, you don’t need to hold your video to a professional standard for it to be effective within a client’s inbound marketing strategy. (It just needs to be well lit and audible.) Two, if you are truly uncomfortable or feel ill-equipped to create these videos, you can hire help—whether that means a video production company to actually make the videos or a video production consultant to get you up to speed and comfortable from a production standpoint. 

A video marketing consultant will provide the following guidance:

• Video production and postproduction tips.
• Tools and assets to help you create better videos and integrate them effectively into your established inbound marketing campaign.
• Information about how to marry video and effective inbound strategies.
• Information about how video benefits marketing and sales (from a strategic standpoint).
• Identification of who within a company is best suited for different aspects of video production (who is comfortable being in front of the camera, creating the scripts, filming the videos, and so on).

Whatever assets your agency utilizes to create the best videos for your clients, if you acknowledge the power of video marketing, you are sure to give yourself a competitive edge against those agencies that strictly produce word-based content.

In an effort to provide our clients with the best in sales enablement services, Brand Fuzion is pleased to announce it’s now a certified partner of PandaDo

PandaDoc and Sales Enablement: What It Means for Our Clients

What Is PandaDoc?

PandaDoc is a template-based document automation service. This means you can create quotes, proposals, case studies, and other documents directly in PandaDoc.

What Are the Benefits of PandaDoc?

PandaDoc is an invaluable sales enablement tool that helps increase the productivity of your sales force. This increased productivity helps lead to increased results—more customers earned in less time.

How does PandaDoc do this?

Save Time with PandaDoc

Because PandaDoc works through customizable templates, it allows you to create, use, and reuse documents. Recreating proposals every time is extremely time consuming. Therefore, having the document already made and accessible online saves your sales team a great deal of time.

All documents are kept in your PandaDoc content catalogue, so everyone has access and need not waste time searching for desired documents.

It also takes less time to create high-quality documents. PandaDoc allows you to add graphics, videos, pricing tables, and more to ensure your documents are as clear, professional, and engaging as possible.

Integrate PandaDoc with Your CRM

PandaDoc integrates seamlessly with HubSpot’s CRM. That means prospect information (so long as it’s in your CRM) will automatically populate in your template document. This leads to less errors from manual information entering, and it saves the time and hassle of copying and pasting. 

Track and Finalize PandaDoc Documents

PandaDoc also allows you to obtain legally binding e-signatures on all your documents. This makes it as easy as possible for your clients to sign contracts, which increases the likelihood this is done and done in a timely manner.

You can also get analytical data on these documents, meaning you can see information such as what pages have been viewed and for how long. Therefore, if you haven’t received a contract yet, PandaDoc helps you pinpoint the problem. If, for example, a client has opened the contract and reviewed it for a long time but hasn’t signed, it might indicate you need to reach out and answer additional questions or address concerns.

Putting Sales Enablement First

Brand Fuzion always strives to provide the most effective sales enablement tools for our clients, and this new partnership with PandaDoc is just another way we help you increase the productivity and efficacy of your sales team.

Inbound marketing is an incredibly powerful and effective tool at the disposal of your business, but the question remains: Is it sufficient for the entirety of your marketing efforts? Businesses and marketers alike agree that rather than focusing exclusively on inbound marketing (or outbound marketing, for that matter), the more well-rounded and ultimately successful approach is “all-bound marketing,” which is a collaborative balance between inbound and outbound techniques.

Strive for All-Bound Marketing: The Combination of Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing

Why Is Inbound Marketing Alone a Dangerous Tactic?

Salespeople are always talking to your customers and potential customers. It’s a necessary part of the job. This means salespeople have unique insight into what your customer base needs and wants. They know your customers’ challenges, barriers to success, goals, and so on.

Inbound marketing is extremely effective for what it’s meant to do, and that’s largely lead generation and lead nurturing through the buyer’s journey. By and large, this means customers are seeking you out, which is, of course, a positive.

However, there is a potential downside. When customers are exclusively finding you in this way, they might not always be your ideal customers. That means they might not be interested in the products or services you’re interested in focusing on, or they might not be interested in repeat business with you.

Whatever the case, all of this can lead to high levels of customer churn, which can be costly for you—both in terms of finances and more intangible resources, such as time and effort.

When you take a more holistic all-bound approach, though, you harness the power of inbound marketing but incorporate the targeted benefits of outbound

So, What’s the Ideal Balance between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing?

This is the hardest part to pinpoint because there isn’t a coverall answer for all businesses. The balance that’s ideal for you isn’t necessarily ideal for a different industry (or even a different company within your industry).

The amount of inbound versus outbound varies across the spectrum, but for your ideal success, recognize that some combination of inbound and outbound is going to yield better results than exclusively one or the other.

From there, it’s a matter of using your company goals and assessing which techniques will help you accomplish those goals with the greatest efficiency and success.

Whether you’re working alone or with an inbound marketing agency, make sure the focus is always on aligning all inbound and outbound efforts. This way, the techniques aren’t ever at odds or working independently. They are a collaborative effort to get you more of the right kinds of clients and increase your revenue stream.

Inbound Marketing Techniques to Utilize 

Inbound marketing is largely about producing strategic content with search engine optimization (SEO) for greater visibility and success.

The most popular methods include the following:

• Organic SEO
• Blogs
• Premium content (e.g., e-books)
• Social Content
• Visual content (e.g., video, webinars and more)
• Podcasts

Outbound Marketing Techniques to Utilize 

At its core, outbound marketing essentially tells people about your company. Popular tactics include the following:

• Pay per click (PPC)
• E-mail marketing
• Press releases
• Direct Mail
• Cold Calling
• Trade shows and/or conferences

Remember, these tactics don’t always fall squarely in either the inbound or outbound category. They can incorporate elements of each technique.

For example, say you have a unique offering. You could send a potential client something tangible directly in the mail that then generates legitimate interest and drives that person to take action, such as visiting your website to learn more about the offering.

Once that person has visited the site, you can pull all kinds of analytics about him or her, including what site pages were visited, what information was requested or downloaded, and more. In this way, direct mail can act like an outbound version of a call to action, thus incorporating both inbound and outbound techniques to drive your revenue.

Account-Based Marketing: What It Is and Why It Matters to an All-Bound Approach 

Account-based marketing is essentially being as specific as possible in the targeting of your buyer personas. For example, say your target audience is dentists. Rather than marketing to that very broad category (and risking the attraction of customers who might be costly and time-consuming for you), you can drill down to only dentists who offer a specific product, such as Invisalign. 

By using all tactics at your disposal (an all-bound approach), you can more effectively target those highly specific ideal clients.

Throughout this process, you can even further facilitate lead nurturing by employing sales development. This involves an employee who can bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Therefore, if a lead is past the point of dealing with marketing but not yet ready to speak to sales, the lead can communicate with this person until he or she is transitioned to a sales-qualified lead (SQL).

As with every department, sales development should strive for a seamless incorporation of both inbound and outbound techniques. 

When done correctly, inbound marketing is hugely effective at generating leads and then nurturing those leads toward the bottom of the sales funnel. However, inbound techniques alone are usually not enough to close a sale.

That’s why all-bound marketing (a combination of inbound and outbound techniques) is so desirable. Inbound marketing can get you those invaluable leads, and integrating outbound strategy can facilitate converting them into paying customers

If your goal is improved alignment between marketing and sales, it is crucial that your inbound marketing campaign incorporates a content-driven system. However, it can’t just be any content-driven system. Throwing out content without the proper strategy or forethought might get you a few incidental leads, but this will always be more time consuming, less effective, and ultimately more costly. You want to create one system through a marketing and sales collaboration. This will help ensure that the one system serves both team and their goals.

It’s imperative you go into your content creation with a good content strategy—one that benefits both sales and marketing. Not only does this drive positive, healthy, productive communication between the two groups, but it improves sales’ productivity and close rates, and that leads to increased revenue.

If you’re experiencing difficulty aligning your sales and marketing and you’re seeing your inbound marketing efforts flounder because of it, a content-driven system is an essential place to start.

Aligning Sales and Marketing through Content to Increase Productivity and Profits

1. Sales Has the Information to Inform Fantastic Content. Use Them!

Salespeople are always talking to your customers and potential customers. It’s a necessary part of the job. This means salespeople have unique insight into what your customer base needs and wants. They know your customers’ challenges, barriers to success, goals, and so on.

When you’re thinking about the content to create, use that vast breadth of knowledge within your sales team to inform what kind of content you need to create. 

If your content answers questions or addresses issues that your customers (or potential customers) are having, that’s going to be highly valuable, and it’s going to establish your company—in the minds of potential customers—as trustworthy, experienced, and knowledgeable.

If you don’t utilize the incredible resources and knowledge of your sales team, you might be putting out content that doesn’t speak as directly or profoundly to your prospects, and the information you’re providing in that content might simply not be aligned with your buyers’ needs.

Remember, the goal of this content should always be to provide value to your potential buyers, and your sales team knows exactly what those potential buyers consider valuable.

2. The Buyer’s Journey, Buyer Personas, and Sales Content

Content should always be directed at your specific buyer personas. (Just like content, every buyer persona should be created in a collaborative process between marketing and sales.) Beyond that, content should also be created for every stage of the buyer’s journey—awareness, consideration, and decision. Some people find it helpful to think of this as top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel.

Whatever terminology you prefer, you need a mechanism in place for your sales team to access and provide content tailored to each person at each stage of the buyer’s journey. In that way, whether your salesperson is talking to a prospect who’s just found your company or a sales-qualified lead who’s almost ready to buy, you will have content that addresses that person’s needs, questions, challenges, and core problems.

3. When Creating Content, Don’t Forget about the Competition 

More than ever, the buyer’s journey is directed and controlled by the consumer. With the advent of the Internet, people are able to do their own research before even talking to salespeople.

Because of that, you should always remember that potential customers are probably interacting with your competitors’ content as well while going through this research phase.

You don’t have to address your competition overtly, but you can identify ways in which you outstrip your competition and then highlight those through your content. Good strategy will always take into account your competition so that you can successfully differentiate yourself to a customer who’s likely researching both you and your competition.

4. Implement a Framework: Create a Content Catalogue 

A content catalogue is an organized system that’s accessible to both sales and marketing. It segments content into the different stages of the buyer’s journey and the different personas. In this way, anyone who needs a specific piece of content to pass on to a specific person can easily and intuitively find that content.

With today’s CRM systems, this content catalogue is easier than ever to create and organize.

As with every other step, sales and marketing should work together to decide how to put together this framework. Because both sales and marketing will be regularly accessing, updating, and using this catalogue, it should work equally well for both teams—and should, therefore, incorporate the feedback of everyone who will be using the system. 

When a catalogue is intuitive, helpful, and easy to use—for everyone—it can truly save time and money.

5. The Importance of Lead Intelligence 

Lead intelligence deals with personal information about that lead and tracking how a lead has already interacted with your site. That includes:

• Site pages visited.
• Links clicked.
• Information downloaded.
• Premium content downloaded or requested.

All this information about how a lead has consumed your content is gold! It can indicate some or all of the following:

• What persona you’re dealing with.
• What stage of the sales cycle that persona is in.
• What that person’s professional role is within his or her company (determined via social media accounts, such as LinkedIn).

With your organized and segmented content catalogue, your salesperson then knows exactly how and where to access the pieces of content that are most relevant to that particular lead. 

When the salesperson contacts the lead, he or she is then armed with all that valuable information and is primed to confidently, accurately, and knowledgeably speak to that lead’s core challenges, issues, and problems. The salesperson can reference the information that lead has explored and send follow-up information to supplement it or directly ask if that lead has any questions about the content (which can be addressed by quickly and easily accessing the content catalogue for supplemental information).

All of this leads to more productive—and ultimately more profitable—sales calls.

6. The Value of Sales Training and Content Coaching in an Inbound Marketing Campaign

This content-driven system only works as well as the people utilizing the system. That is, if your marketing and/or sales team doesn’t know how to effectively utilize the power of content, your system will not work for you.

Salespeople must use all their skills and sales-related knowledge but direct that to this relatively novel approach. That is, they must learn how to take an even more educational approach to selling and know how to interact with a lead based on that lead’s readiness to buy (or, said another way, his or her current stage within the buyer’s journey).

Content coaching explains:

• Key terminology within inbound marketing (buyer persona, buyer’s journey, content catalogue, premium content, and so on).
• The importance of salespeople reading and understanding the content themselves so they can provide the right information and speak about it intelligently when leads have follow-up questions.
• How to find, access, and use the content catalogue.
• How to have initial conversations with leads in the very early stages of site interaction.
• The power of content as the greatest potential selling tool.
• How content can positively influence any conversation with the customer.
• How content can provide real value, establish your company’s credibility, create trust, and differentiate you from your competitors.

7. Without Alignment, Your Inbound Marketing Campaign Is Dead in the Water

It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in or what product or service you’re offering. The importance of the alignment between marketing and sales to foster an effective inbound marketing campaign still applies—and collaboratively created content is an easy, effective way to start to bridge that gap in a meaningful, productive way.  

Sometimes all it takes is a reason to start the conversation between marketing and sales, and implementing a content strategy that puts equal emphasis on marketing and sales is one way to do that. 

Using independently created content without the joint knowledge of sales and marketing is going to make success difficult. If you want to effectively communicate with leads and drive them through the sales funnel, this alignment is key at every step.

People today can do their own consumer research. They don’t need to rely on salespeople to get them base-level information because that kind of information is all just a click away. Therefore, when salespeople interact with leads, they need a strategically created, organized, deliberate content system that gives them the ammunition to answer questions, provide education and value, close deals, and generate revenue.

Deciding what inbound marketing consultant to work with is an important decision that has a lot of potential consequences for your company. Choosing the right marketing consultant can mean a well-thought-out, strategic plan that’s tailored to your company and its goals. Choosing the wrong inbound marketing consultant can mean a lot of time, effort, and money spent for little to no concrete return. So, with such an important decision, where do you start? What can you do to help ensure your consultant is as beneficial to your business as possible?

How to Select the Right Inbound Marketing Consultant

1. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Be Strategic

One of the most important characteristics you’re looking for with this kind of consultant is a strategic approach. Why is that so pivotal?

Inbound marketing results, by their very nature, grow over time. That is, so long as your inbound strategies are effective, the results compound the longer those strategies are in place. Because it’s already a time-intensive process, you don’t want anything to needlessly slow down those results.

Putting out content that hasn’t been thought through from a strategic marketing perspective could potentially gain you some more site visits and maybe even a few leads. However, if you want the best chance at success, it’s not about merely publishing any content. It’s about putting out the right content, and you only know what that is after the groundwork of strategic planning has informed what kind of content you need to create.

The SLA serves two primary purposes:

2. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Be Interested in Your Business

Every business is different, and that means every inbound marketing strategy needs to be different. If your consultant is offering a cookie-cutter approach to your inbound marketing efforts, that’s a big red flag.

A consultant should spend adequate time to deeply understand the following:

• You.
• Your business.
• Your overall business goals and objectives (current and future).
• Your revenue projections (current and desired).

• Your particular challenges and barriers to success (areas where you’d like to grow to your business but haven’t had success).

Make sure the consultant is asking, not just a lot of questions, but the right questions. Say, for example, you want to release a new product in the next six months. If that means targeting a new segment of your market, your marketing strategy needs to be implemented with enough time for that campaign to be effective. Your consultant, therefore, needs to be forward thinking. He or she shouldn’t just be thinking about your immediate circumstances but how to continuously plan for what’s coming next for your company, and his or her questions should reflect that.

Being successful with your inbound marketing efforts also means knowing your competition well. Be wary of an inbound marketing consultant who doesn’t research or even consider your competitors. Thorough, strategic competitor analysis involves: 

• Determining competitors’ weaknesses and strengths.
• Assessing competitors’ websites.
• Comparing prices (so long as the service or product is actually comparable).

If a consultant doesn’t gather this detailed information, he or she is not properly armed to know how best to help your business thrive.

3. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Aim to Align Marketing and Sales

Aligning marketing and sales is absolutely crucial to the success of any inbound marketing campaign. If your sales and marketing teams aren’t integrated and cooperative in this process, you’re simply less likely to reach your revenue goals and objectives.

The right inbound marketing consultant—from day one—will be interested in your company from both a marketing and sales perspective. Being too heavily focused on the marketing side exclusively is a cause for concern.

The consultant should have the knowledge base and ability to implement effective sales enablement techniques that not only generate strong leads for your company but establish a system for when to effectively hand leads off to the sales team.

A consultant should particularly emphasize the importance of this collaboration between marketing and sales when:

• Creating detailed buyer personas.
• Creating content that’s targeted to those personas.
• Creating the system (or content catalogue) that organizes—or maps—that content for specific personas at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

This collaboration ensures you’re incorporating the collective wisdom and knowledge base of both your marketing and sales teams, and it ensures that everyone who needs access to this content catalogue understands how and why the content was created, when it’s appropriate to use a particular piece of content, and the technological logistics of how to use that online catalogue.

Note that an effective, reputable inbound marketing consultant might not be willing to work with your company if you’re not equally invested in aligning your marketing and sales teams.

4. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Provide Training

Especially if your sales team has traditionally done outbound selling, inbound marketing can seem foreign. However, all the techniques that make salespeople effective carry over to inbound marketing. It’s just a matter of learning the new principles and specific tactics that make inbound marketing effective, and your consultant should be able to provide that training and coaching to your sales team.

A consultant should be able to provide coaching, training, or workshops on a number of topics, including (but not limited to):

• Principles of inbound marketing.
• Importance and logistics of sales enablement.
• Logistics of using inbound marketing technologies, such as a CRM.

5. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Provide Technological Value 

You always want to work with forward-thinking consultants who view your company holistically, and part of that is providing value based on your technology solutions.

A consultant should determine if you have:

• A sales CRM.
• Potential sales enablement tools.
• A content database.

That consultant should then determine if those tools and technologies can integrate and work together. If they can’t, your chance of success diminishes. So, a consultant needs to assess your current technology stack, integrate those systems as fully as possible, and then ensure the systems are effectively managed (by sales and marketing).