KITCHENER, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vidyard, the video platform for business, today announced the winners of the 2016 Video Marketing Awards (VMAs), recognizing innovative marketing and sales leaders at Viewtopia, the company’s annual video marketing summit. The VMAs recognize organizations that are using video content and analytics in exceptional ways to expand their audience, generate demand and empower their sales teams to close more business.
“Video has become the medium of choice for modern marketers to engage, entertain and educate their audiences,” said Vidyard CEO and co-founder Michael Litt. “They are creating incredible high-quality content, measuring its performance and using detailed analytics to turn viewers into customers and revenue for their organizations. And the results are coming whether the organizations are large or small, whether the videos highly produced or done on a budget. These winners prove the power of video to connect with audiences and improve the bottom line.”
Below are the winners and finalists in each VMA category:
Video Marketing Campaign of the Year
Winner: Lenovo
with agency partner Traction
Finalists: Philips, Elemica
Lenovo's marketing efforts had primarily consisted of tactics at the bottom of the funnel. With the launch of the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 12 Ultrabook, an all-in-one laptop and tablet, the company hoped to broaden its exposure to a larger audience than they had currently been marketing to and to re-engage dormant customers. They also wanted to educate users while making them feel entertained. The campaign played out in the form of five videos, including “Know your Chad” and “See Jane Run at Top Speed,” and a series of tongue-in-cheek illustrated “Survival Guides” for IT viewers to enjoy and commiserate over.
Results: Lenovo saw an immediate lift in video completion rates from 70% to 96% — a clear signal that the campaign was working. Engagement soared with a 400% lift over previous benchmarks. The videos were the most shared and the most viewed assets Lenovo commercial marketing had ever produced. Lenovo surpassed its target of 17,000 new leads by 50% with over 25,000 and blew away its goal of 34,000 reactivated leads by engaging over 91,000 contacts. They increased the number of marketing qualified leads by 250% and improved lead quality by 200%.
Best Personalized Video Campaign
Winner: Reltio
Finalists:
Veracode, Influitive
Reltio wanted a new way to build awareness and drive interest it its flagship product with a top-of-funnel awareness campaign. The company launched a personalized video campaign targeting 10,000 leads to build awareness and identify their most engaged prospects.
Results: Nearly 30% of all individuals who opened the email clicked through to watch the video. That marked a 10X increase in click-through rates compared to their average marketing campaign. Reltio is now launching a second personalized video campaign as part of its account-based marketing effort.
Best Use of Video for Sales Prospecting or ABM
Winner: MongoDB
Finalists:
Act-On, P2 Energy Solutions
MongoDB wanted to use more customer testimonials to show the impact that MongoDB could have on their organizations. With a small marketing team and small budget, MongoDB picked a few customers to do high-quality testimonials. The end goal was to provide powerful assets for the sales team to better engage key prospects and move them through the buying journey faster.
Results: The sales team was ecstatic, and the videos become one of their top three calls to action in outbound outreach efforts to new prospects. The videos also served as tools for new sales reps to learn how customers use MongoDB.
Best Online Video Presence for a B2B Brand
Winner:
SolarWinds
Finalists: Applied Predictive Technologies,
Prophix
Video is a key component of the SolarWinds marketing strategy, helping the company create a unique, relatable voice that stands out for IT professionals. The video team is a big contributor to brand, social, product and demand gen creative campaign strategy and leverages a multi-channel distribution strategy to reach its audiences across the web. Its videos have been featured on Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Reddit and other media sites. SolarWinds’ customers are IT professionals, and the company uses a snarky, geeky tone to connect with its audience. Top examples include “Happy IT Professionals Day” “Free Tool Brack-IT-ology”, “Meet the Head Geeks,” and their newly released parodies of hit show Stranger Things called “Stranger IT.”
Results: The SolarWinds content has helped the business reach a wide array of new audiences and boost engagement with its current customers and prospects. Its YouTube channel features nearly 1,000 videos, and the top 15 each have more than 50,000 views. SolarWinds continues to invest in video as a primary content medium for marketing and communications, brand and social media to build and engage its B2B buyer’s audience.
Breakout Video Marketer of the Year
Winner: Jonas
Construction Software
Finalists: RL Solutions, ExamSoft
Jonas Construction Software started out a year ago with no video content but a goal to provide prospective clients with a more personalized and dynamic digital experience to guide them to content that addressed their existing needs. In its “Why Jonas” video, the company created a video that explained to customers how Jonas could help them. The used pop-out features in the video to direct viewers to product pages. Viewers who made it to the end of the video got a final call-to-action pointing them to a product tour. The company has invested in a series of product and testimonial videos and is tracking audience engagement to help identify, qualify and convert more leads.
Results: Jonas Construction Software quickly noticed improvement in the quality of its leads, and prospective clients are more engaged with its content. Now roughly 50% of all Jonas’ leads from its website come directly from video content. 20% of closed business comes from deals that originated with a video view. Conversion rates on email marketing programs with video content are 200% that of traditional email campaigns. Sales velocity also has increased, the amount of time needed to convert a lead to an opportunity has been cut in half, and the time need to close new business is down by 30%.
Small Business, Big Bang
Winner: Terminus
Finalists:
Social123, Xenex
Terminus employed a video marketing strategy to raise awareness for account-based marketing (ABM), which was just a buzz word for the B2B marketing industry a year ago. Terminus launched its #FlipMyFunnel campaign with personalized videos aimed at B2B marketing and sales thought leaders the company wanted to attend its first conference of the same name. They wanted 200 people to attend the first event in Atlanta. CMO Sangram Vajre created an individual video for each recipient with an opening “Hi (first name). Sangram here!”. Based on the early success of video content, Terminus now leverages custom and personalized video for outbound prospecting, ABM, event awareness, customer testimonials and product demonstrations.
Results: Besides getting 300 people to attend that first #FlipMyFunnel, Terminus credits video as a huge part of its ABM strategy and success. The company has produced eight customer testimonial videos this year with four more in production. They integrated Vidyard with Uberflip to track engagement and attribution of its video content. The unique video stream of content has proven to be an important asset for the sales team, especially to move deals through the pipeline more quickly. Sales development reps also have started producing their own personalized videos to use in outreach to help them cut through the clutter and increase connect rates.
Video Marketing Impact Award
Winner: Tradeshift
Finalists:
Rapid7, BenefitMall
After working primarily with large corporations, Tradeshift recently started expanding into the mid-market categories and needed help generating demand. Enterprise Marketing head Travis Bickham recognized that Tradeshift’s traditional demand gen model didn’t scale to smaller companies, and he needed a new way to stand out in the competitive mid-market. Already using Vidyard, Bickham could see from the platform’s analytics that customers watched a lot of video before ever talking to sales teams. He saw that using video as the basis for all demand gen efforts would help Tradeshift accelerate leads and accounts down the funnel by providing engaging content and lead scoring at every stage. With Vidyard’s integration with Marketo, Bickham could track metrics on leads, conversions and opportunity revenue that his team helped drive through video content. Bickham later used Vidyard’s personalization technology to send out holiday videos with each prospect’s name featured in the video they received.
Results: 100% of active opportunities that convert to deals are exposed to video before and after sales qualification. In outbound emails promoting customer success stories, video has double the click-through rate compared to PDFs when both versions were tested. Leads who view videos reach qualified status 4X faster than those who don’t. Tradeshift’s personalized holiday video campaign resulted in a 230% increase in click-through rates, an 88% increase in eBook downloads and a surge in qualified pipeline development. More than 10% of marketing-sourced qualified leads in the first half of 2016 came from that personalized video campaign, resulting in a cost-per-opportunity that was lower than the average cost-per-lead of other campaigns, an unheard-of set of results in the world of demand generation.
Video Marketing Trailblazer
Winner: Bisk Education
Finalists:
Cisco, Marketo
Bisk Education partners with universities to help finance, develop and support online degree programs and with businesses to offer training and education programs. The company recently began investing in video marketing and created Bisk Studios to handle all video strategy, production, marketing and distribution. Bisk Studios contributes to several campaigns at a time, supporting multiple brands and the overall Bisk brand. Usually their videos are a piece of a larger marketing campaign or content strategy but sometimes they comprise the entire campaign. Bisk Studios also drives internal communications programs, brand awareness, training, and other video-based programs across the organization. Investing in Bisk Studios has transformed the way the company markets its own business and partners with other organizations. Going beyond traditional marketing and social videos, their production of a full documentary with Notre Dame shows what can happen when an organization gets serious about video.
Results: Bisk’s video series with Florida Institute of Technology, “Study Snacks” drove the most Facebook shares of any of its social efforts to date with more than 2,000 views. Their “Spartans Will” project with Michigan State University influenced many students to commit to a specific degree program. On a broader level, Bisk employees are now engaged in using video initiatives across the entire company. Employee events are now covered by the video crew, and one internal company culture video had a 85% click-through rate and over 70% engagement – even after the video was already shown in a group meeting.
About Vidyard
Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the video intelligence platform that helps businesses drive more revenue through the use of online video. Going beyond video hosting and management, Vidyard helps businesses drive greater engagement in their video content, track the viewing activities of each individual viewer, and turn those views into action. Global leaders such as Honeywell, McKesson, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD Ameritrade, Citibank, MongoDB and Sharp rely on Vidyard to power their video content strategies and turn viewer into customers.
