Social Proof: How Hippo Video Has Helped Transform a Growing Digital Marketing Agency
This is a guest post contributed by Donald Chan.
The importance of video in today’s digital landscape is growing each year.
More people are using video in their personal communications with friends, families and even colleagues. Especially, with the ubiquity of smartphones and platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
As a result, there are growing expectations of businesses to be using videos too.
Not just in marketing, advertising, and social media. Even in customer support, sales and instructional content such as product demos and knowledge bases.
In truth, businesses without a video strategy in this day and age will quickly. Also, find themselves operating at a significant disadvantage.
What is the Role of Videos in Digital Marketing Agencies?
Digital marketing agencies, in particular, have been quick to embrace video. While we tend to be early tech adopters, the rise of remote teams has spurred this.
For agencies with staff working across geographies and time zones, videos are an ideal medium. Especially, for asynchronous communications between team members.
In addition to adding a layer of meaning that is often missing in Slack chats, the video also helps to build a sense of familiarity.
In the content marketing agency I run, our team has stepped up the use of videos in the last 18 months. Not just in the work we produce for our clients, but in our daily communications and business operations.
Specifically, we have been using Hippo Video in quite a number of ways.
Hippo Video is an all-in-one video platform for business that can help you to generate video content. Starting from video creation, professional editing to hosting, lead generation, and tracking your video performance.
Hippo Video packs a range of powerful features that is just great for those who work online. Especially for marketing professionals, online education course makers, customer support, and inside sales, amongst others.
10 Ways How Videos Can Help Digital Marketing Agencies
In the course of using Hippo Video in our work, our agency team has come to understand many of these features. In fact, they started leveraging them in our business.
With that in mind, we wanted to share with everyone some of the ways digital marketing agencies can make use of videos. Let’s dive in then.
1) Website Videos
Videos on websites can be a great way to get users to stay longer on your site. This in turn positively impacts search engine rankings (dwell time is a ranking factor).
There’s also inherently a WOW factor to having a well-crafted video on your web page. It guides visitors through your products and services.
With HippoVideo, you can upload and embed marketing and content videos on your site. Besides providing in-depth video analytics, HippoVideo also lets you brand your video player with your logo. It also enables themes, CTAs, thumbnails, title, and end screens.
2) Lead Generation/Timeline Actions
In today’s digital marketing landscape, the biggest challenge many digital marketing agencies like us face is generating a strong pipeline of quality leads.
Thanks to the built-in lead generation features that HippoVideo has, you can easily take your website videos one step further. These include the ability to add email opt-in forms, call to actions, quizzes and polls, as well as annotations and playlists.
All in all, these features pack a wallop to help you kickstart video marketing or email listing building for your digital agency.
3) Sales Pitches
Imagine how your prospects would feel when receiving a personalized email from their sales representatives. That would indeed be a great way to build a human connection and stand out from your competitor’s salespeople who are merely dialing it.
For agencies selling to local businesses — who might be less clued in on digital marketing — sending a video explaining what you do could help to jumpstart your sales process.
Inside salespersons can break the ice with cold prospects by sending across a personalized pitch video. Thanks to the Gmail integration and Hippo Video’s Gmail Add-on.
With Hippo Video’s Gmail Add-on, we were able to follow up with prospects by tracking engagement stats. Also, spend more time on the prospect who is interested based on the actual behavior instead of those who weren’t.
4) Record Video Testimonials
In the competitive agency landscape, having clients provide video testimonials for your company is the ultimate CRO hack.
Imagine a prospect that comes across your website after researching a few similar agencies. He or she chances across the video testimonials you got your clients to record. The amount of trust and credibility that builds up instantly would be off the charts.
Often the challenge with getting clients to record these videos is the logistical aspects. Like getting them to download a video recording software, recording the video, downloading the file and then sending it to you.
Most clients are just going to find that a chore, especially the less tech-savvy ones.
But Hippo Video solves all that with its video testimonial recording feature. With the help of this feature, we were able to collect video testimonials from our customers by sending them a personalized link.
The technology helps remove friction from the request, which means it’s much easier to get our customers to record video testimonials.
5) Record Video Briefs
Hippo Video has an innovative feature that we love — the ability to generate a recording link that can be sent to clients. Once a client clicks on the link in their browser, they are taken to a Hippo Video page prompting them to record a video.
The best part about this is that the client doesn’t need to install anything at all. He or she can just click a few buttons on the page and get started on the recording. Once the recording is complete, the video file is automatically synced to your Hippo Video account.
There are many ways agencies can make use of this feature.
One way we’re trying right now is to attach a Hippo Video recording link to onboarding/project briefing forms sent to clients. This lets them record a short video to supplement their written instructions. We find this to be helpful in cases where it’s necessary to provide additional context that would be hard to capture with just words alone.
6) Record Video Interviews
This is a continuation of the previous point. One more way we’re leveraging the recording link feature is for conducting interviews with subject matter experts. Most of our clients are in the Technology, B2B and Healthcare space. That means some of the content production involves the input of subject matter experts.
Trying to get these busy folks to sit down and be interviewed on Skype is often quite impossible.
So, we’ve started including links in the interview questionnaires we send out. Inviting these experts to record their answers on video too. This can be a better way to extract deep insights without having to tie everyone down to a Skype meeting.
7) Customer Support
Very often, clients will come to us asking how to go about doing certain small tasks. Like logging into our client portal system to retrieve some files.
We have found that instead of continually repeating ourselves, it’s just more efficient to record a video of us doing the task. Also, publishing it on a support knowledge base. Next time, a client comes with the same question, we can direct them to the relevant page.
What a time saver!
In our agency’s case, we’re starting to use Hippo Video to record instructional videos for clients. When delivering customer support through chat or email, it can be useful for support staff to record videos to communicate or clarify certain points quickly.
Hippo Video has integrations with Freshdesk, Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, FB Workplace, Slack, Trello, GSuite, etc.
8) Instructional Videos
Videos are a great way to record SOPs that many digital marketing agencies use to run their business. This is the case in our agency too.
Besides documenting how to carry out specific tasks in Google Docs, we sometimes record videos to complement the written instructions. This is especially important for multi-step processes that are highly detailed such as installing Google Tag Manager on client websites.
Showing how to do things in a video is sometimes the best way to teach.
Hippo Video’s integration with Google Docs and Google Slides let us record a video while inside Google Docs or convert a presentation into a video from inside Google Slides.
9) Team Communications
For remote teams, the ability to record a quick video and send to team members who are in a different timezone is useful.
Just click on your Hippo Video Chrome browser extension, choose the recording options you want (screen record, webcam), and you’re on your way!
Share the video with your colleagues through a shareable link, or through the Slack and Gmail integrations, and track whether the video has been watched.
What’s great too is that you can edit the videos within Hippo Video itself, adding text and callouts, cropping and blurring sections.
Users can also leave their comments on the video pages, allowing for conversations around the topic.
Right now, I’m using Hippo Video to record quick videos to supplement Slack chats with my team members. This is especially useful since I’m usually out of the office for meetings.
10) Social Videos
For digital marketing agencies that need to keep up their presence on social media. You can create interesting social videos for sharing on social media, using just stock images and Hippo Video.
Just look for the ‘Create Video From Images’ option in your Hippo Video interface.
You can import your images and audio tracks, or connect to online sources of royalty-free content such as Flickr and Pexels.
I hope this post has provided you with some ideas on how to implement Hippo Video in your digital agency setup.
Here at IMPACT, we believe that all businesses will need to have a video strategy. Not just for their marketing and to build trust, credibility, engagement with their audience, but to enhance the way they do things and the things they can do.
How are you leveraging Hippo Video in your business? Share your success stories with us by leaving a comment on this post.
P.S: This is a guest post contributed by Donald Chan.
Donald Chan is the Founder and Business Director at IMPACT! Brand Communications, a leading content marketing agency for Technology, B2B and Healthcare brands. He frequently shares his insights on the IMPACT! blog and also helps run several vibrant online communities for web and marketing professionals.
Great post. I am dealing with some of these issues as
well..
“Awesome blog post.Really thank you! Great.”
Thanks for sharing this valuable information with the community! Definitely this videos will create a huge impact in the market and it will show you immediate results.
Videos can help customers to understand what you are selling and promoting on your website. Sometimes people tend to just watch videos than read long articles.