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Our own John Bonini sat down (virtually) with Gabriel Marguglio, founder and CEO at Nextiny, for a recent episode of the Metrics & Chill podcast. Gabriel and John talked about how the team at Nextiny has turned video marketing into a lead generation powerhouse.
Nextiny is an inbound growth agency that embraces martech, using data and software to save time and money while creating a bigger impact for their clients. During the conversation, Gabriel shared how the team crystallized the idea of using video to drive leads—and how they’ve used data and marketing technology to supercharge that for clients.
Read on for more details, or listen to the full episode here:
Gabriel and the Nextiny team honed in on the power of video for marketing and sales years ago. But the trouble then was connecting video back to the leads and customers it generated. A lot has changed since then—today, Gabriel focuses on the video hours watched metric as a key indicator for marketing success.
“How do we improve this for the lead generation and customer acquisition side of things, but also brand affinity?” Gabriel mused. “At the end of the day, when people watch more video, they’re not just getting to know you more and closing at a higher rate, but also starting to create that human connection with your brand.”
As a HubSpot partner, Nextiny applied for the Impact award for years. When they finally won the Impact award with this article, their application opened their eyes to the true scale of the video opportunity.
“We did a case study as an Impact award application [for HubSpot] connecting HubSpot and Wistia, understanding leads turning into customers and how video impacts that,” Gabriel explained. “We compared leads that haven’t watched video and how they turn into customers, the closing rate, compared to the closing rate from leads that have watched video as part of their path.”
What caught their attention—and likely secured their award—was the results they saw. “In this very video-heavy account, leads that watched video closed 3 times as much as people that didn’t watch video. It was like 7% and 21%.”
Big numbers for any individual marketing tactic, Gabriel and team knew they had an important opportunity to harness those results for the rest of their clients. They thought, “Okay, this is important. This is something that people are paying attention to. We won the award because of the innovative side of seeing the data and how video creates an impact. What’s the next step? How do we extrapolate this to all of our other customers? Is this a story that’s happening everywhere or is it a one-off?”
To ensure they weren’t looking at a fluke, Gabriel went back and conducted the same analysis, connecting Wistia with HubSpot, for all the customers employing their video marketing services. “We saw the numbers were not only 3x, but 4x, 5x, 9x. And it was for us, too,” Gabriel said.
Consistency is key to the whole thing.
As Gabriel noted, “Getting people to watch more video isn’t as simple as creating more video.” The opportunity to grow lead generation by increasing video hours watched was there, but the team needed to figure out how to harness it. For Gabriel, that came down to two key things:
First, the team dug even deeper into the science and data behind their video success. They looked at the types of video and their differing effect on lead generation. They looked at how videos of varying lengths drove leads. They connected Wistia with HubSpot to get a deeper understanding of the why behind what they’d uncovered.
“We started analyzing which parts were more important, which episodes created a bigger impact, which episodes were more shared online, which were watched more from email efforts. We started understanding what made our series interesting to the people who were interested in it,” Gabriel explained. “And we make decisions from that. With that information, we’re making the next episodes better—we’re making the next season better.”
The first thing Gabriel noticed was that longer videos tended to perform better. After the success of their 20-minute Coffee Talks video series, that data encouraged the team to launch a second video series—called Martech Masters—that pushed the timeframe upwards of 30-45 minutes.
Throughout, the most important factor Gabriel found was consistency. For one, “having a consistent effort allows you to track and measure more easily because we can see week to week, if it’s getting better,” Gabriel said. “It’s easier to measure an episodic effort than to measure individual videos.”
Gabriel also hammered home the power of consistency to help improve those results, not just measure them: “Creating a consistent video effort will allow you to create an audience who actually like what you’re saying, they want to come back.”
“It’s not about virality or creating something that’s so amazing that everybody in the world wants to watch,” Gabriel highlighted. “That’s one of the biggest problems out there. People think they need to create something that’s for everybody. And it’s the opposite.”
Now, the team is working into the data to reverse engineer the top 5 episodes of their Martech Masters series—to figure out why they’re so successful, why people engage with them, and share them on social media.
“Consistency is the key to the whole thing,” Gabriel summarized.
“At the end of the day, when people watch more video, they’re not just getting to know you more and closing at a higher rate, but also starting to create that human connection with your brand,” Gabriel noted.
Today, the Nextiny team is constantly tracking video metrics and connecting the dots between various aspects of videos and the leads and customers they produce. “Wistia allows us to track how many hours people are watching, which parts of the video, and connect it to HubSpot and how these people are becoming customers,” Gabriel said. “We’re constantly tracking and trying to connect the dots.”
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And if you are looking for another great show to watch or listen to, you don’t want to miss Martech Masters by Nextiny. Find out how leaders in the Martech industry shift their strategies to thrive during the pandemic and ensure their business continues growing.
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