Video Getting Lots of Attention in the Salesforce CRM

A few news items passed my desk this week related to video and the Salesforce platform. The news comes from Vidyard and uStudio, two similar, but very different video marketing platform providers. Let’s have a look:

Vidyard Connects Video and Pardot

Pardot, acquired by Salesforce last year, is a B2B marketing automation solution. With its new integration with Vidyard, marketers can now identify prospects and customers who watch video and track their viewing behavior across a variety of Pardot-based landing pages, websites, and other third-party sites and social media. This information is added to both Pardot and Salesforce CRM activity logs, and is used to update lead scores and trigger automated nurture campaigns.

The point here that Vidyard makes is that watching videos, recorded webinars, product demos, and other brand related video, is very telling of a prospects interest in your products and services. It does take a fair amount of time (and sometimes patience) to sit through videos, but that time isn’t taken into account into current lead scoring processes. Which, as Vidyard points out, could mean a loss of some very valuable customers.

 

Vidyard’s video marketing platform is actually integrated across the entire Salesforce platform, from Pardot, to Chatter and the CRM itself. It’s available via the AppExchange for Salesforce, enabling sales professionals to easily send videos to customers and prospects and track whether the video has been watched. Videos can also be used for training and other business activities.

Says Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard,

Video is increasingly being recognized as a critical sales and marketing tool, and this integration [Vidyard and Pardot] enables customers to see just how valuable their video assets are to closing deals.”

uStudio Launched VideoShare for Salesforce

Also this week we heard of the launch by uStudio of its . uStudio says that with its video marketing platform you can not only share videos from within your Salesforce environment, including Chatter, but you can also determine the video’s revenue impact, which can include things like how long videos are watched, close rates using video, and other interesting stats related to how that video performs.

With uStudio’s VideoShare integrated with Salesforce (note that this product is not available through the AppExchange), you are essentially integrating the entire video marketing platform into Salesforce. This means Salesforce users can collaborate on videos inside Chatter, send and share videos with people inside and outside the organization, create custom video landing pages with Visualforce, manage your video library, and much more.

This is where you see a difference between Vidyard and uStudio. uStudio has a deeper integration with Salesforce through the force.com platform. I’m not going to say that one platform is better than the other. I think which solution you choose depends a lot on what you want to do within Salesforce with video.

Video Marketing on the Rise

In a recent Demand Metric report (sponsored by Vidyard), it was found that B2B is incorporating video marketing tactics into digital marketing strategies, with 69% using video for marketing purposes. The rest are planning to use it at some point in the future. The most important objectives found for video were brand awareness, lead generation and engagement. Lots more interesting stats in that report, so check it out.

With the use of video marketing growing, it’s worth spending some time taking a look at the players in this market which include uStudio, Vidyard, RAMP and a few others. We’ll look at how video can be best used in a B2B marketing strategy and possibly some B2C. Stay tuned for our first review coming in late August.

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