Many marketing teams are now tracking the activities of their leads and prospects to better understand what they’re engaging with on their website, what types of content assets they’re downloading, and how they’re interacting with email nurtures, social media campaigns, and other forms of marketing programs.

They’re using this information in their marketing automation to better score their leads to qualify who’s ready to hand off to sales and to better personalize the buyer’s journey based on previous activities and content engagement.

However, if you’re not tracking video engagement you may be missing a big piece of your lead qualification model.

My name is Tyler Lessard and in this Chalk Talk, we’ll discuss how you can track the video engagement activities of your leads and prospects to better understand their interest and to identify your hottest leads faster than ever.

To really illustrate the challenge and the opportunity here I want to talk to you through a few scenarios around how you might be scoring leads today and how they may need to change going forward.

Lead number one comes to your website reads a blog post and then chooses to download an eBook.

Lead number two clicks on a link in an email campaign and then registers for an upcoming webinar.

Lead number 3 watches your two-minute explainer video all the way to the end then a 3-minute customer testimonial video followed by 10 minutes worth of video content within your thought leadership library.

Now my bet is that with today’s scoring model you’re going to be scoring leads number one and two higher and flipping them to sales faster because of these actions that they took even though you have no idea if they actually read that eBook.

However, lead number three (who’s likely your hottest and most engaged lead) walks away unnoticed because it looks like just a few page views.

I hope this underscores the importance of thinking about how to track video engagement as part of your lead scoring model especially as you invest more in video as a contact medium across your digital properties.
So of course, the big question is how do I do this and how do I implement it effectively to improve my processes and get better results?

Well with a platform like Vidyard you can start to track all of this data for each of your prospects video engagement activities.

Which video did they watch? When did they watch it? What percentage of that video did they complete? How many seconds did they watch?

And then you can also create custom attributes that help you categorize different videos in different ways and we’ll talk about that just a little bit later. But what this all really means is that your prospects come to your website and for example watch Explainer X all the way to the end. Explainer Y just for the first 10 seconds and then they watch a customer video and re-watch this portion multiple times you’re able to track all of those activities and not only identify them as a hot lead faster but you’re also going to have extra insight into what they might be interested in. For example, I’m going to send them more information about product X not about Y.

So how do you put this data into action and in reality, once you have a tool like Vidyard set up?

So, the way I see it there’s kind of three different ways and stages that you can set up lead scoring and qualification models using video engagement data. A basic, an intermediate, and advanced model.

Let’s start with basic. The most basic way to use this data is to set up one general rule across your marketing automation system for all video view events.

This is really easy to do and you can do something like if video viewed more than 50% assign of certain point value. And for illustrative purposes, I’ve said maybe you give them 20 points.

Of course, that’s up to you based on your model. You can set it up in general just for a view or you can use different threshold points. So maybe any video view for 50% is 20 points and any video of you more than 90% gives them 30 points.

So again, this is something you can do pretty straightforward and pass that to your marketing automation and CRM to at least start tracking those engagement points.

The next step is to move to a more intermediate scoring model and this is all about identifying those key videos that are showing higher interest or higher intent and scoring them in a more sophisticated way.

If somebody, for example, comes and watches your product demo video on your website–this is a really high-value moment. Instead of just giving them 20 points you may create a custom rule where if video is your product demo video and they watch more than halfway through give them 50 points but if they watch more than 90% or all the way to the end give them a hundred points because that’s somebody that I want to flip over to sales faster or perhaps take an on-demand webinar on your website.

You could set up a rule based on the length or duration of consumption. So, if they watch this webinar more than 10 minutes or any of my webinars for more than 10 minutes give them again 50 or a hundred points because that’s showing somebody who’s leaning in and really actively engaging in my content.

So, whether it’s a 20-minute video or an hour-long video I just want to know anybody who’s watching for 10 minutes or more let’s get them over to sales.

The other thing you can do is not just rely on points but actually pick key moments that trigger somebody to become a marketing qualified lead to be passed over to your sales team.

Again, an example let’s say they watch your product demo all the way to the end. Instead of giving them a hundred points you can make that trigger them to becoming an MQL immediately which would then have your sales team follow up every time somebody hits that threshold.

So, this is fully customizable within your business and it’s a different contexts depending on which content you believe is the most valuable. But what you want to do is go through those high-value videos and think about which ones are showing higher intent and making sure you’re scoring those in different ways to get them over to sales faster.

Now the more advanced model is basically taking this approach and making it infinitely scalable across all of your videos. This starts to break down once you get you know 100, 200 videos and you’re trying to do this for a lot of different pieces of content but in the advanced model you can use something called custom attributes.

Custom attributes are a way of tagging each of your videos with different classifications so that you can create the general rule for any of those different viewing activities.

Let me give you an example. So perhaps I create a custom attribute called funnel stage and I have values of top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel. Each time I upload a video, I can tag it as such and I can say this is the top of funnel, this is bottom of funnel and those tags will also be pushed into your marketing automation.

So, I can now set up a rule that says if somebody watches a video that’s a funnel stage top and they watch it more than halfway through I’m going to give them 20 points but if they watch a video that’s a bottom of funnel video more than halfway through I’m going to give them a hundred points because that showing greater buyer intent or maybe you want to set up a tag called ‘video type’ and in this case maybe you can have a type ‘promotional video,’ ‘product video,’ ‘customer testimonial video.’ Lots of different ways to categorize them.

Now again you can set up a custom rule based on that type so anytime somebody watches a customer testimonial video all the way to the end that could trigger an immediate MQL out to your sales team.

What’s really great about this model is it scales really efficiently each time you add a video you simply apply the different attribute and the lead scoring model takes care of itself so this is a really great way to make sure you’re going to identify your most engaged leads faster and help your sales team be a lot more efficient and how they’re handling those leads and who they’re following up with first.

So hopefully this gives you some good context for why tracking video engagement data so important in today’s lead scoring model and its increasing importance as you do more video content across your different programs to make sure you don’t get caught in the trap sending over only leads like these and not thinking about these high-value leads here to pass over to your sales team.

My name is Tyler Lessard and this has been a Vidyard Chalk Talk.