Dustin Tysick, VP of Marketing and Growth at Jostle, explains why the intranet company uses video, how they leverage it across marketing and sales, and how integrations into the rest of their tech stack help make it easy to use video everywhere.
Jostle is on a mission to create extraordinary workplaces. The company’s people-centric intranet helps customers create connected and vibrant organizations.
Jostle’s platform works with all sorts of management structures, industry sectors, and different company sizes across the world. It’s been ranked by users as a high performer on G2 Crowd and included on the Constellation Shortlist of the top 10 Corporate Intranet Platforms.
When your core brand is built around helping companies create close personal connections in the workplace, your sales and marketing efforts better live up to that promise.
The Jostle Declaration sets the tone for the company’s warm, personal style. For instance, Jostlers believe craftsmanship matters, because it creates better experiences for the team and for customers. And the company celebrates all of the individual quirks and creativity that help people perform well as a team.
In short, personality and close connections matter for Jostle and its customers. That sentiment shines through in all of the company’s sales and marketing efforts.
Until a prospect books a product demo, that lead is the domain of Jostle’s scrappy, six-person marketing machine. “We only have two account executives and a VP of sales, so we want to keep them focused on demoing, sales conversations, and follow-ups,” says Dustin Tysick, VP of Marketing and Growth at Jostle.
Two years ago, the company hired its first marketing development rep (MDR). Up until that point, customer acquisition was 100% inbound. Use of video was pretty much non-existent, Dustin shares.
“We had our standard two-minute product tour—you know, the one every software company has. We put it on YouTube and tried to embed it on our website, but that process was pretty much a nightmare,” explains Dustin. “We just didn’t have a culture of video.”
But Jostle’s product is very visual and its culture engaging and vibrant, so Dustin and his team began exploring video.
Creating a warm, personal connection is what we’re about and it’s why personal video is so very important in all our sales and marketing efforts.
Dustin TysickVP of Marketing and Growth
Jostle’s leap into video and outbound marketing happened hand-in-hand. With the company’s first MDR on board, video was part of the outbound sales process from day one.
“As we built our outbound formula, we didn’t want to do the standard cold email or cold call. We wanted to honor our brand values and immediately put a face to a name,” says Dustin.
“Vidyard was our video platform of choice from day one. It gave us the ability to build warm connections through personal video and it gave us the ability to easily edit HTML/CSS for customization of CTAs on the event side, which was really important to us. We are a very design-oriented company and we wanted to make sure we could customize all our video content with our look and feel to match our website and brand.”
The company piloted personal video in an outreach campaign to banks and credit unions. The experience offered Dustin’s team the opportunity to see the power of video firsthand.
“The use of personal video helped us build brand awareness and stand out. We’re not a transactional sale. Lead cycles are long. However, prospects from this campaign are turning up now two years later and asking for demos. Those videos put us top of mind when the topic of intranet does come up,” says Dustin.
The company really found its outbound groove in another campaign built around buyer intent. Jostle’s product is ranked and reviewed on crowd-sourced review sites such as G2 Crowd. When a prospect looks at a Jostle platform review, these sites send a real-time notification back to Jostle.
Michelle Su, Jostle’s MDR, then researches the company and pulls three or four personas of people likely to be searching for intranet products. Using her sales engagement platform, Outreach, Michelle crafts an introductory email to each contact and includes a personal video message recorded using the Vidyard Chrome extension.
As a one-woman team, Michelle has streamlined her video-based prospecting process to work like a well-oiled machine.
“To get prospects to click on the thumbnail, I’ll call up their LinkedIn profile and have that on the screen or write their name on a whiteboard,” she says. “I always say their name, role and company in my opening. I’ll also try to reference something they’ve written about their role or their company, and speak to them as if I’m speaking to a friend to build instant rapport. It’s a surprisingly low effort on my part, but it has a big impact. I’ve only had positive feedback. Even if a prospect isn’t interested in Jostle, they’ll reply saying they appreciated my video or they’ll forward my email to their team as an example.
Not only is Michelle able to record her videos without having to leave Outreach, the Vidyard integration also triggers a notification within her Outreach Activity Feed to let her know when someone watches one of her videos. She uses those triggers to drive the next steps, such as connecting with the prospect on LinkedIn or sending out a meeting request.
“Vidyard’s instantaneous notifications are encouraging. They let me know that someone is actually taking the time to hear what I have to say,” she says.
It’s a surprisingly low effort on my part, but it has a big impact. I’ve only had positive feedback.
Michelle SuMarketing Development Representative
Fuelled by video’s success for outbound sales, Jostle introduced video into its inbound marketing processes. Now the company uses the interactive medium to flow visitors through a step-down funnel on the company’s website, taking prospects from interest to action.
“Up until that point, our inbound content was built around the written word. We realized we were missing an opportunity to explore more dynamic mediums such as video,” says Dustin. “Now, one of the first calls to action people see on our website is an invitation to watch a branded explainer video, which directs a prospect to the product page and product demo. About a dozen leads a month—about 5% of our total volume—go through that flow without even talking to us,” says Dustin.
Website visitors can also explore Jostle’s platform through a video tour (built using Vidyard’s player API) where Jostle employees welcome them to explore key platform features. CTAs embedded in the video player drives prospects to a demo form which feeds both Hubspot and Salesforce.
And every month, marketing hosts a webinar and produces videos to promote new features for the platform.
As much as possible, Dustin’s team likes to use employees as their actors.
“We definitely bribe our people to help us out with video,” chuckles Dustin. “We bake cookies and randomly pounce on employees in the kitchen to make the ask.”
Jostlers are also featured in video profiles in the company’s monthly newsletter.
“We have people film themselves on vacation or doing what they love so customers get to know the faces behind the company and its platform. It’s one of the most clicked-on parts of the newsletter.”
In addition to poaching developers and support staff alike to “star” in its video productions, Jostle’s small and scrappy marketing team has gotten resourceful in other ways to step up video in a big way.
Dustin taught himself to do his own video editing and the marketing team does a lot of the company’s video voice-overs. He and the team also set up their own small production studio in a former storage room, complete with a video camera, lighting, LAV mike, and tips and tricks taped to the wall.
Rather than have someone else on the team act as a camera person, Dustin finds employees are more natural and more comfortable when left to their own devices in the team’s DIY studio.
“We’ve found we have the most luck engaging employees by letting them just go in and give video a try by themselves,” says Dustin. “Hence the helpful hints on where to look and when to smile.”
You can see how effective the approach is in a video the team made to include in their Valentine’s Day newsletter.
Jostle’s personal, friendly, and warm videos are proving to be very effective for generating more inbound and outbound leads for the company.
The inbound side is now producing a regular flow of leads, with 12 to 15 prospects going through the video-enabled funnel every month (about 5% of total leads generated in the same timeframe) with no sales intervention required. Of the leads that come in every month, about 60 to 70% watch the product video prior to booking a demo, and those who do are typically well-primed for a sales discussion.
On the outbound side, Michelle’s on fire. Since she stepped into her role as MDR, she has sent out well over 3,000 personal videos over the course of the year. On average, 30% of prospects who open her emails watch the personal videos she creates for them and 72% of those watch until the very end.
Meanwhile, the buyer intent campaign continues to build traction, with results becoming more and more predictable. “Our challenge now is finding more buyer intent sources so we can broaden the effort at the very top of the funnel,” says Dustin.
“Our core values are built around that ability to connect. It’s who we are and it’s more trustworthy,” he says. “Creating a warm, personal connection is what we’re about and it’s why personal video is so very important in all our sales and marketing efforts.”
Dustin and Michelle have some advice for sales and marketing pros who want to start using video:
1. Obsess About the Audio
“Just do it and don’t stress too much about video quality,” says Dustin. “But get a good lav mic. Audio quality is far more important than video quality. Jostle has only one camera, but we have three different audio mics.”
2. Watch Other Reps’ Sales Videos
“Vidyard’s Templates Hub is a super valuable resource,” says Michelle. “I love to get new video ideas from there, and also have a good laugh at the outrageously funny videos.”
3. Make Video Fun
“Create a mini studio with lights, a tripod and some tips and tricks posted to help your employees get comfortable with shooting video,” says Dustin. “And find ways to make it fun. Do fun videos. Serve cookies. Let people play and fool around so they become comfortable with the video format.”
4. Take Advantage of Tracking
“Vidyard’s notifications give me an immediate reason to follow up,” says Michelle. “I know I have the prospect’s attention and find it works much better than a generically scheduled follow up email.”
5. Use Video Everywhere
“Think about your funnel and the entire journey,” says Dustin. “Most companies are underusing video. Think about all the places where you can swap in video throughout the prospect and customer journey. Then, see point one—just do it!
6. Make Time for Video
“Build a research process to shave time off what can be a manual and time-consuming job and carve out time in your day to record videos,” says Michelle. “Other priorities can push their way into my day. So if it’s in my calendar then it’s easier to stay committed.”
