How a 130-Year-Old Organization Is Moving into the Future with Video Marketing

If a 130 year-old financial services company can do personalized video, then why not you? By focusing on video marketing, Graydon is delighting their customers and speeding up email responses.

Graydon is a company that understands the value of new ways of thinking. We help companies look into the future and better understand the financial situation of companies they’re dealing with. At the moment, we mostly provide insights into credit information and marketing information of companies in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Belgium. And currently we're also working on getting this information available for more countries. 

One of the other things we want to keep doing to grow, is learning more about video marketing. We’re always thinking ahead, and looking for what the next best thing in the future will be so that we can get our customers excited about what we’re doing. We really want to find the “wow” factor. 

This is part of the transition period that was already in progress when I joined Graydon a year and a half ago. Graydon is over 130 years old—so there’s a preconceived notion that the company might be old and stuffy, right? 

But you’d be surprised. As a company, they’d already realized that to succeed, they’d need to embrace new forms of technology and focus on new ways of making their customers happy. 

Personalizing Your Marketing for Better Results 

Marketing is getting more and more personalized. If you see a plain email, you’re much more likely to think it’s spam and ignore it. But if you work in tech, you’re probably used to getting flashy emails with GIFs that include your name in the subject line. While that’s not overly personalized, that little bit of effort makes you more likely to open it.

This is true for whole marketing campaigns, too. When I was making web campaigns for online stores and companies at my former worker, creating personalized marketing with returning customers’ names ensured they kept coming back and felt more connected to the store. I’ve consistently seen better conversion rates from the personalized campaigns.

Focusing on personalization in video marketing takes it to the next level. Including a video in an email makes a customer or a prospect feel more persuaded to answer the email than when it’s just plain text. It’s easier to show them what you’re talking about, and focus on the content in a more interactive way than you could ever do solely through text. I believe that video is the future of email.

Video is also a much easier way for someone to take in what you want to say. If you’re just using blogs, that’s a lot of text for someone to sit down and take the time to read. Not everyone is going to do that. With video, you have an expert telling you exactly what you need to know rather than having to read through a long-form article. 

Being able to see someone’s face also helps to reveal a lot about the content. Just by seeing them and seeing how they tell the story, I think it’s possible for people to take in the content better. A prospect can see how professional the storyteller looks, and start building trust in the company. Video will help you cut through all the noise out there and I genuinely believe it’s the future of marketing. It’s a better way to get your content out to people who need it.

How Graydon Is Focusing on Video Marketing

The impact that video can have is why Graydon decided to start focusing on video in our marketing. We were already using it internally to explain our content to colleagues, but we knew that we needed to start focusing on as a marketing effort. 

That’s when I met the Vidyard team at an event. We spoke about the platform a bit and went our separate ways. Then I received a video from them that had my name on a whiteboard in the video. I couldn’t believe it. I started showing my coworkers and they were just as impressed—that’s the power of personalization.

We weren’t actually looking for a video hosting service at the time, but once my colleague and I saw my name on a whiteboard in the video, we realized the potential it had to extend the personalized marketing we were already starting to get into. Plus, we knew Vidyard would be able to help us with best practices and providing all sorts of tracking and analytics capabilities.  

We’ve already been getting a lot of traction with the videos we’ve been sending out to customers. Our account managers are getting emails back from customers who are very impressed and they respond back quickly. We’re mostly using it for content, as well as for introducing ourselves to new customers so that they get to see our faces and we get to build a relationship right from the start. 

Proving the Value of Video

Soft metrics like this are great, but obviously I need to be able to prove the ROI of what we’re doing with video too. Right now, we’re looking at the numbers of views, and the number of content downloads that are associated with a video. We’re also keeping track of how quickly a lead responds with a video compared to without. Although it’s still a work in progress, so far we’ve found that it’s been a worthwhile investment. 

Proving the ROI of what you’re doing is why you can’t just use a video hosting platform like YouTube, you need a video management platform. 

On top of the analytics you get with a platform like Vidyard, the integrations are also important. For example, we've integrated with Marketo to help send out personalized videos in our emails, and even see the percentage of the video that was watched. We can also track a lot of the metrics I mentioned, whereas YouTube really just tracks views. 

If all you’re looking for is sending videos to an audience, then YouTube is fine. But if you really want to be able to track what’s going on with your videos and do personalization, then you need a more focused platform. 

The Future of Video Marketing

In the future, I think that video is going to kill text emails entirely. Since even phones have such good cameras nowadays, there’s no reason not to send a quick video response rather than taking the time to type something out. At Graydon, we’re going to be focusing on using videos for ABM—combining two of the biggest trends of personalization in one. 

The main advantage of video for all of these things is just how much more expressive it is, and how universal it is in everyone’s personal lives. Why do you think things like FaceTime and video stories on Instagram are popular? I barely even see text on Facebook anymore—everyone is going with images or video.  

Given that social media has made video a lot more popular in everyone’s personal life, and has so much influence on what people like, businesses need to start creating that same kind of interactive experience if they want to keep up. If businesses don’t start now, then they won’t be leading, they’ll just be trying to catch up.