Using Video to Fuel B2B Pipeline Growth with Connor Lewis

00:03 Welcome back to Marketing for Marketers, the series where we interview the brightest minds in marketing to unlock the insights behind marketing strategies that help generate pipeline. guest today is Connor Lewis. Connor is a video marketing expert who specializes in B2B marketing video ads. After spending four years as an in-house creator, Connor founded Studio Lewis, his own video marketing agency, where he creates B2B video ads that you'll love. Connor, welcome. I'm excited to chat video because there's...

00:31 Some people may or may not know listening, watching, you head up the branding content team, very heavily invested in video. So I'm looking forward to this chat. It's not often I get to just chat video for 45 minutes. So welcome. you. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to chat. Now we're going to, we're going to dive straight in cause I want to maximize the time that we have. Cause we've just been talking about the heat wave in the UK, which is eaten up nine minutes of our recording time. So I've got some questions here that, uh, one of my colleagues is very lovingly prepared for us.

01:01 I'm just going to have a look through, I'm going to have a look through list. Which one do I want to start with first? I don't necessarily want to go for number one. Hmm. Which one? Video is such a hot topic right now. It's like, there's so many things that we couldn't talk about. So this guy's the limit here. Actually, you know what? I am going to go with number one. He's done in a nice chronological flow. Why ruin it? So what would you say is the biggest misconception B2B marketers have about video and pipeline generation?

01:29 Yes. The biggest misconception I think that B2B marketers have about video is that it's not worth the investment because frankly, video is hard. It takes time, takes money. It's not as simple as a text post. It's not as simple as a search ad. It's not as simple even as an image ad. And that's by design. It's meant to be a little more complicated. It's why the world is heading towards videos because it's harder to replicate with AI. So a lot of things in there. But if you look at every B2C brand.

01:59 The largest split of their ads is hedged on video and some of the leading B2B brands are starting to do that too. At least with the clients I work with, the investment that you actually put into video gets paid off in the return on those ad spend. On average, a lot of people that we work with see like two to three times CTR engagement. And if you really just think about it, like you sitting there and if you actually do stop at an ad, if you stop at an image ad versus a video ad, which one are you spending a little more time with?

02:29 And time with a brand is ultimately the thing that is going to grow your affinity towards that brand. And so if you actually are targeting the right people, hitting them with a video is going to increase their likelihood to buy faster than an image because they're getting to, hopefully if you're doing video, right, they're getting to know you, the people behind the brand, the features that you offer, things like that. So yes, video is hard, but damn is video worth it. And if you, I'll add one more thing to this, which is that every B2B company is doing image ads. So.

02:57 If you can just stand out with a video on the feed, you're going to stop the scroll so much more. Think about on LinkedIn, how many webinars you've been pitched via ads or how many like free AirPods you've been offered. If you can stand out with, you know, a day in the life of something that those work really well as video ads, thought leadership podcasts, like the one we're doing now, those are great video ads to get started with. And then of course, the things that I do are more like punchy kind of comedy skits that relate to the features. Those have been doing really well too.

03:26 Yeah, there's a couple of things I want to touch on there. You mentioned, um, obviously B2C being far more open or it being much more of a familiar tactic. And it made me think about, um, I was sitting on the sofa the other day watching TV and then ads come on for cars. The ad, the ad for a car is always something like, built for the future. Yeah. Well, you know, world changing dynamics and I'm sitting there going, does, does this convince anyone to buy a car? No, it doesn't, but it makes you.

03:56 think about the brand, which makes you think, okay, yeah, Joe, coming to the end of my three year agreement. Let's go and have a look at Mercedes website and see what they got, see what the prices are. And it's strange how we've not quite got there. We've not quite got there in B2B that you have to think about video as being an attributable conversion piece rather than just not tapping on someone's shoulder and say, Hey, remember us, we're still here. That was the first one I wanted to touch on.

04:25 And then the second one, you mentioned sort of ad frequency, essentially of if you need to build that familiarity, you're aiming to build that familiarity. saw something on LinkedIn this morning that our VPN marketing shared. And was this graph that showed the first time that you advertise to someone or the first time that someone sees you, you've basically got this long tail curve that drops. And each time that you have an ad frequency or an interaction with them, whether that's organic or paid, that long tail curve.

04:54 Start slightly higher every time, which means the brand recall tail is greater every time. So I love that visual. That's great. I'll have to share it with you. It's a very, very good visual. It's probably one of those visuals that was created purely to show C-suite why people invest into brand, but it was great. enjoyed it. That's, mean, that is why you invest in brand, right? And there is brand video and there is demand video too, by the way. It's not just, um, all demand. Yeah.

05:23 That last piece is so crucial. think I said I'll touch on both of those. I'll loop back to the car one first. Cause I remember seeing the Jeep ad at the Superbowl with Harrison Ford and how they didn't even, they didn't even pitch an offer. They had a whole one minute ad at the Superbowl and they didn't even share like, you know, leasing at $400 a month. Um, like they do in a lot of car ads or something. It was pure Americana. It was like relating Jeep to freedom, the word freedom. And it was like.

05:51 That was the whole ad. It was when you think of freedom, hopefully you think of Jeep. the goal there was that it's still kind of top of mind for me, but I met, and I don't even have like that much patriotism to be honest, as much as other folks do. So I can only imagine what it did for those people, but.

06:05 That's a pure example of brand ad. love what you're talking about. And to relate to your second point, it's really just about exposure with ads a lot of the time. Like I think consumers are smart enough that unless an ad like truly speaks to them and they want to buy now, most of the time your ads are going to be watched, but probably scrolled by. Um, and it's all about just like, stay in top of mind, stay in top of mind.

06:25 creating a beautiful retargeting layer. So if they actually watch the entirety of an ad, like you bring them back with a new ad, stuff like that. And as long as the exposure to the right people is there, the rest will flow. And the strength of video is that the exposure is a little longer because it takes a little longer to parse. And so typically folks are spending a little more time with the brand. You get to show off personality of people inside the videos. There's a little bit of nuance there.

06:52 channel to channel, like if we're talking LinkedIn versus YouTube versus Meta that I can get into later. But yeah, I love your two points. It's all about exposure to the brand. the, on the topic of exposure then, when you look at the typical B2B sales cycle, where do you see video having the highest impact on moving people from the start of their journey to the end of their journey? I think there are different videos for different parts of the journey. When you say sales cycle, are you referring to like they've kind of

07:20 book to call or are you talking like the whole customer? would say the full, uh, you know, 250 plus days, whatever it is now. Yeah. For, let me speak for ads initially. this is ads on social channels and I'm generalizing because again, each channel likes different content, but I divided it into two brackets. There's a cold layer of ads, video ads, and then there is a retargeting layer or like a warm layer of ads. I would call it in the cold layer.

07:46 or interruption based essentially. People have never heard of you. They're just trying to enjoy their freaking feed. And then all of a sudden you show up. And so that is an entirely different context to enter someone's life. If you think about it that dramatically. Generally interruption based cold traffic ads need to be entertaining. They need to be punchy. They can't go too heavy on product. As soon as it starts to feel like an ad, people are going to scroll away. Which is especially true for this layer. Typically 15 to 30 seconds.

08:15 Um, do you don't show more than one feature of your product at max and you hook with pain that is kind of funny and relatable so they can laugh and cry at the same time. It's also a partnering with influencers is a really good cold traffic layer too, which is a whole rabbit hole for the warm layer. I actually really like, um, feature ads or customer ads. So customer ads are just a customer saying which feature they like the most.

08:43 What they were, problem they were facing, boom, CTA. Gong does this a lot in B2B. Most of their retargeting layer in LinkedIn is just customers sitting down at a desk showing you their favorite Gong feature. And as far as, uh, what was the other thing? Oh, the feature ads. Feature ads are a little more into the weeds of what you do. It'll maybe show off some fancy UI. It'll feel more like an ad, but again, since we're in this warm layer of ads, these are people who have, A, either visited your website.

09:11 Or B, watch the entirety of a cold layer ad so they're at least curious. Or C, it's a retargeting audience that you've just kind of custom made with your ad agency, which is great. And so that's how I split ads in my head a little bit. I just kind of went at at a sky view. There's a lot more detail there. And then when you actually get people on your website, those kinds of videos need to say what the hell you do very efficiently. And so we're moving off of skits when people go onto your website and onto like explainers, to be honest.

09:39 I think explainers get a bad rap. think they're very helpful in giving an overview in being easily shareable internally. So your champions can actually take those explainers and convince other people, Hey, just watch this 60 second thing. I'm thinking about purchasing it for the company. What do you think? Academy videos. like, how do you actually use these in practice? Landing page videos, those increased conversion for us when I was in-house, we had like downloadable assets for instance, that we would actually explain to people in a 30 second video.

10:05 which would increase conversion rates. And the last step of the process is sales enablement videos. So at this point, they've booked a call, they're on the fence, maybe they have to talk people into stuff maybe. And that's where case studies really shine. The velocity of sales cycles increases the more case studies you can share. This has just like been studied by HubSpot, it's been studied by Wistia. It's one of the most highly, if you're a sales led organization, start with case studies. I'm not even a case study agency. There are better agencies for that. And I recommend.

10:34 Again, if you're sales led, just go that direction. And your goal there is to share a video that is the same industry as the person that you're selling to. So like if, if I was selling to a manufacturing company, I want to share a manufacturing case study. And obviously the more recognizable logo, the better. The more you can share the story of the ROI, the better in that sense. And video does make a difference in those scenarios because I don't, I don't, maybe it's.

10:58 Maybe it's how I feel, but at least the VPs of marketing and other executives that I've talked about have grown skeptical of generalized testimonials that are written and on video and they can actually see the person and they can understand and feel their conviction. It lands better. So I walked through like at a high level each step, generally how I think about video.

11:17 at each step and like what the content is. But maybe I missed something that you're thinking about, Jimmy. No, no, that was honestly, was, I wasn't expecting you to do a full work, a walk through the customer journey and the optimal type of video, let's throughout the cycle. So it's cause I was basically sitting there and that's why the Colts were turning. I was like, Hmm, yeah. Do we have, do we have video for that? Do we not have video for that? Okay. Maybe we should start thinking about filling. Cause we're, we're seeing, um, pretty good top of funnel at the minute, but midler funnel could

11:47 use some work. I was listening to the middle of stuff and I was like, depends by the way, middle of funnel. There's nuance there too. Like if you're sales led versus product led, like, and I mean, true product led. I'm a lot of people say they're product led, but then they're like a freemium plus sales is going to call you afterwards. think I tend to think of that as a little more sales led of marketing strategy, but if you're truly product led, you have a free forever version and you're just trying to get people to upgrade.

12:13 The middle of funnel looks like user education in that sense. It's like you're onboarding a bunch of free people. How do you get them to upgrade is actually the real path to revenue. so getting them to get value out of it, to use the software more becomes the number one challenge versus in a sales ad organization, you're just trying to get like the buying committee bought in. You're trying to convince them it's a good investment. Maybe a few people like the execution level have tried out the software and are trying to push it upwards. yeah, anyway. Love this topic if you couldn't tell.

12:41 No, there was some very, very useful tips there. think if anyone was listening to that five minute segment of the types of video, they need to think about each stage of the journey. And if you already know, like we do where we want to improve the funnel, where we're seeing slightly less than ideal performance in the funnel, then then we know what to focus on, is, which is good. So, all right then. So distribution.

13:02 So inter you mentioned quite a few channels there, YouTube, LinkedIn, web, et cetera, et cetera. So which video format formats and channels have driven the most qualified pipeline for you then in your experience? Man, it's a complicated question because the things that get the most clicks aren't always the most effective in a weird way for driving qualified pipeline that is, but it's so channel specific. You know what? This is a good, I think opportunity to talk about video formats and channels.

13:31 Because I think the trap that some demand gen managers run into is thinking that you can just like take a video and make it vertical and then put it on meta. And unfortunately, channels are really picky with the types of content that they want because they just have their own personalities to, to put it bluntly. Like if you're going on meta, you're probably expecting a certain type of video. And when I say meta, I mostly mean Instagram, but.

13:55 You know, sometimes Facebook is better for the older generation. When you're going on LinkedIn, you're expecting hopefully to be educated, um, to learn a little bit about people's personal lives behind the business. When you're going on Twitter, you're expecting something right out. You're expecting something, right? So all of these channels have like a very different intent going into them. And as a result, the content needs to look different. So for example, with Meta, our video formats are like, even though we get the fancy cameras, we're an agency with the fancy cameras, right? We'll sometimes just record stuff with phone.

14:24 On set because that is the format that has done best for us on meta is vertical lo-fi personalized, sometimes like selfie kind of content versus YouTube entirely different. we're ever advertising in YouTube, people are coming in and expecting high quality. I don't know if you've ever watched a YouTube video these days, but most of them are really freaking good. They're like beautiful camera setups, lighting, sound, everything's perfect. And, uh, so.

14:50 You have to match that format if you're, if you're coming to that channel again, now we're horizontal. Now we're shooting with nice cameras. Now we're maybe trying to be a little more punchy and like comedic and high quality, good props, smart jokes on YouTube. Um, and yeah, and then on LinkedIn, if you asked me about LinkedIn videos, three months from now, I my answer would change. And if you asked me three months before, my answer would be different. But right now what I'm seeing on, on LinkedIn is that weirdly enough.

15:18 horizontal video is doing the best from what I'm seeing. It's just that, that text hook that you need at the top of LinkedIn is there for horizontal video and it's how users like to scroll right now. That said, I know LinkedIn is making a huge vertical push. They have so many different influencers shouting from the rooftops that vertical is going to be the future on LinkedIn. I haven't seen it yet, but I think if they're, if they're proclaiming that they're investing in that direction, vertical kind of meta style videos.

15:45 will do pretty well. again, as of what is this? July 1st, 2025 horizontal videos with decent production quality have been doing the best on LinkedIn for me. then- Just on that, have you done A-B testing to that effect as in you've done the same video vertical and horizontal and there's a demonstrable difference? Virtually, yes. Like the same content, but maybe not the exact same video. That's a really fun test though. I think I might do that.

16:13 This is like the same time each week post it. But no, I mean, I've posted for a lot of different companies, made videos for a lot of different influencers too. And it's more of a generalized feeling of like horizontal always performs better. As of now, again, I do think it's going to go vertical because they're pushing that way. I just think they need to fix how it presents itself in the

16:38 It's we post vertical at the minute, but I still don't love the way it looks in the feed. Like on desktop, it's like the way in which you scroll, it's very rare that you actually get the full video in the right scroll and then you have to re scroll to get it in. And whereas the horizontal video, there's much higher chance of you getting it in your window and you can see the whole thing. What are your thoughts on square then is like a happy medium. I like square. I actually post.

17:03 Now four by five, which is like almost square. It's like slightly vertical square on LinkedIn specifically because of the reason that you talked about for LinkedIn desktop, shows up better. We still get that preview text, which is really important to me on desktop at least. then, um, uh, you end up show, this is all on LinkedIn, by the way. And that's what I'm talking about on LinkedIn. You, you actually end up being in the video feed down the line where if someone actually is.

17:29 scrolling on the video feed, which is rare right now. I don't think many people do that, but you will show up there if you do square as well. Uh, the square and vertical shows up. So I'm a fan. I like a happy medium. I saw a square video the other day and I was like, actually quite liked that because we, you know, resource limitations or whatever we default to vertical, because that means it can go on YouTube shorts and LinkedIn. So we don't have to do two different edits of the same, uh, clip of this, sort of stuff. But I would rather do.

17:57 four by five or square for LinkedIn and then just leave vertical for YouTube shorts. But obviously not necessarily twice the amount of effort because you could just switch the layout in AI with AI nowadays anyway, but it's twice the export at least. the export time and the credits you have to spend on certain tools or the time someone has to spend exporting that sort of stuff. You know, add that up every year is enough of a ball to just stick to vertical. Yeah, that makes sense. Interesting, interesting. Okay. So.

18:27 Let's talk measurement, attribution, metrics, is always an interesting conversation when talking about video. how do you, I already know the answer to this is like, do you measure the success of a video in a demand jam program beyond the views and engagement? I think you're probably, you're sorry, it jumped back in. Yeah. You're probably, did you get the full question?

18:54 Yeah. Yeah. And you said that you had a, you think you already know the answer to this. what do you think the answer is? The full question, how do you measure the success of video in a Demand Chain program beyond views and engagement? And I think your answer is going to be, well, that depends on the video and what part of the customer journey you're talking about. And then it's going to be slightly different for the parts of the customer journey that we've spoken about. Yeah. I'll give the audience a pure non-nuanced answer so that they can at least walk away with something tactical, which is to say that.

19:24 I do look at watch time all the time. Watch time. It doesn't matter what part of the journey we're in, how much percent of the video did they get through? That's what I care about the most when I'm looking at video because if, yeah, you know, don't expect high percentages on these, especially if you're looking at cold traffic ads, most people are going to skip them. It's just the way of the game. But if, if I'm like seeing that people are not even watching 10%, 20%, even 30 % of the video in like a retargeting layer.

19:53 That's a bad video and we probably shouldn't be running it. So on all channels, check out your watch time, see how many people are actually completing the ad. Cause that's the mark of a good video ad, regardless of, you know, click through rates, all the other things we watch CPMs. think the number one metric that people should watch is watch time. Yeah. It's interesting because we, I'm thinking YouTube here, but we, for YouTube shorts, we track a percentage views.

20:17 per, because we have series on stream, the series being like a Netflix series. So we had something called the sales stoic, which is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a sales version of the daily stoic and the watch time on those shorts was between 40 and 60 % depending on the- not bad for me to be this. Yeah, for like, yeah, for a YouTube short B2B. Whereas we've got other series where the average percentage watch is like 6 % for a YouTube short.

20:45 So it's, yeah, it is very, very interesting. Cause you, when you first look at it, you're like, oh, you percent. All right. It's not amazing. And then other ones are getting six. You're like, okay, the 40 % the 40 % is pretty good. in B2B our audiences are generally pretty niche. And so a lot of the times the video will hit the wrong person and it'll hurt your percentage. So you're not looking for like the 90 to a hundred percent that other YouTubers see on their like purely entertainment videos. You're looking for that.

21:13 40, 40 to 60 is great on a short. I would take that in any B2B company. That's awesome. obviously, well, I'm talking organic there. If we were targeting people who we specifically think would enjoy that video, it probably be a lot higher. A little less. Yeah. It's the nature of ads. It's also why it's important to plug your brand as early in an ad as you can, because most of the time people are going to skip it. It's just, it's just how ads are. Even if it's a fantastic ad, it's still an ad at the end of the day. And so.

21:39 I always like to say, your brand name in the first six seconds of an ad. So even if they do skip it, they still got that impression. And what metrics should we be using to track or connect video to pipeline? The pipeline? Are we talking, are we getting into the realms of influenced attribution with tools like Dream Data and Hockey Stack? Oh yeah. At that point, it starts to become a little above my pay grade because attribution is a nightmare. But.

22:09 I have worked with really, really high quality demand gen folks who do use some of the dream data hockey stack attribution that you're talking about. It's also about your sales team, just like literally asking the question on the sales call, how did you find us? Or like, what was the last piece of content you remember seeing by us? Last touch attribution, you know, it's, what we can do as marketers for now.

22:32 Unless you have some of these fancy softwares. I will tell you what I do because I run ads for myself. They're all video ads. And I always ask, what's the last video that you remember seeing of me? And obviously I'm a unique case. I'm a service business, but it has helped me tremendously attribute like the right. is it? Which video formats are actually landing and educating versus which ones are getting engagement. For instance, I started to do this format where it was like a top-down approach and it actually break down the structure of an ad with like pieces of paper and it didn't get much engagement. I didn't know if it was doing well, but.

23:01 The next three leads that booked with me all referenced that video. So it's marketing, man. It's always going to be really hard to attribute the things that do poorly in engagement will do killer for book calls. Sometimes you just got to keep investigating with it. I'm a huge advocate of the whole, did you hear about us? You know, put it, put it after, put it on the thank you page. Once someone's booked a call, you booked a demo. Ask it on a discovery call. think my previous company, we.

23:29 we're investing to be fair, it only like between five and 10 grand a month on LinkedIn at the time trying to prove it out. And we had minimal attribution to show the value of it, but 30 % of everyone who filled in the, did you hear about said LinkedIn. I want to get it implemented here at Dealfront or at least embed to the practice of it a lot more, both on calls and on web as well. Cause I think we definitely need more clarity in trying to show the value of.

23:58 Pure brand or demand chain stuff. yeah. And that's how you get the investment too, is you got to keep proving it and show the payback period and stuff like that. So I get it. I know how much of a struggle it is. Yeah. Just keep asking. You've touched on the fact that obviously you're a service business. You run ads for your own business. I do, Which is, guess it's a lot easier when you're running ads about the service you provide because you can provide the service to yourself to do the ads. Exactly.

24:26 For teams without an in-house function or big budgets, what's your advice for like low-fi scrappily getting started with video content that can have impact? Yes, there are a few things. yeah, generally for context, the videos that I do more better for like when you're series B, series C, you've kind of proven out which ads work already or have like a feeling for product messaging. I would say for people getting started and with like no budget at all.

24:56 Uh, here's, here's like the first thing I would tell you to get is an Osmo pocket three. It is an $800 camera that does everything for you. It's, it's one of the best creator cameras out there right now. It even comes with a little microphone. Filming yourself as a marketer is. I think still the number one underrated skill is getting on camera yourself. It's going to always be the cheapest. have the sharpest point of view on your own company.

25:21 and what your product provides. You can interview founders, you can interview other marketers. A lot of, lot of companies I'm seeing these days get started with that scrappy kind of self approach. If you're not someone who wants to do that, if you're not comfortable in front of the camera, totally normal. I wasn't for a very long time. I think one of the cheaper ways you can get started with video is actually through influencers. Um, I think B2B influencers are still relatively cheap. Um, to be frank, you can probably, I know influencers and how much they're charging.

25:50 Uh, and it's usually in the ballpark of like $1,000, $2,000 for a video that's authentically them showing off the product. Uh, and that is, for, far as video goes cheap for the impact that you're getting, because you're, you're, hitting on their audience who already trust them. And most of the time you can talk them into a deal where you can reuse that later as a thought leadership ad. And so you can use their likeness and their message to actually start to see what.

26:19 operates in that space. And by that, mean like, you know, what resonates with your market with regards to video ads. So that's the second cheap option I would say is, and again, this isn't true for all video influencers. Like there are some influencers who will charge you way more than one I just referenced, but if you actually do the research yourself and get scrappy with it and search them out, you can find them. The third thing is as cringe as it is, because I think sometimes it's a little overrated, but text on screen videos are very cheap right now.

26:48 You can find people on Fiverr to do a very good job at that. I also have some contacts for that. If you're curious, usually people's lower budgets, I think should start there. They're almost like glorified. They're almost like image, image ads that are turned into video ads is how I think about them. It's not like you're, you're, you're probing at a pain point immediately with text on screen. But it's moving and then it shows the product a little bit off and those tend to still work.

27:13 pretty well, at least at the beginning. The overall engagement rate is quite a bit lower than like humans on screen, but it does give you a scalable way to test a bunch of messages at once. Cause once you have a brand template down, let's say for a motion graphics ad like that, you can just churn out like 10 and then see which hook actually performs the best and then invest into that area. for instance, if I was like a sales tech organization who's making a bunch of motion graphics ads, it's like a V1 of a video ad.

27:42 campaign, I would test out like all the different pain points in the beginning and then show the same product and you know, the rest of the video afterwards and then be like, which one did people stop on the most? That pain point might be the most important to actually invest in further with video. Maybe we can get some influencers involved or maybe we can set up a shoot day and get like ton of ads on that. But I would get that data first before I invest into anything bigger. So yeah, those are the three things I would say like number one.

28:08 Get used to filming yourself or someone on the marketing team can handle that in-house creator and Osmo Pocket 3 is by far the cheapest and best equipment right now. Two is micro influencers, small influencers can get you started on video really easily. And the good thing about it is they'll usually write the script and edit it for you. And then three is motion graphics ads are dirt cheap right now and a pretty good way to get started with testing. I just wouldn't want that as like an end state for my company. Now if in terms of that first piece of advice you gave, so

28:37 just get filming. would you start filming though? What would be the type of content that you would start with? You spoke about doing interviews like this, speaking to peers, but if you were starting a new business tomorrow and you were a marketer of one, what topic or theme would you start with? Yeah. Should I talk about like, is software, most of the people listening? Yeah, there's SaaS. Yeah. Okay. SaaS. Yeah. If I'm like a marketing team of one who just joined a SaaS organization, it's really important to develop a point of view.

29:06 I just think point of view is everything these days. And so that'll take some time, especially if you just joined the team, you're going to let it sink in, take 90 days, you know, get that point of view. the meantime, just building in public and like filming yourself day in the life of like, here's a project I'm working on, especially on LinkedIn, that kind of stuff does bananas numbers right now, because everyone is starting to like have an affinity towards that more personal content on LinkedIn and helping each other out and.

29:33 knowing what you're up to. I would say that's the easiest thing to get started with as well is like do a day in the life of video because it'll teach you so much of the fundamentals of being on camera and being video. teaches you how to film B-roll of yourself, which is awkward as hell, but something you have to get used to. It teaches you how to do voiceover, which is a whole, you're acting when you're doing voiceover and it's complicated. And I used to suck at it and I still kind of do. And then three, it's about visual storytelling. So you're learning how to stitch together.

30:03 the voiceover plus the B-roll plus anything in the software that you want to show to actually tell a story about your life and about the software's life. And so it's just like that, that format. If you can do that repetitively, you'll start to understand video a lot more and all the little intricacies that go into it. All the music editing that goes into it and like these small details that you don't think about until you're in it. And it's going to be really freaking hard. The first video is going to be impossible. feels like.

30:30 And then the second video is going to be a little easier, but still really hard. And then the third video is going to be pretty hard, but you're starting to get the hang of it and so on and so forth. And until eventually you just get comfortable with it. And I'm a video dude. do video for a living. I've done video for 10 years. And it was, it took me until year seven of those 10 years to actually step in front of the camera. And until basically at the beginning of this year to actually master it and get it to a point where I feel comfortable on camera now.

30:57 and comfortable editing myself. So be easier on yourself in the beginning. You know, it's, it's, you're going to be self-critical. Everyone is just, just get on that camera and just get those repetitions down. Practice the art form. It'll pay off so much in the long run, especially when you're giving feedback on other people's videos, you'll, you'll come out with such a smarter perspective too. So day in the life, start there. Then you can start to develop your point of view and do like thought leadership videos, which I can share some examples of if you want, but that's where I'd start.

31:23 Yeah, no, it's interesting because I've been wanting to film. I noticed that the best performing content I was sharing on LinkedIn was me talking about how I had set up Asana and the workflows. So I was, I was, we were going to do Asana for marketers as a stream series where we just show how we've set up Asana to as the content engine workflows. like we've launched nine different series in in H1 and we've launched.

31:47 two playbooks a month, a hundred blogs or whatever, and just to show how Osana set up in order to manage that scale. And the goal was that if we can just build the rapport of showing other marketers how we do marketing and we're trying to sell to marketers, then they're going to be like, Oh, why don't I check out what they actually do? So I really want to do that. And that's easy because I just use Riverside, which we're on now. I share my screen and say, let's build a board together. Let's build a template together. And it's like a 15 minute video, lo-fi minimal editing.

32:15 So I want to try that. I'll give you, if you want to make it even better, use the software called Screen.Studio. It'll, it's like a fancy loom basically. We're lucky enough that we do have an in-house editor. So the reason I do Riverside is because then he gets separate files. can play, he moves around the face and all that sort of stuff. And yeah, he can get a bit creative. Don't listen to me. If you don't have an in-house editor, then use Screen.Studio. otherwise, yeah. that's got the nice rounded edges, like a almost not quite a square, but.

32:44 Yeah, I think I know the one. puts everything in a rounded square. puts everything in a fake desktop environment. And then whenever you click, it like slowly zooms into what you're doing. And it's very, it feels like cinematic without much effort on your part. Yeah. I know the one you mean. It does look good and for you to be fair. Um, I love, I want to build on what you said really quick because you, mentioned that the Asana, how I build Asana boards did the best. I think there's a nugget there that I've noticed, which is that like.

33:11 A lot of times marketers feel like we have to do like how-to content and be the authority on something immediately. like honestly, the how-I content does so much better if you just start a post with how-I. And you mentioned like, you know, nine series, two, was it reports? Two or three playbooks a month. Two or playbooks a month. Yeah, that's two or three playbooks a month. Blogs we've done this quarter. We had an agency.

33:39 uh, for the blog, but in-house we're doing an average of one blog a week in-house as well. Um, plus all the other stuff we do. Incredible. Yeah. I mean, just that alone is a reason to watch it. If you just said in, in H1, we did these things. Here's, here's how I built the Asana template for it. Hell yeah, I'm watching that because like, there's no way AI wrote that because you did it. Uh, and I think this loops into a broader point, which is that as AI

34:06 gets better and better and, content is going to be turned out at a larger rate. A lot of it garbage. The way that you stand out and, and, and don't get caught up into that tsunami is that you keep centering the content on how, what you're thinking, what you're doing, what your company is thinking and doing, what your founders are thinking and doing. If you just center it on like a human's point of view, it's always going to do great. Cause people can tell that shit. So I love that. I'm not surprised that it did

34:31 We've got this new AI push program, which is what it's called internally, but it's basically right. Big focus on AI that's embedded everywhere, make our lives easier. So I'm working on wrapping my head around like nanrelai.app, other agentic workflow things. then that's another one where I'm like, if I can record a literally probably five minute video, if that, of how I built an agentic workflow that turns this episode into a 1500 word blog that's optimized by LILM, puts it in Asana.

35:01 sends me a notification on Slack and then I'll prove for you to check it and post it. Someone's going to watch that video because they're like, because the AI agents is like, Oh, agent, agent, the word agent. it's a, it's a, it's a trigger word. But if we say, here's how you turn a 45 minute episode into an LLM optimized blog in, uh, automatically, like it's more of that to your point. It's the, it's the real, it's the actual use case. Like it's the, it's the game. Yeah.

35:31 Yeah, I think, I think with all ads, with all videos, if you can single it down to a moment, like you just talked about, like the moment that you need to turn this podcast episode into a blog, like, you know, dreadful, but automatically, hell yeah. Versus an agentic AI that turns podcasts into blogs. It's like, it feels a little separated from like the human experience. So yeah, I love that. Oh, I'm gonna have to do it then. I'm gonna have to do it.

35:57 All right then a couple of, a couple of more questions for you. can you highlight a campaign or particular video that you worked on where it had the most obvious like impact on pipeline? I'm trying to think of which one I'm allowed to talk about. think there's been a few. I'll talk, I'll talk about one that I think explainers get a bad rap. So I'm going to talk about an explainer project that I did last year that had a good impact. We worked with this company called SCADA. They are a B2B SaaS company.

36:27 that does space management. like if you have an office with more people than desks, so you've less desks than people, then typically what you'll do is have some kind of booking software so that you can book a desk this day and Sally can book that same desk the next day, et cetera. Cool software, very simple. And there's a few competitors in the space. So it was like, brand was brand mattered as a mode.

36:53 We did an explainer video that was part comedy, part explainer. And it was just a day in the life of a person using the software. So simple. was like, instead of the traditional like text on screen, flashy UI animation, blah, blah, blah explainer. Um, we did it live action with an actor and actually brought them through their day. But instead they're using scatter as opposed to like trying to book things manually through like a spreadsheet. Um.

37:22 We made it, it was 90 seconds. It's cool. You should go on skater.com if you want to see it. It's still there. But the reason it's still there is because we did an A B test with the homepage. Put the hero video at top versus no hero video at top. And the, the hero video version had a lift of 27 % conversion rate for people actually clicking to book a call. And so that was surprising to me because frankly.

37:46 Sometimes I've seen conversion rates drop when you put a video on the homepage or on a landing page because you're giving them something else to click on. But in this case, at least one can theorize that it educated people on exactly what the software does, how it fits into someone's day-to-day life. And it was one of the first explainer videos that I've made that's long form that had a considerable like two digit bump in conversion rate like that. So they ended up moving forward with the B test, in this case, the video. They've kept it on the homepage ever since.

38:13 I think it's a little below the fold now, which is great. Oh, yeah, and that's also a video that champions use to sell internally. So it doesn't just exist on the homepage. It's actually a sales enablement tool and it's a, it's a 92nd way for anyone inside the champions organization to download what exactly Sketa does and how it fits into their day-to-day life. The format of that, I think was one of the most important levers. Um, that's a little underrated.

38:41 Because we stood out from the traditional explainer and that we weren't just like showing you software. We were showing you a human being, and then the software just augmented their life. So we put ourselves in the, in, in the feet of that human and understand, you know, if we do get SCADA, how will my day change? What will this actually make a considerable impact versus

39:05 You can imagine the same video like showing flashes on screen of the software going 3D zooming into these little features, but no one cares about that because we've all seen it and it doesn't actually tell me how this fits in my day to day life. So yeah, that was one of the biggest campaigns or one of the campaigns that has had the biggest impact. And I make that example because I explainers are underrated. I think they still work very well. I think they're highly shareable. And I think if you break the mold a little and do a little bit of a different format, you're going to come out on top.

39:34 I, it's frustratingly, I saw a very, very nice explainer video from one of our, uh, competitors, um, earlier, earlier, earlier in the week. I shared internally and I was like, I've got, I was like, this is a lovely explainer video. Yeah. It's very good. Okay. Then last, last question. The question we, we knew would come up has to be asked with like looking ahead. So with all of this AI generated VO three, you name it.

40:04 the way in which you're able to create, okay, lower quality or churnable video out at pace. What trends or tactics should B2B marketers actually pay attention to if they want to double down on video? Should it be VO3 AI that's just go balls deep with that or stick to a more traditional method, but you use AI to make that easier and more efficient? This is evolving.

40:32 at the moment. So I'm just going to tell you what I'm paying attention to because I'm paying a lot of attention to AI right now, as you can imagine as a video agency. one is consumer. I'm really paying attention to consumer sentiment on AI video. When someone posts an AI video on LinkedIn, on Meta, on YouTube, and it is in all three of those areas, what's the reaction in the comments? What is, how is it being received compared to the engagement? Are there other posts? Right now I'm seeing that consumers by and large reject AI content that they can tell is AI.

41:00 That's just what I'm seeing. If, if a human comes across as AI generated, instant slop. Like it's, it's almost, it's almost brand damaging to upload like a pure VO3 video right now is again, this is just what I'm seeing. Will it change? Probably as we become a little more more exposed to it. And I'm not anti AI. So I think if that sentiment did change a little bit, I'd lean a little more heavily into it.

41:26 Other things that I'm paying attention to is are are other video agencies offering AI services? So far, only a few of them are. It's so, so it sounds like the trend is moving in that direction a little bit. Most of them are very simple, short videos that have multiple different characters. So there's no continuity loss. And most of them were doing it well, are trying to hide the fact that it's AI a little bit. Um, because again, as soon as the consumer knows that it's AI.

41:55 help, they don't love it at this point. I'll tell you where I'm using AI in my business right now, making videos for clients is repurposing is has been great, continues to be great. I use a tool called Summarize within it's it's spelled with an AI in the middle of it. Jay. Jay. Yeah, Jay made it. yeah, Jay. Jay Desai. Jay Desai. Yeah, he made a good tool there.

42:23 I use it for all of my podcasts, clients, and for any kind of long form video, it does pretty well for a ton of different formats. It'll always get you a V1. I still recommend this to highly edit it. I have some GBT prompts that take like the summarize output and just like make it into a better blog post. And then I edit from there. And then I deliver that to clients. it's, AI is very good in repurposing. In concepting, I also use AI video and VO3.

42:49 for concepts and for storyboards. So if I'm pitching something to a client, which I do every week, they're almost always going to see a video storyboard at this point. It's not going to be crazy advanced, but we already, we have the tools to create the exact shot we want in the exact setting with the exact character. Yes, it looks AI and shitty, but for concepts, who cares? Like we're not showing that to the public. It's just to get, it's just to put something on paper. Cause a lot of times with video.

43:15 People are talking past each other because they have all these different ideas of what the video should look like. And so if you can use VO3 to actually put something down and group everyone to talk about something that's really good. So I'm using it again, I'm repurposing and concepting. And then there are a lot of miniature tools, which I won't get too nerdy about, but are absolutely crushing it in the editing space. One is, uh, you can take any song and change it into any length and it'll automatically remix the song to that length. Yeah, it's killing it there. Audio. I can take.

43:45 really, really shitty like iPhone audio and turn it into sounding like a podcast. Thanks to Adobe podcasts AI automatically reframing videos is something that we've talked about already, but it is insanely powerful and it's just made shorter with AI. Autofill and, taking stuff out of scenes is something that I use a lot. So maybe we shot something that has like a wire that's kind of hanging in the background. AI makes it very easy to take it out. So there's a lot of efficiencies bought in the editing process in AI right now that I'm seeing be absolutely killer.

44:14 And then, um, if you're not using AI to brainstorm content topics, I think you're missing out. think it's brilliant in that sense. It's never going to give you the kit, the original campaign, cause it pulls from the internet, right? So we're not talking about original thought there, but it's damn good sounding board, man. Sometimes I just need to talk to talk to someone or something in this case, GBT and just like brainstorm with them.

44:39 Has anyone ever done this campaign before? You know, what are some ways that we can visualize this? And it's quite good at giving you feedback in the moment and someone to bounce off of as I'm writing scripts, I'll just have it on the left-hand side and like workshop alongside it. So that's what I'm using in the business. That's what I'm seeing trend wise. This again, if you interviewed me in a year, I probably had vastly different things to say. It's just how fast it's moving. yeah. Well, that's very interesting. So that kind of aligns with.

45:07 Um, my team, we've got a designer and a media producer or video guy, and we use AI to supercharge things or to make things easier rather than relying on it for the, you know, the full output. The only example of like the fully AI generated stuff that I've liked is the, what was it? The gorilla. There's the sit there. There's basically a gorilla who did a selfie style video. Oh yeah. Yeah. And he, uh, he knocked his teeth out doing something. So he went to the dentist in Vegas.

45:36 Uh, to get some new teeth and it showed it showed the whole like customer journey of him going to this dentist. And it was actually an ad for the, for the dentist on Vegas. And it was funny. know, like there, there are these like one off kind of, uh, what do you call it? Formats that seem to work with AI, like, like that selfie video format that you've talked about. I've seen that a few different times now. I've seen the infomercial format a lot of different times with AI. Yeah.

46:02 It's evolving, man. But that sounds kind of funny. I like that. Because obviously you stopped in the feed, like, why is there a gorilla recording himself doing extreme sports? And then it's only when you get right to the end where he gets his teeth sorted and it shows the brand of the dentist and you're like, And it is a very, very good video.

46:28 Well, that's been, uh, that has been a fantastic 45, 50 minutes. I mean, I've been jotting stuff down in the background. I've been opening Skenes website. I've been opening Adobe podcast to check out the speech enhancement. Um, and I'll definitely have to reach back out to Jay about summarizing it I've used it before, but I haven't used it for a couple of years. See what, see what's up with that. Um, considerably better. That's been, it's been a fantastic chat. I think there's, there's tons.

46:56 good advice and ways to think about video in there. So thank you very much for joining me for an episode. My pleasure. Great questions and thanks for having me. And for those people watching or listening, we will check you out in the next episode.