REAL MARKETERS: Stop Being Scared of Video

Stephanie Cox: Welcome to Real Marketers where we hear from marketers who move fast, ask forgiveness, not permission, obsess about driving results and are filled to the brim with crazy ideas and the guts to implement them. This is not a fireside chat and there's absolutely no bullshit allowed here. I'm your host, Stephanie Cox. I have more than 15 years of marketing experience and I've pretty much done about everything in my career. I believe speed is better than perfection. I use the Oxford comma. I love Coca- Cola. I have exceptionally high standards and surround myself with people who get shit done. On this show, my guests and I will push boundaries and share the real truth about marketing and empower you to become a real marketer. Welcome to the second season of Real Marketers. We have an amazing lineup planned for you this season, and I cannot wait for you to hear from all of our guests. We're getting started with one of my favorite people, which is Tyler Lessard. He is the VP of Marketing and Chief Video Strategist at Vidyard. He is also the author of The Visual Sale. He's been a previous CMO at Fixmo and had multiple roles at Blackberry. We're talking everything about video. Let me just say, if you're not incorporating video as a major part of every aspect of your business from marketing to sales, to customer success and so on, you're definitely missing out. Thanks for joining me, Tyler. I don't know why I haven't had you on the show before.

Tyler Lessard: Stephanie, I am so excited to be here. You're right. We've known each other for at least two or three years now. I always enjoy our conversations because I also think that you are one of the most creative and interesting marketers out there with some of the things you're doing. I am super stoked to be here.

Stephanie Cox: Well, first question I love to ask, which is, tell me something about yourself that few people know.

Tyler Lessard: I'd say within my community out there in the business world, I've been a marketing leader for more than 10 years now. But prior to that, what a lot of folks don't know, is I'm actually an engineer by trade. I graduated from the Systems Design Engineering program here at the University of Waterloo in beautiful Toronto area here in Canada. I started my career as a Software Developer at Blackberry, the then smartphone manufacturer and a solution provider. I spent many years on the technical side of businesses as a developer and working with developer communities. It was an interesting start to my world. I didn't intend to come over here to the dark side of marketing, but I am thrilled with where I am today and appreciate the opportunity to build on my technical background.

Stephanie Cox: What caused you to make that change? Also, I love that you were at Blackberry, because I always tell people, when I started in mobile, the first apps I did were for Blackberry, which, that's the biggest way to date yourself ever.

Tyler Lessard: Shh. Let's not put it that way. It was wild. I started at Blackberry in 2001, I was there for 10 years and I started off as a developer and quickly realized that I was not a great developer nor did I really enjoy it. I just didn't thrive on working in isolation and digging into code. It just didn't end up really being my thing. But one of the things I did really enjoy doing was working with others, articulating the value of technology and helping them solve problems related to it. I actually ended up leading and building out our developer program at Blackberry, where I worked with third party developers, initially helping with technical support. But ultimately I ended up expanding that out into a full developer relations program and just kept gravitating more and more towards the business and marketing side of it. I really enjoyed working with partners and managing those relationships. I became the go- to speaker when we had to go out and talk about or evangelize the platform or work with customers and operators with it. It ultimately really drew me more into, what I didn't realize at the time, but it was effectively product marketing for our developer platform and things just took on a life from there.

Stephanie Cox: That's really fascinating. I think developer marketing is something that a lot of people don't realize how important it is. If you sell into IT and developers, it's a totally different way of marketing than what a lot of us probably think about.

Tyler Lessard: It is. So much of it is about creating a community of like-minded people. There very much tends to be this almost like comradery that I learned about those areas. It was less about marketing to them and more about partnering with them, frankly, and helping them ultimately kind of get to where they needed to get to, genuinely collaborating in the market and going to market together to help them be successful, not just in building what they were building, but then in their go-to market efforts. That was really fun being a part of that kind of full life cycle with these vendors where it was everything from yes, helping them understand how to build the best product, but then also supporting them in their go-to market to make sure whatever it is they build is successful. That level of partnership, ultimately to me, is actually the best way to market.

Stephanie Cox: No, I completely agree. Now you're leading marketing at Vidyard. Full disclosure, I've been a Vidyard customer for three years. If you've ever heard me talk about video, I'm a fangirl over how much we love Vidyard. I would love to maybe start talking a little bit about video. It's so funny in this day and age to me, marketing, using video, whether that is in your marketing efforts, in your sales efforts with customer success and support, seems so obvious, yet I find so many companies aren't doing it or aren't doing it well. If you were to talk to someone and they're thinking about really embracing video and what I mean by embracing video, not just creating a video, but really making video part of your organization. What should they be thinking about as they embark on that endeavor?

Tyler Lessard: It's such an interesting time for this because video has been around forever and any marketer or sales team that you talk to and you say, hey, video, good. Right? Everybody nods their head. Of course, video is great and we should be using video to communicate our key messages and to engage our audiences in different ways. But, to your point, it's a challenge for a lot of folks. A lot of that comes down to it just simply has not been a traditional or historic in-house capability within our organizations. We went through this, we've gone through this many different times in different iterations of marketing teams. Remember back when having internal content marketers and writers wasn't even a thing, right? Back when it was just we had a website and we did advertisements, and then all of a sudden we figured out this content and inbound marketing thing, and we went, oh, we should start creating a consistent cadence of our own original content, put those out into our communities and use that as ways to engage our audience. We started by working with agencies and having outsource people. Then many of us went, well, wait a minute, this is something that just needs to be a part of what we do. It came in- house. We now have folks internally who lead those activities. Same thing happened with social. The same thing's happened with a lot of other areas. Video is just at that point now where we're starting to understand and realize, hey, it's become a lot more accessible. The ability to create it and share it has been fully democratized. Any of you listening out there right now, could by the end of this podcast, record and publish a video of pretty darn good quality. Which you couldn't have done 10 years ago, even five years ago. The ability to create the content has become completely democratized. The expectation of audiences is now there, that they expect to be able to consume rich media content. If they want to learn about a topic or understand something, they want to be able to watch a video. Those two things have suddenly collided, the demand and the supply opportunity, have collided. What we all just need to figure out is that supply side. It is easy. We got to get over that hurdle of video is hard and expensive. We just need to get there as marketers. Honestly, I think the biggest shift in that is just starting to think about how do we make this an in-house capability of ours? How do we skill up the folks we have? Or maybe do we bring in somebody who is a professional video producer who has those abilities? It no longer becomes the oh no, we have to create a video every time we want to do it. It just becomes a part of our cadence, just like written content and just like designed infographics.

Stephanie Cox: I think that's such an interesting point. It's funny when you're talking about content and it kind of relates to video today. I remember when everyone started to realize you needed to do your own content. At first, it was like, oh, well we just have the team to do that. We'll just do it internally or we'll use an agency. And then we started realizing no, like there's a special skill that's needed to write really engaging content. I think that's the same thing for video. What I mean by that is, the strategy. I think there's a creativity that's needed for thinking about how your company uses videos strategically. But I do think, and we've done this here at Lumavate, everyone on your company can create videos and they should, and it's scary at first. I remember when I first got the sales team at Lumavate, started on video. They were all... It took forever. Filming a one-minute video was like 30 minutes because they kept stopping and starting. I know you've seen that with other customers at Vidyard. How do you help someone, especially when they're doing those more one-to-one, personalized videos? Because today, and I think one thing that COVID's taught us is, you can't just go get on a plane right now and go see your customers or your prospects. How do you think... Video is a great way to have that personal connection. I know we all do Zoom, but we're all kind of like Zoomed out. I think sending a video, and I'll do a personal example of what I got last week. I joined the product-led growth inaudible group. Literally within four hours of joining, Wes Bush sent me a 10-minute video explaining to me how I could best use all their courses, but then also how he went through our product-led growth process and gave me feedback on it. He just did it from his home office. It was nothing that was highly produced. He happened to use Vidyard, as a side note. What was cool about it was, it wowed me. I think that's what people don't realize, is there's a way, especially when you're developing these relationships with prospects or customers to wow people with these personalized videos. How do you get people, especially your sales team, excited about doing that, when it's a lot of times the opposite of what they're used to doing?

Tyler Lessard: It is an interesting opportunity/ challenge. What you really sort of talk to there, is that there's all these different ways we can be using video today in marketing and sales teams. Marketing teams produced content published on our websites, things like that. But there is this huge opportunity as you're taking advantage of that at Lumavate, to empower sales reps to be able to record and send videos as part of their email flow to customers and clients. Whether they're prospecting and using videos as a way in their emails to try to stand down and get their attention and create a more personal relationship right upfront before they ever talk to them, or whether it be sort of throughout the rest of the process, as you alluded to when somebody sort of comes inbound, if you will, not just following up with them with a text-based email saying, hey, thanks so much, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is me. Let's book a call. It's like, hey, hit the record button. Turn on your webcam and record a quick video and go, hey, this is me. I'm Tyler from Vidyard. It is an absolute pleasure to meet you. I'm so excited to work with you. By doing those kinds of videos, as you alluded to, you can show, rather than just tell. With tools like at Vidyard, you can do a screen share video, or you can do a webcam. With a screen share, you could show rather than just tell, which I assume that Wes did, where he actually was able to bring up his screen and walk through something. You can introduce yourself much more personally, you can use intonation, you can use your passion, use your energy to create that more personal connection. A lot of sales reps do struggle with that because back to the same thing with marketing, it's not how they've traditionally operated. It is a shift in their communication flow, in their typical process. But, the most important thing to think about as a salesperson or a leader trying to support something like this, is that all video is in this case, is another medium to deliver your message. It's not some other big thing. It's not something you need to produce. It's not something that needs to be perfect. If you are going to send an email to a client or a prospect, could it be better delivered? Could your message be better delivered through a video? It's as simple as that. It doesn't have to be anything more complicated. You can hit the record button. You can bring up a screen share. You can bring up your webcam and you can say it, you can show it. You can explain it clearly and visually. I think that's the hurdle a lot of people need to get over. They often think, well, when would I use a video? A video is like this or this. No, forget about that. You're sending a message to somebody. You have something to communicate. Do you want to type it out or do you want to say it or do you want to show it? Just getting into that mentality of, I could use a video when I need to communicate something or show something and making it habitual as a part of the way you communicate. That's it.

Stephanie Cox: I think that's such a great point around why salespeople tend to be more, not nervous. Maybe nervous is the right word. They're just timid about doing it for the first time. I've found once you do like a hundred of them, you no longer think about it. So much of it's in your own head. I think the first time you were on a podcast... I know I was so nervous the first time I did a podcast, as a guest. I was so nervous my first couple of episodes, and now I'm kind of like, not nervous, but like excited. It's kind of like when you speak, I just get amped up for it. I think video is the same way. Once you do so many of them and you see the results from them, because here's, what's crazy, video is pervasive. We all watch Netflix, we're all on YouTube, social media, Tik Tok, Instagram, you name it. People are doing video as consumers. But, what's crazy is in like the B2B world, especially, I get a ton of prospecting emails sent to me, like we all do. But I maybe get one video sent to me every two or three weeks. When I get it, it stands out and it doesn't have to be a long thing, to your point, it could be 30 seconds. It could be a minute. Honestly, most videos, the shorter is better. I think all of adults don't have long attention spans for stuff like that. It's, I think, interesting that there's still so few people doing it, even though there's a ton of data supporting the type of results that you can get from it. If you're thinking about why are... We talked about sales reps being, maybe nervous to get started, but why are companies not going, hey, there is data out there that shows that video can help us in our better in our sales process, better in our customer service, and deliver better results for us. Why are they not jumping on that bandwagon? What is that one thing that's keeping them back from doing it, do you think?

Tyler Lessard: I think that a lot of them simply don't understand what is possible and how easy it is. I think a lot of folks feel like, oh, this is like another big thing we've got to plan for and integrate. It's one of 20 different priorities we're going to have to think about. But the reality is, and those who are most successful with it, realize that this actually isn't something that's going to be complicated and make you less efficient. It's actually something that can make yourself and your reps more efficient. Again, to your point, once that you sort of hit that threshold where it just becomes a part of how you communicate. I know lots of different sellers and sales teams that I've seen who they get, they try it and they say, okay, I'm going to start sending videos and emails and see if I can, again, get more responses or better feedback. They do 10 or 15 videos and they go, oh, every video took me 20 minutes to make because I had to rerecord. I didn't really nail my message. It felt awkward. And then they give up and they say, ah, it's too much time to make the videos. I'm not necessarily getting more responses. Or maybe I'm only getting a few, but it doesn't line up. I'm just going to go back to my old ways of doing things. And I think to your point earlier, the real problem there... It's like cold calling. If you had started off cold calling and said, oh, I've tried 10 cold calls. I didn't get a response. I'm going to give up on it. Your business probably wouldn't be where it is today. And so I think-

Stephanie Cox: You could say that about content too. Think about it. If you just wrote 10 blog posts and didn't get like a ton of views to them right away, you could have given up on content marketing altogether too.

Tyler Lessard: Yeah. With all these things, there's no shortage of excuses why you don't want to do it or why maybe you shouldn't do it. But if you shift that mindset and say, well, why should we do it? What is the opportunity here? If you genuinely believe that your prospects and customers want to be able to connect with you more personally, that they want to be able to consume information offline and to get to know you, they don't always want to have to get on a Zoom call. If you believe that as a salesperson, a huge part of your value is your personality, your passion, your commitment, your expertise. Then you start to say, well, shoot, video is the next best thing to being there in person when I want to bring these things to life. You need to just start thinking about, wow, this really could change the way that I sell. I just need to get that practice and need to make it a part of what I do. The other thing that I find, Stephanie, is that a lot of folks, for whatever reason, they think, oh, video in sales is all about just that prospecting as we talked about. I'm just going to use it for this one part of what I do to try to get people's attention. But in reality, it's actually just as, if not more useful and impactful throughout the entire life cycle with somebody. Whether it's following up with somebody, whether it's recording a quick walkthrough to explain something to them, without having to wait for that Zoom call or schedule an in-person meeting. If somebody is like, hey, this part of what you do sounds interesting. Instead of saying, hey, let's book an hour and then you go, okay, we have calendar tag, we're going to book it out three weeks from now. Go hey, you know what? I'm going to record you a quick video. It's going to be five minutes. I'm going to walk through and I'm going to show it to you and I'll send it over, watch it and let me know your feedback. And then all of a sudden you're moving through a cycle faster because you're creating, you're basically becoming a little mini video content, creator yourself, and you're giving them information. But each time you do, you're the one still explaining it. You're building that relationship. It's not like you're giving up control. You're actually getting back control by allowing them to consume it at the time and ways that they want. There's all these interesting benefits. I think you've just got to get your head wrapped around that of, this is an opportunity to create these new experiences for my buyers and to really get ahead of this shift that's going to be happening across the market over the next few years.

Stephanie Cox: It's such a big culture change within your organization. That's the one thing that I've found, is you've got to get everyone to understand that this is a new way of communicating. Just like email was new, 10, 15 years ago, when it really started becoming part of a true marketing channel. It's, it's a new way of communicating to everyone. One of the things that I find so important is, if you're using a lot of video in your marketing, to some extent you need to use it, as you mentioned, throughout that entire customer journey. In your sales process, with your customer success team, as you think about product announcements if you're a software company, as an example, because it's what people are starting to expect. To me, one of the things that I love about it is, if I think about other channels and I'll use email as an example. I know if someone opened my email and if they clicked on links or if they responded. With video, I know how many people watched the video. I know how much of the video they watched. I think that's so important. The type of information, as you think about your overall, not just video strategy, but content strategy too, is you start thinking about, and I do this myself a lot with my team is, okay, we're going to create a one minute video. But, we also know that X percentages are people watch the first 30 seconds. The first 30 seconds seems to be the most important piece. You can use that data to continually improve and get better on stuff. I think what people don't realize is that video is not just something that you can do, but it's something that can really help you improve all aspects of your marketing in a lot of ways, because people want to consume video.

Tyler Lessard: Yeah, it really is. What's interesting is what you spoke to there, is that it's not only advantageous for your prospective buyers, because video gives you the opportunity to show, rather than just tell, to create a bigger narrative, to actually create a more human connection with them, by having real people and all of these things. In many ways it's a better experience for them, but it can also be a more strategic tool for you as a marketer, because unlike those PDF guides or the static content on your site, if you're set up appropriately, you can track second by second, how long are different people watching different videos. That engagement data, if you're able to use it within your marketing and CRM tools, that can start to become some really interesting fuel for customer insights, for understanding the intent of different individuals and their actual levels of engagement. One of my favorite stories of what we're talking about here, Stephanie, and I think that I actually, at Lumavate, you could do something like this too. My favorite example of this is Marketo right? Most of you listening probably know who Marketo is. They're now part of Adobe, but they're an amazing marketing automation platform, email marketing, ABM, all that goodness. I encourage you, if you're at a desktop now, or in a few moments, go to Marketo. com and take a look at their website. It's very different about what they've done. And this has been a few years now that they've done this and it's worked incredibly. You'll find when you're on their site, unlike most software companies, the main calls to action, those big shiny buttons, the top right corner of the site, when you drop down their main menus. Their main calls to action, are not book a call, talk to sales, request a demo, or get started now. All of their main calls to action are watch a demo, see it in action, or take a product tour. Which all actually take you to the very same place, which is an online, on-demand, video-based demo experience. I can actually see what the heck they do without having to book a meeting with sales or to actually sign up and start using the product. If you think about it, that's actually the experience that most buyers would prefer to have. They've proven it. Their conversion rates on their website, when they moved everything, to watch a demo, see it in action, take a tour, were like astronomically higher. Yet, it's common sense, because if somebody is on your website, they're learning a little bit. It's a very small percentage who are actually going to convert on the talk to sales button or request a demo. It's also a very small percentage, frankly, who are going to get started now, if you have a freemium product. How many people do you think would click on a nice big button that says, see it in action or watch a demo right now. In many cases, we've seen companies see incredibly high conversion rates on those, because why not? I'm here, I'd love to see it. If it means I don't have to talk to a sales rep or something, of course, I want to see it.

Stephanie Cox: Exactly.

Tyler Lessard: They have a ridiculously higher conversion rate on their core calls to action. But then, what happens is, exactly what you talked to. When you click on that button, in their case, they're actually presenting you with a lead capture form because they do want to use it as part of their lead gen. They see a high conversion rate on that, because again, the expectation is, hey, I'm willing to give you some info, if it means I can actually watch some demos and not have to talk to a rep. You fill in the form and then it unlocks this beautiful demo page with 10 different demo videos that show you all the different parts of what they do. You can now binge on this different content, depending on what you're most interested in. You could spend five minutes watching these videos, you could spend 50 minutes watching these different videos to learn all the different nuances of what they do. Exactly as you described, they're tracking on the backend, which of those videos do you watch? How long do you watch each of them? Those give you an engagement score within their own marketing automation and the higher engagement you're showing, the more likely you are to get a direct follow-up from a rep or be put into a custom nurture. The result of that, Stephanie, which is the stat that actually blows my mind, is their average time to move a lead from an inquiry to a qualified lead, or for those of you into the acronyms, from an MQI to an MQL, reduced by six times. By six times, because they can, within 20 minutes, if you've binged on those videos, they know you're engaged. They know your intent, they're qualified. They're putting you in as a qualified lead and having sales follow-up. They've never been able to do that before, because it used to always take... They'd have to download three white papers and do this and that. And now they're like, if somebody comes in and spends 30 minutes watching videos, they're going over to sales.

Stephanie Cox: That is... I'm kind of speechless. Those numbers are crazy. But what's crazy about it too, is what you just said, as soon as you said it, why wouldn't you put a demo, a demo video on your website and use that as your main CTA versus scheduling a demo. It makes so much sense, but so few people are doing it.

Tyler Lessard: It's scary. There are answers to why wouldn't you. People would say, oh, well, you know, my organization and my marketing were built around getting our sales teams demos. That needs to be the main call to action. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't have that. But like Marketo, what they do is once you go in there, of course they have ready to talk to sales. They've got lots of these different points where they can convert you into a meeting. I think so many people are afraid to kind of give up that control in the process. They're also afraid to put these demos online because they don't want their competitors to see it or maybe they don't want prospects to see it without having the added layer of context from a rep who can explain to them what it means to them. But, the reality is again, hey folks, the world we're living in, information is democratized. If you think your competitors don't know what your product looks like-

Stephanie Cox: You're wrong.

Tyler Lessard: You are absolutely fooling yourself. If you think that if your prospect comes to your site and has to book a demo, and then they go to one of your competitor's site, what if your competitor gives them that opportunity to binge on demos at their leisure? Who do you think is going to get that meeting? That's the risk, is that you're not the first one to do this and they just go with your competitor because they got to see it all live on their site. And they went, this looks great. Okay. I'm going to get started here and get going, as opposed to that legacy company over there who still expects me to book 60 minutes with a rep to be sold. It's interesting.

Stephanie Cox: Well, here's the thing about it is, one of the things I know Vidyard has a product-led growth offering. We do at Lumavate and I know a lot of companies are moving that direction. But if you can't, what you're talking about is a way to still have that same type of offering. I think what people want is, I want to see what your product can do before I talk to sales. I want to figure out if this, especially if you're marketing to marketers. I want to figure out if this is worth my time. I just need 10 to 15 minutes to figure out if it's worth the conversation. So many brands make it hard for you to do that. I want to see your product. I've heard it can do these things. I want to either do it myself or test it or just see it. This is a great opportunity for someone, which is like how I buy a lot of times, which is like 10 o'clock at night on the couch, where I'm looking at software, because that's when I have free time. I also know that if I download something, no one's going to call me right away.

Tyler Lessard: Yeah. The interesting thing as well, Stephanie, is that on-demand content becomes eminently more sharable to other people in your team. If, again, take that Marketo example. Imagine how many people go there, they start watching these online demos and they go, okay, this looks cool. This looks interesting. Pull up my email, hey, Sandy, check this out. Go watch this video and take a look at this. Hey, Ken, take a look at this video. It looks like they can do this. That doesn't happen with the sales call that you had. You don't have a sales call with a rep and then go and say, hey, everybody go watch the 60-minute recording of the Zoom call. We have to learn about them. It doesn't. There's all these innate benefits of this almost on-demand world. We all know it from like our personal lives. That's how we expect to operate now. But again, it just hasn't really permeated most of the business world, but it's happening. It's got to happen because the expectations and preferences of your buyers, trump everything else. It trumps the way that you want to market. It trumps the way you want to sell. And I think that's what a lot of this is all about, is we need to engage people the ways that they expect and want to, and prefer to be engaged and stop shoving people into a manufactured marketing and sales process, because that's the way we want to do things to control the experience.

Stephanie Cox: You hit the nail on the head because brands that do that or who are going to win in the next three to five years. It's who's winning today already, honestly, is the ones going, how do you want to buy from me? When do you want to buy for me? Let me make that really easy for you. One of the other things that you and I have talked about is this idea of building community and building a brand and the change that is happening around that. I'd love to maybe talk a few minutes about what are you seeing as you think about building a brand for Vidyard, building your own brand from a thought leadership perspective. What shift is really happening in the markets today around that?

Tyler Lessard: Yeah, it's been really interesting to see this happen over the last decade, really. A lot of factors have contributed to this in how I think the best brands are being built. To me, it actually goes back to what we just talked about, is that the audience... I think we all know this today, our buyers, the community, our customers, they're the ones who have control now, not us, as brands. We need to lean into that and say, okay, rather than trying to bring you into our community, we need to be a part of your community. Instead of telling you what we want to tell you, we need to teach you what you want to or need to learn. Instead of making you talk to sales, we need to give you a demo in the format that you're most interested in. All of these things stem from this underlying mentality of, we are here to help and support this community of people, these potential customers, these customers of ours. We aren't here to market to them. We're not here to sell to them. I think honestly, leaning into that and saying that's what we're going to do as a business. It does change the way you think about the content you create. It changes the kind of buying experiences you create. In some cases, it changes the products you build. That's why here at Vidyard, we leaned into a product-led growth strategy. We said, time and time again, the consistent feedback we heard from all our prospects was, can I just try it before you signed me onto a big contract and we said, you know what, you're right. Instead of just having a free trial, we'll give you a free product because that's what you're going to ask us for next anyways. You're going to say, could I take that three-month trial and use it for six months? That, to me, those things, aren't just about a go-to-market strategy. Those things also create the brand experience for your audience. I think that is going to continue to more and more trump the kinds of things we try to do with paid media and traditional brand tactics to raise awareness. More and more people who come into Vidyard, for example, are people who come from all these organic channels that we're living in and that we're supporting. We're part of countless different Slack communities. We are part of all sorts of different online communities. We run a lot of webinars and virtual events and all these things out there. These are the things that, to me, build our brand. People come to me frequently and they say, I love Vidyard because you guys are so helpful. And I learned so much at this point in my process with you. Honestly, I think that is the kind of experience we all need to create because that's ultimately what people are going to want in the long- term. They're going to gravitate towards those brands that are being built by being genuine, authentic, transparent, helpful, and all of these great things. It's a big idea. What does that actually mean in practice? Which might be our next podcast we do in a couple of months, Stephanie, but I think that's sort of the underlying tone of brands are being created organically now, and you need to be out there in these communities, leaning into your audience and helping.

Stephanie Cox: Final question for you. How are you using video at Vidyard?

Tyler Lessard: Oh boy, how aren't we using video at Vidyard is maybe a better question. We do use it prolifically throughout the organization. And frankly, it's not just because we're a video tech company, but because we were early on in making it just a part of the culture and getting people to, what we talked about earlier, just comfortable and understanding how to use it effectively. Absolutely our sales team. All of our sales reps use video as part of their prospecting, as part of how they follow up on inbound leads, in their ongoing communications with customers. All of our reps have become basically their own custom video creators. They use our tools every day to be able to do that. From a marketing perspective, as we alluded to, we use it throughout the entire buyer's journey. We use video-based thought leadership. We have a number of different episodic series that are ongoing. We use a lot of videos on our blog and our different thought leadership programs. But we also have libraries of demonstrations, of customer stories, all these different parts of what we do, have video versions of them. Is it all video? Of course not. We have written case studies, we have guides and PDFs and eBooks. It's just become a part of the content portfolio that we have to support all these different efforts throughout the buying journey. I'm thankful we were ahead of the curve on that because the market is now starting to catch up in terms of what people are expecting.

Stephanie Cox: I am waiting for the day when, instead of getting 40 prospecting emails a day, I get 40 personalized videos. To me, that is the creme de la creme. Until that happens, when you use video in your efforts, whether it's to outreach to people, to connect with their customers, you're going to stand out. That, to me, is like the biggest message, is video is a huge opportunity for brands to stand out right now. You've been listening to Real Marketers. If you love what you've heard, make sure to subscribe, rate and review our podcast. And don't forget to tell a friend, all of this marketing goodness, shouldn't be kept a secret.

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