This is a Q & A with Tom Burgess from Revenue River, a leading digital marketing agency and a HubSpot Diamond Agency Partner. Below, we cover the details of our new partnership, Revenue River’s background, the impact of video marketing platforms, and how video can play a role in sales. (You can find the Q & A with TwentyThree on Revenue River’s blog) Enjoy!

To start, tell us about the new partnership between TwentyThree and Revenue River?

The partnership we are launching is a big deal, especially with efforts to create more video and multimedia content. TwentyThree, right off the bat, understood what we were trying to build with a video marketing platform both for ourselves and our clients. Our relationship with TwentyThree is not your typical model; we are always on the same wavelength, and more importantly we are willing to build both of our messages together. On top of that, with Revenue River’s firm understanding of previous pain points in the video marketing realm, TwentyThree listen’s to our feedback and suggestions as to how to make their tool better, and more effective in the long run.

This partnership is going to continue to grow, the announcement is just the spearhead, we are already discussing cross-promotional content pieces that we can both unleash to the masses. With a company like TwentyThree and an agency like Revenue River, we are both striving to educate companies on why video marketing (and everything associated with it) is such an important avenue to go down.

For some background, tell us about Revenue River and how your agency helps your clients succeed within the digital marketing space?

Revenue River is a digital marketing agency that provides full stack solutions to help align your digital strategies and systems. We started in a tiny office in Littleton, CO, and have since grown to over 24 in-house professionals, in a beautiful office in Golden, CO. We have been a HubSpot Diamond Agency Partner for just about 2 years now, and we pride ourselves on being one of the best, most well-rounded digital agency in the world (Winning the 2017 HubSpot Impact Award grand prize for Client Growth doesn’t hurt either). 

We strive to help organizations in every industry that want to compete in the digital world, by aligning the team and technology to deliver results. Every complex issue is fair game for us to help solve, and we appreciate some of the nuances and challenges even the most common campaigns can offer. It’s easy for prospects and clients to see what we have built, and how we can help, and we build relationships with our clients that you would never see elsewhere...it also helps that we have a kick-ass culture at our agency.

We’re super excited about our new partnership with Revenue River here at TwentyThree, from your perspective, why was it so important to bring a video marketing platform to your customers?

I think there is no doubt we are feeling the same excitement! As an innovative agency, we spend a lot of time finding new tools and systems that will help ourselves and our clients. The tools that can save us time but also show bottom-line results, no matter the application is wildly important. With video marketing, it was no different. We saw the shift and discussion around how big video was going to be in 2017, and it only made that more recognizable when TwentyThree came to us. 

People and companies get so caught up in the process of creating a beautiful, impactful video, that they believe that’s the entire battle. They focus on aesthetics, versus what’s going on behind the scenes with implicit data points that are shed in a tool like TwentyThree. In fact, when I have a prospective client that is wanting to dabble in a video campaign, I explain straight up that the most important piece of creating a video is how motivated you are to read, understand, and adapt from the data. TwentyThree makes that easy to do with every important video data point to help you get results from video marketing. We all get a sense of success when we create a lasting video for a client, but we feel it even more when we can show deep data results and audience engagement on that video a month after we launched.

In your experience, how has video marketing played a role in improving inbound and lead gen efforts?

Video marketing, and a high level video in general has just as much, if not more capacity to drive lead generation more than written content. If you told me I could watch a two minute video and gather the same information from an eBook that takes me 20 minutes to read, it’s a no-brainer. The key is knowing what videos should play the role of a lead generation piece. 

I think in 2017 we have seen what video can provide in terms of lead generation, which is a lot. Aesthetically, with TwentyThree’s native connector form that integrates with our HubSpot marketing platform, we can now place that lead generation form right on top of the video in a clean, sleek fashion. To boot, being able to gauge an individual’s engagement via the video heatmap, how can your sales team not use that to their advantage? Being able to key in on a 5-second portion of your video where someone has rewatched 5 times, and it’s about a product you sell? The amount of information someone can gather from engagement data alone is enough to set your sales process apart from your competitors. Now that we are seeing lead gen from video take off, I am excited and curious as to how we can make it more intuitive and “smart” when it comes to interpreting your audience.

50% of all website data is now from video content, what do you think is the future of video marketing for most brands?

I think that percentage will continue to grow, and at a massive pace. The future of video marketing for brands is critical, mostly for companies that haven’t yet hopped on the video train. Companies are creating video content at rapid paces, and it’s transforming how the public views their brand, and how easy it is to digest their content via video. I think we are going to see a gap happen where companies that jumped onboard early are excelling with their video marketing efforts, and the companies that are behind the eight ball are going to be building at a furious pace to catch up, which doesn’t seem like a model I want to be leading. 

At Revenue River, we use video in all mediums, and we focus on every aspect of our business. I’d say one of the more important approach we take is building our culture and brand through video. You get a feel for the type of agency we are through our videos and it’s fun and easy to produce. With trust being a top factor in a customer’s mindset, why not build that trust up front? Empathy rules the emotion playbook when it comes to business. Brands need to know this, and they need to give that to their audience. You don’t get an empathetic feeling towards a brand by reading text, you do through video. Once you can master showing your brand and culture through video, you begin to see how video can affect more than a brand awareness level play, you can see the potential revenue associated with a well planned video campaign.

How does video help sales enablement and increasing the pipeline?

I think the idea of using video from a sales enablement standpoint has been under utilized. This may just be a timing issue, with so many companies getting used to using video more prominently in their brand, they are focusing outwards, versus in. With that said, brands need to understand that video isn’t just meant to blanket their audience with a digestible form of content, it can be applied through all stages of the sales funnel. With sales enablement alone, you can help connect your marketing and sales team, and save time through video. An example from Revenue River. As a digital marketing agency, we are prone to questions from prospects before they ultimately make a decision. The more common questions are those that they would ask any references that an agency makes available for prospects to dig in on the nitty gritty of who they may be working with. 

We have developed a list of the 12 most common questions a prospect proposes as a concern they need answered before hiring us. What did we do? We took short, 10-15 second client testimonial snippets that answer those questions directly, essentially making it impossible for a prospect to ask a reference, without already hearing the answer on our homepage. So this video series is two-fold: 1) It solves a pain point a prospect that is at the decision phase needs answered, and 2) It saves times on both of our ends by providing references to call, who may or may never pick up, etc...I think video in sales enablement will play a bigger role than a traditional marketing video will play in 2018.

We recently released an innovative cooperation with HubSpot to bring all of your video data into HubSpot, allowing marketers to lead score and automate activities based on video viewing behavior. What’s the impact this can have on marketers trying to be more data-driven?

This is the key to it all. You can cook a chicken a thousand different ways, but if that chicken is infused with cajun butter that from the beginning, brings a different element of “wow” than any other chicken? This is what TwentyThree is doing. TwentyThree is taking an already great tool, but giving it that “wow” and usability factor. I say this because we work primarily in HubSpot, and our clients use the tool as well. To have a platform that connects all pertinent video viewing and lead data back into your main marketing hub, has proven the “X factor” when it comes to how we get our clients onboard. Marketers want their data in a simple format, but deep enough that they can read a story to either alter course or continue with what they are doing. Being in one tool where all of your major marketing data is stored is the icing on the cake. We have been waiting for a video tool to do everything that TwentyThree can do, AND integrate with HubSpot, and I am very excited to see our clients succeed with the use of TwentyThree right now.