Improving Your Inbound Marketing Strategy through Wistia and HubSpot Integration

While YouTube may be the first place most people think of when they think of online video, there are limitations with that platform. For one, your marketing strategy is hijacked by YouTube. You have little to no control over the ads it chooses to serve up with your marketing videos.

In addition, your prospective customers may never reach your website. Even if you spend time digging through your YouTube analytics, you know little more than the fact they watched your video.

Even if you may be able to find where your video has been embedded, you are still missing key information. You have not captured actionable data.

That's where Wistia and HubSpot combined have the power to transform your marketing strategy. Wistia hosts your videos and offers one set of tools for measuring their effectiveness. Hubspot Inbound Marketing complements with another set of tools. Both ensure you're capturing the data you need to improve your marketing strategy continuously, so your business resonates more effectively with your market over time.

Why Wistia?

In-Depth Video Analytics

The software tracks the level of engagement during a video--was the viewer multitasking or truly focused on the video? It tells you how many loads and how many visitors watched a video. It tells you what the play rate was, number of plays and how many hours a video's been watched.

Heatmap Data

This data shows you whether a video's been played by the same person more than once and whether they rewound a section to watch it again, or skipped past a section.

No Ads

No ads interrupt your prospective customer's viewing experience. No distractions from your message. No redirects to a competitor by a distracting ad. Have your video production work for your company better.

Customized Video Player Options and Cross-Platform Consistency

When branding is important, customization is an asset. YouTube may work effectively for Google+ sharing and more, however, Wistia enables sharing to other common social spaces such as Facebook and Twitter. Those customizations extend to HubSpot!

You don't have to worry about whether or not your videos will be compatible with mobile devices either. Flash or HTML5 compatibility is part of the Wistia hosting package.

Additional Useful Data

Wistia collects two additional types of data worth mentioning.

Video performance over time: This is a good way to evaluate how well different videos are filling your sales funnel and the audience with whom they resonate.

Engagement of 'evangelists': These are the people who share videos, even though they don't become users of the product. They may play an important role in promoting your business, even though they never become users of your product or service. These are people you want to identify. You could create a special type of campaign for them centered on information rather than lead nurturing.

Why HubSpot?

From the ground up, HubSpot is focused on marketing from the approach today's customer responds to--inbound rather than outbound (AKA push marketing). They don't want you to shove product information at them. Just like you, they're tired of tactics that interrupt their workflow.

In an information saturated world, most of your potential customers prefer the journey of discovery. Imagine your prospects are adventurers, using the internet as their tool to uncover the solution they already know they need. Your job is to help them find you and show them how your solution meets their needs! And that's what HubSpot Inbound Marketing was built to help you accomplish. They've designed their platform to assist your shaping of an overall marketing plan that 1) ensures you get found, and 2) resonates with the person looking for what you have to offer. Hubspot also has official Hubspot Partner Agencies, such as PatraCompany, to help you leverage these inbound marketing tools.

That means HubSpot has built a platform widely recognized for its excellence at helping businesses of every size to integrate a modern, inbound marketing approach (leveraging the web) with a follow-up sales process that grows business.

Not only does HubSpot help you understand the inbound marketing perspective. You also learn how to improve your marketing strategy through:

• Insights into how to leverage your website and position information in the right places;
• Lead management tools;
• Marketing automation;
• Email automation;
• Analytics;
• Salesforce synchronization; and
• Landing page strategies.

One very important tool HubSpot & Hubspot Partner companies offer is their lead scoring system, a point system used to trigger automated responses. When information is captured about a video, you can give the importance of a video a score, signifying how important it is as an indicator of interest. You give short pieces, such as introductory videos less weight than longer, more detailed videos. The automated response choices HubSpot offers include emails to prospects from a planned lead nurturing sequence, as well as messages to sales that someone is nearing a buying decision and may be ready for a call.

Why Both?

When you integrate the strengths of Wistia as a video platform with HubSpot as a marketing platform, you merge two powerful tools. The synergy makes two plus two equal more than four. Both platforms capture data, and when they're communicating with each other, you get deeper insights into what's working and what you need to adjust.

Wistia Features HubSpot Leverages

Consider the following Wistia features that HubSpot leverages for you.

Pre- and Post-viewing Calls to Action (CTAs)

Do you want to capture emails before visitors to your website view a video? Or maybe you'd like to let them see some of the produced video before asking for personal information. Wistia allows you to gate your videos and insert CTAs. However, without HubSpot, your CTA can't accomplish as much. Yes, you might capture emails, but what happens afterward. Does someone have to manually respond? An inbound marketing agency, such as PatraCompany, can teach you to capitalize on the marketing automation available in Hubspot, saving you time and money.

Would you like to elicit a response to your video when a prospect watches it to the end? Wistia enables post-viewing CTAs. The response to the CTA can be whatever action you want from prospects. Suggest another video. Ask if they want a free trial. Offer a white paper or eBook.

These are all exciting options, yet until HubSpot enters the picture, you're missing a key component to improving your marketing strategy. You're missing the power of marketing automation HubSpot provides.

When you integrate Wistia with HubSpot, you can customize the follow-up sequence for further contact based upon the video the customer was viewing. This is better than having the email go to HubSpot as a contact. In addition, you can use Wistia to send the viewing behavior data to HubSpot to further refine the follow-up marketing sequence.

Heatmaps

Wistia's heatmaps allow sales to quickly evaluate where a potential customer is in the buying process. Did they watch a demo to the end. Did they watch the entire webinar? Or did they stop at a certain point? Did they 'rewind' the video to watch a section again? How has that clip your video production company made actually performing?

The heatmap could tell you whether a prospect is worth calling or not.

With Wistia alone, the process would be manual. With HubSpot, alerts can be automated so your sales team doesn't overlook key ready-to-buy signals.

Annotation

Is there a point at which potential customers are abandoning certain videos? Wistia records this type of viewing behavior. However, it's HubSpot who helps you capture the meaning behind the trends with their powerful metrics.

Wistia tracks this type of behavior for a different reason than Hubspot does--to enable its annotation feature. Wistia sees the moment of 'departure' as an opportunity to re-engage, which you might otherwise miss. Before a visitors gets to leave the video page permanently, a popup offers an alternative piece of content that might be more relevant.

Some people do respond more positively to reading a blog, eBook or white paper. Others might find an alternative video more interesting. The annotation feature could be a way to show an alternative side, not apparent in the video they are leaving.

HubSpot Features Wistia Compliments

Smart Lists

Smart lists up the efficiency of your whole marketing approach. Based on carefully targeting the prospects most likely to benefit from your product(s) or service, they shape your video production decisions as well as shape the messages you send as you automate your initial marketing contacts.

Email Integration

It's been proven repeatedly that videos in emails get more clicks. Wistia reports that their own email open rates for video emails were 27% higher than the industry average of 14.8% after they started tracking the open rates, click through rates and forwards. They also used their video heatmap data to help them evaluate 1) which messages worked best, 2) who showed interest, and 3) how to improve their inbound marketing strategy.

Summary

By integrating Wistia and Hubspot, you have the tools at your disposal to:

• Tie video viewing behavior to lead nurturing campaigns. In other words, when someone views a certain video, it automatically triggers a follow-up sequence for your sales team.
• Customize lead nurturing campaigns to match video viewing choices. (Did they watch 100% of a video or leave prematurely?)
• Score leads by setting up rules in HubSpot.
• Gather information on who is watching and how they are responding to the videos.
• Collect data that allows you to adjust video marketing strategies to increase conversion rates.
• Guide people to the best of your videos for the interest they have shown.

Both Wistia and Hubspot provide Instructions for integrating with each other. You'll find Wistia's instructions at https://wistia.com/doc/hubspot and HubSpot's at http://www.hubspot.com/integrations/wistia. Alternatively, a Hubspot Partner Agency like PatraCompany can help you set up your tracking and help you develop your specific inbound marketing strategy.

Sources:

1. https://wistia.com/blog/4-advantages-of-adding-video-to-your-email-marketing