Last week I attended the second annual Wistiafest conference in Cambridge, MA. We’ve become avid users of the Wistia platform at ThoughtWorks, and consumers of their content on doing great marketing using video. Here’s a bit of a recap from my perspective.
Welcome Party
Unfortunately I missed this as my flight got in a bit late, but by all accounts, this was great fun. The Wistia team welcomed everyone to their HQ and took a bunch of footage that Wistia included in the Day 1 “Good Morning” Video.
Day 1 Keynotes
Who doesn’t love free swag? We all do. But what’s better than free swag is BEAUTIFUL free swag. I already knew that Wistia makes great T-shirts, and we received a new one for the event. That’s not all, they also welcomed us with a packet of other fun goodies and a well designed program that were all really coordinated. You can take a look at the package on Dribbble here.
I would also call out the really fun signage and sets for the conference, because I geek out on stuff like that. The signage was hand-written style, white paint (crayon?) on cardboard. The main stage featured a few silver screens of varied height and a big cylinder of multi-colored butcher paper. The overall feel was like you were sitting inside of a video studio, which was cool.
- Your marketing should humanize your brand and video is one of the best tools for that
- Unless you’re one of the mega-brands with all the cash, you’ll need to be creative to get attention, and more creative to keep it. This means we need to foster an environment that welcomes creativity within our organizations.
- As marketers we don’t experiment enough and we test even less. It’s up to us to hold our teams accountable for trying new things. We should also use real data analytics to confirm that we’re seeing impact.
- Analytics is a hard game. Tracking nothing is a missed opportunity, and tracking everything is stupid. You should figure out the right balance for your company.
Phil Nottingham of Distilled followed up with a great talk called Building Your Social Video Strategy. Phil has been a regular speaker on video SEO for many years. He is also an authority on when to host videos on site versus when to use services such as Youtube or Vimeo. This talk focused on changes to the video landscape during the last 12 months and how they affect marketers. Some of the items he covered included:
- How should brands consider Facebook and Twitter video
- Micro-video formats on Vine and Snapchat
- Live streaming video from Meerkat and Periscope
Phil advocates that brands design video for each channel and take advantage of their unique features. He provided some tips on how to customize content for individual channels without massive rework. Phil also provided guidelines to evaluate hosting video on-site versus on a social platform.
The great Ann Handley then gave a talk called “Uncovering Your Most Authentic Stories” (will link slides once I have them). What I loved most about this talk were the examples that Ann chose to illustrate her points. Ann drew her brand examples from higher education, healthcare and technology. Each one showcased their humanity by focusing on answering the Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQs) from their audience.
Day 1 Workshops
I attended the Marketing With Wistia track on Day 1, which was facilitated by Mack Fogelson, Ezra Fishman and Casey Henry. Links to the slides that I have are below.
- Establishing Focused Marketing Goals – Mack Fogelson
- Building an Engaged Audience with Video – Ezra Fishman
- Using Video and Wistia to Create a More Efficient Funnel – Casey Henry
I thought this track was a really a very practical compliment to the rest of the day’s talks. I won’t go through all of the session details for these, but will call out a few takeaways.
Mack’s session was an interactive exploration of how to workshop your business goals using a Focus Canvas. The examples here were great as well: Patagonia, Traveling Vineyards and Help Scout have aligned their marketing with their strategic business goals.
Ezra took us on a tour of Wistia’s content creation lifecycle including the concepting, promotion and learning phases. I was already familiar with the concept of the ‘table read’, yet, it was helpful to know that the Wistia team now uses this to decide whether a piece of content should be a video at all. My favorite part of this session was understanding the promotion cadence that the Wistia team follows for their new content. We’ve evolved our own tactics at ThoughtWorks, but it’s always great to hear what other marketers are finding success with.
Finally, Casey walked us through how the Wistia team measures its marketing funnel. He also shared research from his team on how video can improve landing page performance, particularly in the case of PPC. There are some useful tips in the slides for those interested in retargeting, social promotion and analytics; I hope that Casey will write some blog posts detailing the findings.
Day one wrapped up with an awesome cruise on the Charles river with other attendees.
Day 2 Keynotes
If you’ve never seen Wil Reynolds speak, you’re missing out on one of the most energetic, witty and inspirational cats in business today. “Building a More Human Brand” drove the point home that the humans we should be focusing on are our customers. A couple of stories that he told that stuck with me included how Airbnb crowdsourced Vine video from its community to create the concept video which later became a television commercial, and Revzilla’s focus on creating useful motorcycle product comparison guides that built up its online brand equity.
Sarah Green of Harvard Business Review gave a fantastic talk on how to build a successful video team and brought to bear lots of management science on how to do so! It was also great to hear about HBR’s journey into interactive and how it has looked to social and video to bring written content to life in new ways. Two great examples were this video on The Costs of Racial Color Blindness and this study, ‘We’re all terrible at understanding each other‘. Sarah was kind enough to share the full list afterwards.
Justine Jordan of Litmus loves email, and she also loves telling us about the common ways people ruin the medium. Having seen Justine speak numerous times, she never fails to send people away with several ideas for improving their own email marketing. This particular talk was focused less on the technical aspects of mail and more on the qualitative ways we can bring more humanity to the most popular and effective marketing tool out there (email).
Brendan Schwartz of Wistia closed out the keynotes by taking us on a tour of Wistia’s explorations with data analytics particularly to understand a couple of key marketing questions:
- What videos appeal best to new users versus returning users?
- Does placement of CTA in videos affect performance of conversion (e.g. Turnstyle)?
During the course of the talk Brendan announced that Wistia would make our own new/returning data sets available to us for analysis, so that we can make some of the same comparisons for our businesses. I’m looking forward to more analytics within the product along these lines.
Following the keynotes, I attended the workshop called “Building a Brand With Video” on Day 2, which was a treat as it featured folks from Mailchimp, All Star Code and BambooHR who all shared great examples from their own work.
It was an insane amount of content and fun for two days that couldn’t be topped by much, other than a huge party with tacos, IPA, oysters and dancing. My head was full, my belly was full and I left happy. Looking forward to come again next year.
Finally, if you made it this far, I’ll leave you with a last treat which is the roll of speaker intro videos that the Wistia team made for the keynotes. Hysterical.
ps. Great thank you video from Bart@Work