Latest / Content, Briefly / Wistia: Sam Balter on video content marketing strategies for brand building

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Wistia: Sam Balter on video content marketing strategies for brand building · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  There's probably gonna be a lot of that kind of, like, 10X language for content marketers, people who are, like, disproportionately above the rest of content marketing.
• 0:09
  [upbeat music] Hey, folks, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we're talking to Sam Balter, who runs content marketing at Wistia.
• 0:19
  Wistia has a longtime reputation for having a great brand, and we talk quite a bit about how content fits into that. Sam also has a really interesting perspective on how all companies could be doing more with video.
• 0:31
  He had some great ideas, I thought.
• 0:32
  We talk about how video has changed a lot over the past couple of years between kinda the rise of the creator economy, everyone going remote because of COVID, few other factors which have made video really more accessible and actually easier to make with lower expectations on production value.
• 0:47
  So Sam, as you might expect, feels that there's a huge opportunity with video for a lot of companies, and I tend to agree with him. I really enjoyed this conversation. As always, I hope you do too.
• 0:57
  And also, just in full disclosure, I am both a Wistia shareholder and a customer, so there's probably some bias in that. But I am both of those things because I really believe in what they do and in their product.
• 1:06
  So with all that said, I'll get out of the way. Enjoy this episode. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly.
• 1:14
  I have a new friend, Sam Balter, head of content at Wistia, here today.
• 1:19
  We were just reminiscing, or I was reminiscing, I guess, about Wistia content, which for me goes back seven to eight years working on Wistia on the agency side, actually. Maybe we'll get into some of that.
• 1:30
  But first, Sam, would you mind introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are, your role at Wistia, and maybe some of the other projects you have going on. Yeah. My name is Sam Balter.
• 1:38
  I'm the head of content here at Wistia. Before this, I worked at ZoomInfo, where I was the director of media content, and before that, I worked at HubSpot for a few years as well. Very cool.
• 1:51
  Paint the full picture of Wistia. What's the product? Give us a sense of the company and who your customers are. Yeah. So Wistia started back in 2006, so that's, like, 17 years ago? Seventeen years ago or so. Oh, wow.
• 2:05
  Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. And when Wistia started, it was primarily, like, a video embedding tool.
• 2:11
  So basically, you want to embed a video on your website, and you want it to have a nice player, and you want it to look nice, and that would be where you would use Wistia.
• 2:19
  Today, Wistia is, like, a very different company and represents kind of an all-in-one video platform, so people can host their videos, create videos, distribute them, do webinars, do text-based editing, cut things into clips.
• 2:33
  So it's really solving for a lot of B2B buyers and a lot of other people in B2C as well of just having a central spot to manage all of your video content.
• 2:44
  So you can look at it, you can clip it, you can compare it, you can take notes on it, all from a single area.
• 2:50
  So that's kinda how the company has evolved today, letting you create, analyze, host, and distribute your videos. Nice.
• 2:58
  And customers, are they primarily other B2B SaaS companies, or do you find that it's really just anybody who needs kind of video features beyond what, say, YouTube offers? Yeah.
• 3:10
  So Wistia's got around, I'd say, like, 20, about 20,000 paying customers today. Oh, wow. And we have a little over 420,000 users.
• 3:20
  So I think you see a lot of customers in the kind of paid space who are using Wistia that are, like, software companies.
• 3:28
  There's a good amount of people within industrial manufacturing who wanna create videos that showcase their product and showcase, like, how it's used.
• 3:36
  And then we have some large customers in the, kinda the education space, where it's like they wanna host, like, a large number of educational videos and things like that, courses, information, like, along those lines.
• 3:46
  So those are probably your core kinda customers that we're often going after, but a lot of the times it's like, you're a restaurant and you wanna put a video of your food on your website, and you want the player to look nice, you might use Wistia as well.
• 4:01
  Yeah, yeah. It's a really nice product. W-we use it for a few different purposes. One is gating video content- Yes... which is incredibly useful.
• 4:09
  You give someone 30 seconds of kind of, quote-unquote, "free access," then you can prompt them to enter an email to watch the rest of it. It's great.
• 4:17
  So, like, if we do a webinar, we'll often publish on Wistia, embed it on the site, and then gate it so that other people have to register in order to see it later, which is, like, such a great use case for it.
• 4:28
  It's, it's such an easy win that, like, a lot of businesses don't take advantage of.
• 4:33
  Like, we allow you to do forms, so you're gating it, but also things like if you're doing a webinar on a research report, you can point the video there and then create a button so that somebody could download the research report from the video.
• 4:45
  Like, there's a lot of cool CTAs, annotations, things like that you could do to make the videos more interactive, which I think is hugely helpful. But yeah, it's a very, very easy piece of software to use.
• 4:57
  Yeah, I can definitely attest to that. You know, actually, I just thought of this. The microphone that I am talking into right now is a gift from Wistia- Oh, nice...
• 5:05
  because last year, I guess it was last year, as Wistia was developing its webinar product, they needed some customers to test it out- Yeah... which I did, so we, like, ran some webinars on Wistia.
• 5:14
  Anyways, they sent me this very nice gift. Yeah, Wistia, yeah, Wistia Live is great.
• 5:18
  We've just been, we've really been putting a lot into making that experience good, and the updates that are coming around Wistia Live are, like, very fantastic if you do webinars. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.
• 5:30
  Let's talk about content specifically. Yep. Wistia's been doing content for a very long time. I would also point out that Chris Savage has, the founder and, or co-founder, I suppose, and CEO of Wistia,
• 5:41
  has been doing content for a very long time as well, some of it on Wistia, some of it on personal sites.
• 5:48
  I am curious how that potentially influences what the culture around content is like at Wistia, but also just curious about, like, nuts and bolts. Like- Yeah... who's on your team, you know.
• 5:59
  Can you give us, even if it's just in broad strokes, like, an overview of what content strategy looks like at Wistia too? Yeah.
• 6:04
  So I'll start at kinda, like, just the content team vibe here and the content team, like, creation process, which is great.
• 6:11
  Like, Wistia is really unprecedented, at least for the places I've worked, in terms of havingHuge amounts of autonomy to take creative risk for the content.
• 6:22
  And I think a lot of that is actually built up around some of the big early successes that Wistia had around brand content.
• 6:31
  Like, one of the ones that a lot of people know Wistia for is one ten one hundred, where- Yeah...
• 6:38
  it was this big brand series they did where they gave an agency basically, you know, a hundred and ten thousand or a hundred and eleven thousand dollars and said, "Make us a thousand dollar ad for this product, Soapbox, make us a ten thousand dollar ad for this product, and then make us a hundred thousand dollar ad, and let's document the whole thing."
• 6:56
  And it was to talk about the difference between, you know, creativity and money and how those things influence each other and kind of the net product you're creating.
• 7:04
  So like, Wistia is very strong on this very big, bold brand content, which I think gives like the content creators a lot of leeway to take risks, to try things, to do stuff that we think is gonna cut through and get to the audience.
• 7:22
  So that's sort of like one bucket of content. Very strong brand affinity content. The next area of content that is like a very strong historical suit of content for Wistia is production content.
• 7:34
  Like, our team here, since we make videos, since we have software related to videos, we have, like, incredibly good video experts, and we leverage that to create very, very tactical things on how to shoot with your iPhone, how to do a lighting setup for under a hundred dollars, recommended video, you know, cameras, recommended things for webinar software, how to use different pieces of different things together, right?
• 8:02
  So we do a lot of that, like production, how to shoot better stuff, how to record better videos, and that's also a huge chunk of Wistia's content today.
• 8:11
  I feel like that's like a, probably a perfect intersection of massive demand from search queries and, you know, perfectly positioned content for Wistia to actually convert people.
• 8:23
  With like, that, that Venn diagram doesn't always overlap so nicely. No, and I mean, to a certain degree, it's like, it's definitely our best search category.
• 8:31
  Like, it is our search category we dominate on is hugely production-oriented content, which is awesome. I think it does a good job of also building brand affinity with the person holding the camera. Like- Mm.
• 8:49
  [chuckles] Or the person who's attempting to hold the camera for the first time, and is like, they wanna make a good video, they don't have a huge budget, they're trying to do something in their house.
• 8:56
  You know, they're trying to make some great content. And so I think we speak really, really well to that audience and have a very strong affinity with that audience because of the way we've written that content.
• 9:08
  That being said, like, it's a lot of the people who are more involved in video now is the average marketing manager. And now there's also customer support using video, sales using video.
• 9:25
  You know, it's not just like the person actually recording and producing the content who's in charge of the video strategy, but we've noticed that a lot more people are involved in video.
• 9:34
  And I think a lot it's an area we want to invest in terms of content, is like creating more content for that marketing manager who's struggling to do video analytics, uh, that person who's trying to connect HubSpot and Wistia so that when somebody watches a video or fills out a form on a video, we they do good email or marketing automation kind of follow-up on that.
• 9:57
  So I think it's like the production content's really strong for us. It's built like a really good thing.
• 10:03
  And I think there's other kind of additional content in an area of like video strategy that we're building out more content on. Nice.
• 10:11
  You know, we're recording this, let's see, early April twenty twenty-four, basically four years since the pandemic started. How did that affect the way that you think about marketing a video product like this?
• 10:27
  And what I'm getting at is, okay, everybody's remote all of a sudden. Does that mean that lower production value videos are kind of overnight more attractive?
• 10:37
  Like it's more accessible to people, there's a lower expectation? Or like for companies that maybe did have studios or sent people out on shoots, like I imagine all that changed.
• 10:47
  Maybe I'm totally overthinking this, but I'm just imagining like video is just different than it was four years ago. Yes. Video is really different than it [chuckles] was four years ago.
• 10:56
  So I'll say like there's a bunch of things to unpack within that related to video. So I think, one, you have an issue where, like you lost the ability for a lot of businesses to do events.
• 11:10
  So it forced more businesses to move to online events, to do video events. And having an engaging video event and having an engaging like physical event are two very different things.
• 11:20
  You have to think about them differently, you have to produce differently.
• 11:23
  And I think a lot of people learned a ton of valuable lessons about like how to produce a good kind of webinar, a good video event throughout the pandemic.
• 11:32
  So it's like I think a lot of businesses found it useful first 'cause they needed to replace a physical event. So that's one thing. I think the other thing is you start at a broad trend.
• 11:43
  You-- Everybody was sitting inside and video consumption of everything rose. You know, TikTok rose. Like I, you know, like you have huge amounts of video consumption growing on YouTube.
• 11:54
  You have like all of that going up pretty significantly throughout the pandemic and then continuing afterwards.
• 12:02
  And so your kind of question about this is like not only did it change the process for people, what they were creating. Yeah, it changed like they wanted to move some in-person stuff to digital. Great.
• 12:14
  I think you also had a lot of people who were needing to communicate with people and not being able to do that in person.
• 12:22
  Sales, customer supportAll of a sudden these teams are not necessarily-- They're needing to, like, get information out there.
• 12:28
  They might not be meeting directly with clients, so they might be sending more video follow-up and things like that.
• 12:34
  So you see people testing the waters a lot more during that time period of, like, using video within their workflow, whereas video is really traditionally held within the marketing department.
• 12:43
  You start seeing it trickle into other departments more. And then I think the kinda last part of your question that was about
• 12:50
  how has video changed or customer expectations about video changed, that's super significant and something we've actually conducted a good amount of research on from our most recent State of Video Report.
• 13:05
  One of the things that we noticed in terms of engagement, like the engagement rate, how long does somebody watch a video relative to how long it is? Like, are they gonna watch five minute, ten minute?
• 13:16
  How much of a video are they gonna watch? The highest engagement rate content when we looked at different types of content, so like promotional videos, customer testimonials, how-to videos, was instructional content.
• 13:30
  When we- That's super interesting. It's cool. Yeah, it's super interesting to see, and it was like our winner was three to five minute instructional content was, like, the best performing.
• 13:40
  And it was like, "Oh, wow, that's, like, pretty interesting."
• 13:44
  And then the other side of it was we had research from TikTok, and TikTok showed that there was a huge boost in likability, ad recall, all of this other stuff when you show a product in use versus a promotional video, right?
• 14:03
  So instead of saying, like, "My product does this," you create some sort of, like, just showing the product doing it.
• 14:10
  So, like, an example for me, and I think this is like, this is kinda the way I think about a lot of video stuff today, I saw an ad once [laughs] that was like, that was like, "This wallet can't be sawed in half.
• 14:25
  It can't be sawed in half." [laughs] And it was like, "Ah," you know, like time is up. I got that ad, yeah. [laughs] Yeah, and it's like, uh, like, but...
• 14:30
  And then it shows the wallet, somebody trying to saw it, somebody trying to saw it, blah, blah, blah. It's, like, ridiculous.
• 14:36
  But it switched my mindset pretty significantly because normally the way, especially a lot of B2B businesses, is think is go, "Tell me about the problem," then the product comes in, and it's the hero that solves the problem.
• 14:51
  I don't... And my wallet has never been sawed in half. [laughs] Right. You know what I mean? Like, that is not a problem I've literally ever run into or even been close to running into.
• 15:02
  I've never like, "Oh my God, yeah, I guess that almost happened to me when I was near that saw." Like, never happened. [laughs] But I'm on their website. I'm looking at this wallet. I'm about to buy this stupid thing.
• 15:13
  I didn't, but I was very close to buying [laughs] this ridiculous wallet because it was like, it's engaging. I saw it in use. It didn't feel the same way. It was a very big switch from the normal way of showing products.
• 15:26
  And so, like, [laughs] I, I always think that's, like, a funny example of, like, a kind of extreme one, but in my last job at ZoomInfo, we had a video. It was one of the best...
• 15:39
  It was one of the top performing videos on social. It was, like, s- I think three to five minutes long, and it had the absolutely riveting title of "How to Remove CRM Duplicates in Salesforce."
• 15:53
  And it was, like, 10,000 plus, you know, it was, like, views on this video- Yeah, yeah... that's on a really boring topic that's just like, "Here's what you do.
• 16:03
  You click here, you do this, you click here, you do this, you [laughs] you do this," and then it's like, "That's how you remove the duplicates using, like, Wrigley," right? It came...
• 16:11
  And so, like, it's really changed my perspective a lot of saying, like, there's a huge value to these videos that are just simple instructional videos that show it because they actually match a lot of the content that you see on, like, TikTok and other areas, and they're a big switch from the way that businesses normally talk about their products, which is kind of long-winded, and you're talking about a problem that is sometimes so broad that people just go past it.
• 16:44
  Can't get enough leads? Like, is that your problem? That's gonna be 800 other or 8,000 other companies are gonna solve that same problem. You know? [laughs] Right.
• 16:54
  So I think, like, having that unique I'm just gonna show you how to do it is a big change that happened from the pandemic, is, like, all of those things coalesced together to make sort of a culture shift on what people wanna see in videos and that they're willing to just watch something that's lower production, and they're gonna be more engaged when you can see something in use accomplish the task and then go, "I also have that same problem."
• 17:21
  Yeah. That's fascinating. I feel like what you're describing is almost like a, a spectrum of video styles that a company could do. Like, I suspect that a lot of companies don't do video because...
• 17:34
  Or maybe they have, like, some basic sort of, like, very, like, functional tutorial style stuff, which might be, like, one end of the spectrum, whereas the other end of the spectrum's, like, highly creative stuff.
• 17:44
  Like, I'm thinking of an example where many years ago Zendesk created a video of a group of employees in a alt-rock band, and the idea was when people searched for Zendesk alternatives, they would find this band called Zendesk Alternative, and it was just, like, a video of, like, this band playing.
• 18:03
  It was, like, really funny, you know- Yeah... it was, like, really well done.
• 18:05
  But not every company I think has, like, the, uh, maybe the guts or the creative willpower to make those kind of things happen, but it doesn't mean that the video doesn't, some type of video doesn't belong in your content strategy somewhere.
• 18:18
  Yeah. Like, I think about, a lot about Airbnb.
• 18:20
  So, like, [laughs] Airbnb used to make these videos that would be like a movie, like a cinematic movie, and it would be like, you know, you're going, and then it's, like, the person on the plane, and then they, like, show up and all this other stuff, and it's, like, really, really great.
• 18:34
  They were fantastic, wonderful brand videos. If you look at what, like, Brian Chesky shares on videos today, they're like GIFs-Of the app. Right? [chuckles] And we're like, "Yeah, that's so interesting."
• 18:47
  "Now you can see total price." Right, right. [laughs] Thank God, finally. Yeah, like, and that's the thing. You look at it and you go, "Oh, shit. That's cool." Like, actually, that makes me wanna go back to Airbnb more.
• 18:56
  And so, like, I think for a lot of businesses, what they could probably benefit from is, like, you probably have crummy videos that are explaining the product that are done by somebody internally, and then you have a whole team that's like, "Let's make these really zesty, cool, interesting videos."
• 19:17
  If you just, like, apply a little bit of that zesty coolness to the slightly more boring tutorial videos, that will probably be a lot more engaging, and you'll have, like, an evergreen asset that you can use. Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:31
  Totally. You know, we actually do a lot of tutorial videos with our partners. So, like, they have a product they wanna showcase, and we help them create tutorial videos, and I think they're great.
• 19:42
  We chop them up into sh... I'm actually really glad to know three to five minutes is a good length, 'cause that's- [chuckles]... pretty much the exact length we chop them down to.
• 19:48
  But I just have a video editor come in, add music, bumpers, clean it up, remove all the awkward parts, and the final product is so, so much better- [chuckles]... than the kind of raw riverside thing that we recorded.
• 20:02
  Yeah, it doesn't have to be much. It's just... But it... Like, I think it also shows people that you care about them understanding how your product works. And- Yeah. Yeah...
• 20:13
  I think it shows people that you are not just invested in their becoming a customer, you are, like, invested in their long-term success.
• 20:24
  And so, I think when you share that type of content on social and people feel that you are invested in their long-term success by making these types of videos, it does really well.
• 20:33
  Like, I'm not saying, "Oh, don't ever do promotional videos," or anything like that. That would be insane. I'm just saying, like, I think sometimes people don't...
• 20:40
  They have a really good asset that's, like, 80% of the way there, and if they just put a little more into it, clip it, edit it, add bumpers, add sound, you'd be getting a ton of value out of things. Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:53
  You know, actually, I sense some angst among content marketers that many of them are sitting on a lot of video that they don't really know what to do with.
• 21:03
  For example, they host webinars, they record a podcast like this one, which generates, you know, a 45-minute video every time they record, you know, among whatever other just kinda like raw video assets they have, and there's this...
• 21:15
  The angst part comes in when they feel like, "Oh, gosh. We should do something else with it." Mm-hmm. Do you have any thoughts on that? Because it's pretty easy to say, like, "Here's a checklist.
• 21:22
  You chop it up, you do one LinkedIn one, you put two on Instagram."
• 21:25
  Like, I feel like it's too formulaic, though, and I feel like the angsty part comes from, one, it's like repurposing, this sort of idea that, like, repurposing is sometimes better than net new, but, like, how do you execute it?
• 21:36
  And then two, like, there's, I think, some hesitation or fear around the relying too much on the algorithms. You know?
• 21:43
  It's like in order to do it well, you have to, like, really understand the channels where you're distributing it.
• 21:47
  And then w- I'm getting lost in this thought just thinking about it, and I think that's probably where other people get lost in it, too. Yeah. It's a good...
• 21:54
  It's like, I think content marketers, like, strangely just believe that there's gonna be some flawless system that they can follow, and then that will be the result, and everything will be great for them. Mm-hmm.
• 22:03
  I think, like, [chuckles] I think that it's, it's rarely gonna end up working out like that. I think a lot of it is you have to do what makes sense and you have the resources for within your own business.
• 22:14
  So in terms of, like, chopping up and editing content, and what do you do with this sort of, a lot of this stuff, the State of Video Report, for me, was really, really interesting, 'cause you see
• 22:26
  it's something like a little over 50% of companies do a webinar, like, at least once a month. With some, I think it's, like, 6% do them, you know, like, weekly. Other people are doing them, like...
• 22:39
  Or no, actually, it's even higher than that. There's, like, uh, 20% that do weekly. I'd have to double-check the numbers.
• 22:44
  But it's, yeah, like, 30% do monthly, 20% do weekly, and then some are doing even more frequently than that. And I was like, "Okay. That's a lot." Like, four
• 22:53
  60-minute things a month, like, that's a huge chunk of webinar content. Plus, you're doing a podcast, plus you're making these other videos, and every social algorithm is generally favoring video.
• 23:06
  You know, like, even X's CEO recently came out and said that they want X to become, like, a video-first platform. LinkedIn loves videos. YouTube is obviously... YouTube's, like, the biggest search engine.
• 23:19
  So it's like a lot of these things are gonna end up in the case where companies are already creating a ton of videos, and they need to create more videos, and they're struggling to house and organize them.
• 23:31
  It honestly feels a lot like blogs did, like, a few years ago.
• 23:35
  Like, people don't really know how to organize a blog particularly well until you had, like, content pillar and structure strategies and all these other things.
• 23:43
  So it feels like we're in kind of early stages of video content getting to this point.
• 23:48
  I feel like there's a skill set component there, too, where it's a bunch of writers and former journalists being like, "Oh, we should do something with this video," but, like, we don't know anything about video.
• 23:56
  Yeah, and, like, s- there's a couple things. So, like, the what to do with video, the thing that people are not... And this is something that is, I'm, like, writing about actually pretty frequently, is, like,
• 24:08
  one, you could take your videos and put them into video galleries. Like, it's a really underutilized kind of tactic. So, like, at Wistia, we have an ability to do, like, video galleries so it looks like Netflix.
• 24:19
  You create a page, it has videos, it has channels, it has episodes. Like, it's very easy to make it look nice. That has kinda two benefits. One benefit is usability and grouping.
• 24:30
  Like, w- a lot of Wistia customers will create a series of demo videos so that they can then send that series to somebody, and it'll be like, "Oh, this is how you use this part of our platform.
• 24:41
  This is how you use this part of our platform," stuff like that. We have series that are onboarding series for Wistia, just internal video things. "Oh, you're a new employee of Wistia. Here's a video about benefits.
• 24:51
  Here's a video about office policy. Here's a video about this." Like, grouping that together is a nice usability experience, which is huge.The second benefit is basically video SEO, the way videos work today.
• 25:05
  Google made a change last year where it wants to see a video be the focus of the page that it's on. And so by grouping a lot of videos into channels, each individual video gets its own page.
• 25:20
  And so therefore, it's like it's helping that video to rank better in search. So like that's all kind of easy win-win situation for people. Yeah. Yeah. You have videos- Super easy to do that...
• 25:30
  group them together, and if you can, it's beneficial for users, and it's beneficial for the algorithms.
• 25:37
  And then, like you had mentioned before about, you know, you get a lot of value out of using lead gen forms, similar thing, like you can use these channels to group together so that then each video has a lead gen form associated with it, and then you can start taking actions based on what happens to that, in that form.
• 25:54
  Send a follow-up email, convert that person to a hot lead, do whatever you want from that point on. So I think that's like a lot of the sides of grouping it.
• 26:02
  The question you had about, or the statement you had about clipping, I think is super interesting because I see all this stuff with like Midjourney and Sora, and it's like you type in a text prompt, and then you get like a dolphin riding a bicycle or like, you know, like a- [laughs] Right...
• 26:18
  like a panda bear on Mars, and people are like, "This is gonna destroy Hollywood," and you know, I was like, "Oh my God."
• 26:25
  And then in the state of video report, we asked people, you know, like, "What are you most excited about using?" And everybody was like, "AI." Like AI was like by far the most excited technology.
• 26:37
  And then you dig into those responses of what are people gonna use it for, and it's like captions, transcripts. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. That's so funny. Like clipping, chaptering. You know what I mean?
• 26:50
  It's not like people are really just looking to save time. Like, they're just looking on things like, how do I script something basically? You know, like, how do I do a script quicker?
• 27:00
  How do I do post-production a little bit quicker? How do I do, you know, make a clip out of this video a little bit quicker?
• 27:07
  And so it's like when you see it, the larger kinda debates around AI and the use of AI and all that other stuff,
• 27:14
  I'm very happy with the stance that Wistia is taking, which is very much seems to be in line with what people actually want, which is AI for time savings. Like AI- Yeah. Yeah...
• 27:27
  to make you move forward in a way that you might not have moved forward before.
• 27:32
  Like, I really look at, like clipping a 60-minute webinar is one where all of a sudden it's like, I don't think people fully understand, at least like senior level people gen- tend to not get that process because they're like, "Yeah, just get together a couple clips of this webinar."
• 27:50
  Well, they're like, that means that the video producer then needs to watch the 60-minute webinar.
• 27:56
  Like, so they need to take an hour, and then they need to mark down throughout the timestamps on all the clips that they might wanna clip.
• 28:04
  Then they need to like actually clip all of [chuckles] those clips, and then they need to like resize appropriately.
• 28:10
  So like it's not unreasonable that to get a couple clips from a 60-minute webinar might take like three plus hours. Yeah. It's a huge pain. I do it for this podcast. Yeah. And it's a huge pain. It's a huge pain.
• 28:22
  But like now, AI, you put it in, generates a transcript. You say, "Show me some highlights." It's like, "Here are six to seven highlights." You look at the ones you like.
• 28:34
  You're like, "Oh, this would be good if it was a little longer, a little shorter," whatever. Make your adjustments, and it's done in like 10 minutes. Yeah, that's amazing.
• 28:41
  And so it's like, [chuckles] like that's what I'm excited about, about a lot of the AI stuff is like, oh, this is dope.
• 28:47
  It's just making video production easier for people, and it's less geared towards the people who are like a really skilled video producer and more people who are like, "Ah, shit, I just need to cut a couple clips of this thing."
• 29:00
  Yeah. Yeah. That's true. I've been using the Riverside Magic Clips feature for this podcast, and it's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good. And then there's this whole other suite of tools. I was gonna say they're new.
• 29:11
  I don't think they're all new, but I'm thinking of like Kapwing, Capsule, Animoto, like tools that are built for the non-professional, sort of like the Canva style apps for people who wanna do video stuff but aren't a full-fledged editor or producer.
• 29:27
  Yeah. Which is cool.
• 29:28
  And I mean, like, like [chuckles] I'll tell you one that, I'll tell you one that like came in and has like shifted my whole thinking about our content, which probably isn't good that I'm shifted this easily on a single message.
• 29:39
  But like a couple, I think it was two weeks ago, our support channel got a message from a, like a 72-year-old woman, and she was like, "I just wanted to reach out to say like I love Wistia.
• 29:53
  I was trying to send this video of my cat to my friends, but the file was too large, and I found your site." And I was like, "Oh, you know, like this is great."
• 30:02
  And she was like, "It was easier for me to like send this video than it was to write this."
• 30:07
  And then she said something where she was like, "And then I got a, this video from a nice man," like I think it's Chris Lavigne in an automated email- Yeah. Yeah... "about how to do my lighting setup better."
• 30:19
  And she was like, "Now I'm inspired to like start a podcast and like get going and stuff like that." And I was like- How great is that? Yes. Like, yes. That's the... That's fucking awesome.
• 30:29
  Like, she's like, uh, this woman was like trying to do something simple, but because we made something daunting like video slightly easier, it was like, "Yeah, I could get into this." And I feel like- That's so great...
• 30:42
  for mar- like, if we can, if we can handle that for somebody who's just trying to send a video file of a cat who's like a 72-year-old woman, like we could be inspiring other marketers to like make the jump into this.
• 30:55
  Like, it's not as hard as you think it is. It's very doable. Yeah. Yeah. And like you can do a good job of this. Um- Totally. So I think that's like where my head is.
• 31:03
  If you ask me like what is my content strategy, it is like, that is a dream state.
• 31:08
  Somebody comes in to do something, they learn something helpful, they get better at what they're doing, and they're like inspired to do more. Like, that's my ideal flow. [chuckles] That's so cool.
• 31:19
  Actually, that reminds me of a question I wanted to ask you about, which is how does Wistia think about its own content output in terms of the mix of text versus video? Mm-hmm.
• 31:29
  I know it's probably hard to compare, like, words published versus videos published, or maybe it's just, like, how much energy goes into text content versus video content, and I'm assuming that Wistia creates probably a lot more video content than the average company, although maybe that's not true.
• 31:47
  No, we create a lot of video content, and I think we also just use, we eat our own dog food. We, you know, people are sending videos all the time to each other. We're using lots of video content.
• 31:57
  We're really going big on a lot of video content, and s- you know, we have a lot of things physically that make it easier, studios, stuff like that. Yeah.
• 32:06
  In terms of the energy, there's, like, my content team is three people. Our video team is just two people. So we're, we're definitely invested heavily into both. I'd say we try and think about them really together.
• 32:22
  Like, you'll notice a lot of the content on Wistia's blog has a video and a text component. And I think a lot of the times the way that I think about it is, like, we wanna be meshing those two together where we can.
• 32:38
  Sometimes video is just not always necessary. You can get something across, like a video marketing glossary. We don't really need a... That would be a weird video. You know?
• 32:49
  [chuckles] Like, just somebody- Right, right... somebody saying a bunch of definitions and things like that.
• 32:53
  And so, like, for me, when I think about it, you know, we try and balance our content where we want to be able to create a bunch of useful content that's searchable, SEO, stuff like that, could be used in email and drip campaigns, but I don't feel like I necessarily think about them as hugely different.
• 33:14
  I think about them as driving towards the same goal as helping people.
• 33:18
  Like, one of the ways that I think at a high level we look at it, and it's a driving force of our content strategy, is this document we have called the core questions doc. And the core questions doc is basically, like,
• 33:35
  200 to 230 questions that we feel like Wistia should answer better than anyone else. Like- Ooh, this is interesting. Is this document publicly available, or is this internal stuff? This is an internal thing.
• 33:51
  I mean, I guess- Yeah... like, it's not unreasonable that we would make it a public document, but basically, like, the way it looks is, like, here are questions about production.
• 33:59
  And there are things that we feel like we should have a better answer because we have an opinion on it, like a good opinion, a good, strong opinion about why this is useful,
• 34:09
  or that it is, like, directly tied to our product, or that it's a question- Right... like, very core. So you'll see things like what is aperture? What is frame rate? What is aspect ratio?
• 34:19
  Like, these are all important things for somebody producing video which lines up to our customers. How do you do video follow-up on lead forms? Or, like, video lead form follow-up.
• 34:30
  That's another question we should answer. How do you look at video analytics? What's more important, play rate or watch time?
• 34:36
  And so, like, those are questions that we feel like our audience would have where we are uniquely positioned to answer them well.
• 34:44
  And so, like, a lot of what that guiding principle is is saying, like, do we have an answer to those questions? And often it's like, is that answer good, okay, or do we need to update this particular article?
• 34:58
  And also, like, do we have a video associated with a high priority question? Like if it's- Yeah... a high priority question that makes sense to answer with a video, do we have videos associated with it?
• 35:10
  So I think that, like, the core questions doc is a really big driving force for me in terms of, like, what are we making and what are we trying to do, and it's we're trying to answer the questions that people have related to video and related to, like, video production.
• 35:25
  I love that. I especially love that because I feel like you've taken a version of what a lot of companies have, which is a keyword list, but made it very personal. Yeah. Right?
• 35:34
  Because the keyword list often falls flat over time because there isn't a perspective or any conviction over what goes into that content, whereas what you're saying is, "We believe we should be the authority,
• 35:46
  so, like, let's do that." That's a totally different way to...
• 35:48
  Maybe you even end up in a similar place later on where you're optimizing the thing for search or whatever, but it's coming from a place of authority, opinion, et cetera, that so much SEO content just, it just doesn't.
• 36:00
  We don't want... Yeah. 'Cause, like, it's not like that, that is a part of the doc.
• 36:05
  There's another sheet that's several columns over that shows, like, here are the associated keywords with this question, and here are basically the volume of search you could get from that. Right? And here...
• 36:16
  Like, so we keep that information there, but that is not the point. The point [chuckles] is are we answering core questions? So it's like the CSM team, our customer success team, looks at this document.
• 36:29
  Oh, great, you know, they get a question from a customer, they look at it, is this a core question? Does that core question line up? Here's the appropriate- Mm-hmm. Yeah... resource. Great.
• 36:37
  Sales team, you get a question, you could go to this thing. Like, it's a very clear-cut document in that way, but it is something... And it also gives us a roadmap. There's a lot of questions we don't have answers to.
• 36:49
  You know, like, we haven't written it yet. But we feel like this is the direction we wanna go in. Yeah, yeah. I love that.
• 36:56
  You know, you've mentioned the State of Video Report a couple times, and I wanted to ask you about that. There's so many angles we could talk about.
• 37:01
  Like, I'm curious about the meta of it, like the research, how did you write it, who worked on it, the promotion, et cetera.
• 37:08
  And then there's also, like, the findings of it, which are equally relevant to content marketers. Yeah.
• 37:12
  But maybe there's one thing I'm particularly interested in, which is it obviously required coordination among many people to do, but it still retains thisKind of brand ethos maybe that is so familiar to Wistia.
• 37:25
  How do you maintain that as you add people and tasks and project management and all these things into it?
• 37:32
  Like, it, it could so quickly become a piece of content that is so obviously created by a committee that you lose all that good branding stuff that Wistia has sort of become known for. Yeah.
• 37:42
  And I think, like, the whole issue of, like, marketing by committee versus collaborating on something is really tough. And I'll say, like, a couple of things about this topic. Like, for one,
• 37:56
  the State of Video report, how does it work? We collect a ton of research from our own platform. And so basically, like, we look at millions of videos that are embedded within Wistia.
• 38:07
  We took the transcripts of millions of videos and ran them through AI to categorize them. Cool.
• 38:12
  We cross-referenced all those videos with industry to understand what industries, like the benchmarks for each one, and then, like, did a bunch of analysis of, like, durations of videos for different industries, for different types, for different benchmarks, and all of these different pieces of it.
• 38:28
  So that's kind of the process of how it works. It's generally, like, a couple months of information gathering, a little short while of putting all of that together, working on the report, the design.
• 38:39
  That's, like, a few weeks. And then the webinar, we shockingly... We turned that around in, like, two and a half weeks or two and a half, three weeks or so. And that is, like, a... Our most recent one is, like, a...
• 38:52
  It's insane. It's a live show. It, it was, like- It's really good... fully pre-recorded. I watched some of it today. Yeah. It's really interesting. It's bes- it's, like, very fun. It was super good to do.
• 39:02
  That's, like, a whole other topic I could separate.
• 39:04
  But, like, the question of, like, how does something maintain really good Wistia quality or, or just that consistent quality and not get into a whole committee of opinions.
• 39:15
  So I think when situations go bad and you're doing marketing by committee,
• 39:21
  it can often feel like you're doing collaboration, where somebody says something pretty innocuous, like, "Oh, you should get so-and-so's opinion on it." Right? "Get their opinion, get their take on it.
• 39:34
  Get so-and-so's opinion, get their take on it." Right? Like, some sort of things like that.
• 39:39
  And once you start adding in all of these people, if there's not a clear owner or somebody who's, like, the person who's making the final call about these things, all of a sudden it becomes a committee decision.
• 39:53
  And I think one of the strong parts of Wistia's culture that helps a lot with this is people are given a lot of autonomy, and they're given a lot of control, and they have people supporting, watching, and making sure that it's going in a good direction.
• 40:07
  But, like, there is a confidence in the people here that they know what they're doing, and they were hired to do that. And so, like, we got an enormous amount of compliments on the design of the State of Video.
• 40:23
  Like, it's beautifully designed. It looks fantastic, and it was done by, like, one of Wistia's junior designers. And it just looks great. Oh, wow. But, like, they had- Yeah, that's cool... the freedom. They nailed it.
• 40:36
  It looks fucking great, and we were all there. And it's like, when I looked at the design, I knew what I was looking for. Do the charts accurately reflect the information that's being said?
• 40:48
  I'm not really there to give design feedback. I could say it and I could do it, but she doesn't have to listen to me. You know what I mean? There's [laughs] Right. I can be like, "I don't really like that color."
• 40:59
  Doesn't matter if I really like it. She's the one designing the report. You know? Like, I don't really [laughs] like, like this piece of it. Doesn't matter.
• 41:06
  And I think, like, that part of it is really useful, and then also having a culture where you can quickly arrive at decisions. So I'll give you one that I think is funny about the webinar. Part of... Sorry, live show.
• 41:20
  It's a live show.
• 41:21
  There's this segment during the live show where it's Chris Lavigne is at the data desk, and he's at the data desk, and the data desk is like, you know, it's got all these computers and all this other stuff on it.
• 41:32
  When we were shooting that particular part, it's like that segment beforehand, there's this enormous calculator, and then also Chris Lavigne has this enormous pencil, right?
• 41:43
  And all of a sudden you're in this [chuckles] and we're in this room, and it's, like, the head of marketing, you know, director of content creative is there, I'm there, Chris is there, and it's like, head of marketing's like, "Get rid of the pencil.
• 41:54
  Get rid of the calculator. I hate these." [chuckles] Like, "We need to keep this well." And then Chris is like, "The calculator is absolutely non-negotiable. I'm keeping the gigantic calculator."
• 42:04
  And it's like, "I want the giant pencil." And then Dan go- then Dan comes back again and he's like, "No. Like, the further this gets from reality, the worse it- it's doesn't hit as well as a skit."
• 42:15
  He's like, "Okay, fine. I'll remove the pencil, but I'm keeping the calculator." This is, like, 4:30 at the end of the day. You know, this is, like, people have been shooting videos for hours and this is the argument.
• 42:26
  But it's like quick decision, everybody's opinion is heard, and then a decision is made. And I think, like, the more often you build a culture of that with content creators, the better.
• 42:38
  You get more consistency when people know, "I'm gonna say my feedback. I'm not gonna couch it in something. I know who's making the final decision on this," and then we can move forward.
• 42:49
  You're gonna get, end up with consistent results. The thing that I think is hard for leadership sometimes, or people in more senior positions who end up marketing by committee, is, like, [sighs]
• 43:02
  I think there's a certain sense of, like, a little bit of ego that they feel like if they don't say something or if they say something and their, like, opinions aren't taken into account, maybe they're not that good at their job.
• 43:15
  Or- Yeah, yeah. Absolutely...
• 43:16
  like, I don't know why people have an issue with it, but, like, sometimes I think people are afraid of relinquishing creative controlAnd by doing that, they're not guiding the project, they're just, like, holding it back.
• 43:30
  And so I think, like, the more people can get into the habit of being like, "I trust the person I hired to do this, go do it, and if anything's drastically wrong, I will call it out in very direct terms and get it out to people."
• 43:47
  And so, like, I think you see that a lot of the State of Video.
• 43:49
  It's very consistent, it's very easy, it's very good to understand because you have not that many people working on it, and the people who are working on it have a high degree of autonomy on what they're doing. Yeah.
• 44:00
  That's so-- I love that. There's actually, I wrote an article for the Superpath blog a couple years ago about why iteration doesn't always make content better.
• 44:08
  Like, there's this kinda trap that content teams fall into where it's like somebody writes a brief, someone else writes it, then they have a feedback thing, and Google Docs comments, but then somebody else feels like they wanna add their two cents, and then the writer feels like they need to respond, and it's like next thing you know, it's just been iterated on so many times, but like completely lost its spirit, for lack of a better term.
• 44:28
  You know? And that's like a... I don't know. I think that's a lot of people borrowing HubSpot's content model, where it's like it really feels like
• 44:37
  people are really excited about this idea where it's like, you know, you have an SEO guy who plans, like, the SEO and then writes a brief, and then you send that brief to a writer, and then that writer, like, looks at it, and then there's an editor, and the editor edits it.
• 44:50
  And then all of a sudden it goes back to the writer to write, and then it has to go back to the SEO guy to make sure that it didn't, like, lose any of those other things.
• 44:58
  And then it goes back to the person who then actually uploads it onto the website. And then that [laughs] like it's so... It ends up being- It's like an assembly line, basically. Yeah...
• 45:05
  it's this huge assembly line, and I think that works really, really, really well when your content team is large.
• 45:16
  Like, it's, and when everybody needed specialized knowledge, like when SEO wasn't particularly accessible to the average person. Sure, you needed all of those individual things. I think when you look at stuff now,
• 45:32
  it's better when everybody is a little bit more autonomous, knows everything that they're doing, and knows a little bit there, and you're more, like, supporting each other in specific areas.
• 45:41
  And I think that model works better because people are faster when you have these, like, kind of clear areas of overlap. Like, I do this thing, you do this thing, we overlap on this other particular area.
• 45:54
  You know, I write customer testimonial content, you write, like, thought leadership content.
• 45:58
  Sometime we come together and help each other and support each other's work on, like, product content that's thought leadership-y. It's great. Like, totally good. Yeah, yeah.
• 46:07
  I think about the assembly line that is, like, a little bit further out that I think people are gonna run into is [sighs] I think a lot of marketing leaders are paying influencers money.
• 46:20
  So they're paying influencers, like, $10,000 for a couple post.
• 46:24
  And I think what a lot of marketing leaders are probably looking at on their content teams or thinking about subconsciously is like, "That's one dude, like, or one woman, and I'm paying one woman, and she's making all of this incredible content that's great.
• 46:40
  And then I have a team of six people who are struggling to get a blog post out in a week." And it's very confusing to have that dichotomy.
• 46:51
  Why am I paying six people to go slow and make something that's not working, and then I'm very excited to pay this influencer $10,000 who is by themselves writing a weekly column?
• 47:06
  And I think that difference is gonna keep getting exacerbated, where businesses are gonna be like, "Oh, maybe I don't need all of these people in this assembly line format.
• 47:17
  Maybe I need to be encouraging more people to think, work, and act like creators, where they're taking on more ownership of the entire process. They're thinking about how does it do well in ranking?
• 47:29
  How will it end up on social? Like, how is it gonna be cut into a different video? How is it gonna sh-- is there other videos to add it to?"
• 47:37
  Like, the more people are actually thinking in that way, I think the better production you're gonna end up getting. Yeah. That's so fascinating.
• 47:46
  Uh, back in my Animalz days, you know, we had this cool luxury of being able to see a lot of people's Google Analytics. And
• 47:56
  l- I don't have great data on this, but anecdotally, I remember being very disappointed looking at traffic from, uh, large companies with large content teams.
• 48:06
  You're like, "How are you spending this much money and nothing's growing?" And then every now and then you'd find kind of like a lone wolf content marketer just all by themselves just absolutely crushing it.
• 48:18
  It's like, why? How does this happen? I mean, what you just explained is exactly why it happens. But I wonder if... You know, I have this theory right now that in content marketing, everything that was old is new again.
• 48:29
  You know?
• 48:29
  Like, a lot of people are just, like, throwing stuff out the window right now, and I wonder if there will be kind of like a new breed of these, like, lone wolf type content marketers who just can absolutely crush it for companies who maybe previously relied on the five to 10-person content team that costs, at this point, maybe a prohibitive amount to continue running.
• 48:50
  I think you're gonna see... The, the, the phrase that I hear is, like, that I think'll probably come over to content is from engineering. People I, I've heard of 10X engineers.
• 49:03
  You know, like an engineer or a developer who is so much better or so good that their code is, like, so much more impactful than a larger amount of other people.
• 49:14
  I think you're gonna see something similar, where it's like, oh, wow. Like Amanda from SparkToro. Like, she was on it. I didn't realize. I was listening to that podcast. They're a three-person team?
• 49:23
  I was like, "What?"Yeah, yeah. She is incredibly effective. Yeah, exactly.
• 49:28
  Like, the, more people are gonna stop looking at it as like, "I need a writer," or, "I need this person," and they're gonna find you or like, "Oh, wow, that person can write an article, appear in a video, and then post it on social- [laughs]...
• 49:38
  and write copy for this." They're amazing, and they would've cost me five people that would've been all in arguments with each other. [laughs] Right.
• 49:52
  Like, one person with no arguments who's good at working is going to really outpace everybody else.
• 50:00
  So I think, like, that's something that I'm very, like, strong on, is like, oh, yeah, like, there's probably gonna be a lot of that kind of, like, 10X language for content marketers, people who are, like, disproportionately above the rest of content marketing.
• 50:14
  Yeah, yeah. That's so fascinating. Sam, I wanna be respectful of your time. I feel like we're kinda just scratching the surface here. [laughs] Like, there's a lot to talk about.
• 50:21
  I really like your perspective and your opinions on content, and I feel like you're just saying so many things that I've been kinda, like, mulling over in my head.
• 50:28
  You're giving some- so many of these things, like, language, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. We should do a round two if you're open to it. Love to. But in the meantime, where can we send people?
• 50:36
  Like, where can people follow in with your work and Wistia stuff, too? Yeah. So people should follow Wistia. Just follow Wistia on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, like YouTube, wherever it is.
• 50:47
  They'll see a lot of our great content there. I encourage everybody to download the State of Video Report, so just look for Wistia State of Video. It's really fantastic. Check out the State of Video Live.
• 50:58
  And then if you wanna follow me or, uh, anywhere where I am, usually LinkedIn is the best place. My name is just Sam Balter. You can follow me there. Perfect.
• 51:07
  We'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes so people can easily get to it. Sam, thanks so much. It's awesome to meet you, and I, I really do hope we can do this again. Awesome.
• 51:14
  No, it was great to be on the show. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye. [outro music]