Online Video as Lead Generation – response to David Meerman Scott's Blog Post

 Today, David Meerman Scott posted this article on his blog entitled “Online video as lead generation“, which features a video application we helped him to create based on his interviews with execs at GM. There was some great discussion and debate about how new and innovative the approach we took was. Here was my full response and I encourage your feedback.

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful comments about the VisibleGains application on this blog and the feedback about our website. I’ve been with the company since 2004, when we first created the core technology to enable interactive or non-linear video. But in the past six months we’ve gone through a major transformation from a video technology platform (previously called PermissionTV) to a B2B marketing and sales solution. While the enabling technology has been around for some time, we realized that the core challenges faced by B2B marketers and sellers could only partially be solved by technology. We needed to rethink the way video content was conceived, produced, assembled, and delivered for the new “buyer-led” world that social media has empowered.

We built new tools to enable rapid construction of “video apps” to enhance prospect interaction throughout the entire sales funnel from lead generation to lead qualification, nurturing and sales enablement. We focused on integrations with key CRM and marketing automation systems like Salesforce.com, Hubspot, and Eloqua and integrated Omniture’s analytics engine to provide insights into user behavior and needs. The ROI numbers quoted in this thread are similar to what we’ve experienced with our clients to date, but in true agile fashion it’s critical to gather specific metrics on engagement time, click thrus and lead capture in order to tell what works and what doesn’t. On the surface it may look like a technology that’s been around for a while, but underneath it all is a well thought out solution purpose-built for today’s marketing and sales challenges.

Based on the comments in David’s Blog, we know we have much more work to do on the marketing end, no doubt. Since we provide video content strategy and production as part of our solution, prices can vary greatly depending upon the amount of content required. I’d like to make myself personally available to anyone interested in exploring our solutions in greater detail and can be reached via Twitter at @mpkaplan.