On September 24th, we held a roundtable discussion with 15 Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Sales Officers from our client accounts, along with members of our advisory board (David Meerman Scott, Mike Volpe, Steve Garfield and Trish Bertuzzi). Everyone was very engaged and there were many insights that we will share over future posts. Here I would like to begin with an interesting idea on getting started using video as part of the B2B sales and marketing process.

Matt Duffy, VP of Marketing at Schwartz Communication, shared a great (bit bold) idea for getting his organization started. Matt began with a video holiday card, where each employee at Schwartz (there are 200+ in 4 offices in the U.S. and Europe), shared a New Year wish to his or her clients’. The people were captured in high definition (HD) with an inexpensive camera ($150). Check out what they did by navigating through the branches to watch a clip or two…

Under Bryan Scanlon’s leadership, Schwartz had built out their digital services practice. They had seen the evolution from traditional print based PR and wanted to make sure their clients were aware they were now providing a very broad and deep set of communication services, including the use of video.  The holiday card accomplished several goals:

1. Started the video process – It got everyone in the company on camera and thinking about the new video medium while providing a bit of a Casting Call for those that were comfortable and interested in video.

2. Intriguing to Clients – Clients were intrigued by such a different xmas card approach. It got their attention and helped to convey that Schwartz was on the leading edge of new media for communication.  It also allowed existing customers to meet the members of their account team who are geographically distributed.

3. Great Results – The application was viewed by more than 1000 customers and it led to a number of discussions about video-related services that Schwartz could provide.

Do you have examples of some marketing or sales activities where you had easy ways to use video to help achieve your goal?