Big Bang, Small Budget: How Scrappy Startup Videos Changed the Game for #FlipMyFunnel. A big part of your strategy rides on it, and it’s up to you to make it happen. Startup Videos Don’t Have to be Perfect The first video Vajre and his team put together was to promote the idea behind #FlipMyFunnel. But Terminus was confronted with a different problem when planning their first #FlipMyFunnel conference – how does a relatively unknown company assemble a high-profile team of speakers to talk account-based marketing at an event they have never heard of in Atlanta? So rather than pushing resources towards polished marketing assets or trying to secure third-party introductions, Vajre turned back to the same video technique that made #FlipMyFunnel successful in the first place. Every person on your sales team probably has a camera on their smartphone sitting in their pocket or purse. We only have customer videos. When they tell it, they’re going to tell it as practitioners, and the people who faced the problem that we solve. It’s not going to be about Terminus. And to me this really speaks to the power of video – giving your prospects the opportunity to put themselves in your customers’ shoes is key, and when you can show your customers expressing how big of an impact your business has on theirs, you’re doing the hard work for them.
Picture this: you have an incredibly important goal, something that will change the course of your business. A big part of your strategy rides on it, and it’s up to you to make it happen. Oh, and as an added bonus, you have very little budget to make it happen. Sound familiar? Chances are if you’re on a startup team – whether it’s a tech company or a restaurant – this will be familiar territory.
Sangram Vajre, CMO and Co-Founder of Atlanta account-based marketing startup Terminus, faced this problem when his team decided to turn marketing on its head, literally. They created #FlipMyFunnel, a community and event series based around ABM strategies, and had the daunting task of promoting it to the world. Lacking in the resources to make a big impact in a crowded space, Vajre and his team got scrappy – and started with everyone’s favorite medium: video.
I had the opportunity to hear all about Terminus’ video strategy during Vajre’s talk at Viewtopia 2016, The Video Marketing Summit, and here are the four big lessons I walked away with.
1. Startup Videos Don’t Have to be Perfect
The first video Vajre and his team put together was to promote the idea behind #FlipMyFunnel. Vajre admits the video was never intended for public consumption, and that he may or may not have been a bit drunk at the time. “Videos are really cool because it puts that human element out there,” Vajre said at the start of his talk. “We made this video to explain #FlipMyFunnel to our designer, and it wasn’t supposed to go out to people.”
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But the video proved to be such a powerful and succinct message that they decided to send it out to customers and see what they thought. The response was unpredictable, and overwhelming. “We thought ‘Let’s just get an idea out there!’ and now we use this video to send out to prospects to help them figure out what account-based marketing and the concept of flipping your funnel really is. They watch, learn, laugh, and it puts a smile on their face. ”
Creating a new market isn’t easy, even for big brands. So Terminus’ success at creating such a great community around their funnel-flipping concept really stands out. “It’s a scrappy video, taken on an iPhone that started a movement for us that is now 3000+ people that come to the conferences in cities all over North America,” said Vajre. And it kicked-off a series of video-led campaigns that would end up putting Terminus on the map very quickly.
For me, the biggest take-away from the first portion of Vajre’s talk is simple – as a startup, you don’t always have a big budget to make things happen. But video lets you show off new concepts or ideas to your prospects, and drive emotion in a way that you simply can’t do with text. Sometimes low-budget marketing falls flat, but if you use your assets wisely, and put your passion into words, sometimes you’ll find yourself with a runaway hit like Terminus.
2. Personalization Isn’t Just for Prospects
We’re big believers in personalized video at Vidyard, and we have many customers (including Terminus) that use our Personalized Video platform to add really immersive and engaging details to their prospect campaigns. But Terminus was confronted with a different problem when planning their first #FlipMyFunnel conference – how does a relatively unknown company…
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