Tyler Lessard is VP of Marketing and Chief Video Strategist at Vidyard, a video platform for marketing and sales, and answers our questions in the latest of Press Gazette’s Marketing Maestro interviews. This series is produced in association with Lead Monitor, New Statesman Media Group’s AI-driven marketing solution.
What has been your proudest achievement in your current role?
In 2020 I released my first book, The Visual Sale, bringing together everything I’ve learned about using video in the B2B marketing and sales process to generate better results with modern B2B buyers. It was a culmination of more than seven years of learnings and examples from our own business and countless others that I’ve worked with. It’s a proud accomplishment of mine personally, but also represents a huge milestone for our marketing team and business overall.
What media channels do you see as most important and best value when it comes to marketing spend and activity?
As a B2B business selling to marketers and sales teams in other B2B companies, we’ve found LinkedIn to be a very effective channel for reaching the right audiences with highly targeted messaging. We’re also seeing success with YouTube as well as paid media programs with industry-specific publications. These third-party channel strategies complement our organic SEO and content marketing programs, community engagement, and email marketing programs.
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What is the best way to improve your social media output, especially when dealing with B2B marketing?
There are two great ways to increase your social media output while also improving the results and outcomes. First is to be intentional in creating content on a consistent basis for each of your primary social media channels. It’s no longer good enough to just repurpose existing content and blogs, you need to be creating content designed from the ground up for LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, or whichever channels you’re engaging. Second is to invest in ongoing ‘series’ of content for your main channels, giving you a formula that you can lean into and easily reproduce on a consistent basis.
What for you is the key to any successful marketing campaign – what actually makes a ‘good lead’?
It’s all about engagement. Clicks, likes, and online activities are helpful indicators of interest and relevance, but high engagement is the true indicator of intent and resonance. We always focus on our campaigns and content on creating opportunities for high engagement, enabling us to build our brand and educate prospects but to also track and understand who’s really leaning into our messaging.
How important is technology in modern marketing?
Marketing without technology is like selling door-to-door. You can do it, but your effectiveness and efficiency are going to suffer immensely.
What are the biggest pain points in a marketing campaign?
Tracking and analytics are still challenging for most marketing teams. While it’s fairly easy to track leading indicators such as clicks and conversions, it’s very difficult to understand which campaigns are truly having an impact on the bottom line. Attribution reporting has elevated this, but it is still a very real challenge for most of us.
And finally, if you could ask your peers for one piece of advice or help, what would it be?
What are you changing, or considering, for your next wave of marketing to better engage audiences in a digital-only world? What’s that next creative idea that will help you stand out from all the noise and build a unique and impactful brand?
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