Sarah Hughes: Leveraging Content Marketing To Accelerate Growth

Video content marketing is rocking the world right now. It has become one of the most effective and versatile digital marketing tools. When done rightly, it boosts conversion and sales, increases ROI, and builds trust with a target audience.

At PinchForth, we want to see businesses grow in 2021. So, in today's post in the Rediscover Marketing Series, we feature Sarah Hughes, the Director of Content Marketing at an online video creation platform for teams.

Be sure to read this post until the end to discover some of Sarah's vital advice on content marketing strategies for growth leaders.

About Sarah and Wibbitz

Wibbitz is an online video creation platform that makes it easy to create professional short-form videos in a few minutes - with no video creation or editing experience needed. Sarah Hughes is the Director of Content Marketing and has worked at the company for almost five years. She works with an in-house marketing team of three individuals comprising herself, the CMO, and Director of Growth. Sarah also collaborates with external marketing agencies and freelancers.

Sarah oversees every aspect of Wibbitz's content marketing strategies from SEO, website, email, and social media to drive organic lead generation and create a knowledge hub of resources. We are impressed by Sarah’s goals to drive product awareness, communicate current customers' stories, and educate potential users on how the Wibbitz platform can solve their challenges with video.

Even more, Sarah is interested in seeing that, through published educational content, Wibbitz becomes the go-to for relevant information on how to implement video content into their overall marketing strategies.

Sarah, on Organic Marketing and Notable Team Achievements

In March 2020, Wibbitz changed their business model from the traditional inside-sales-only model most common for enterprise SAAS (software-as-a-service) products, to a more self-service system that allows users to sign up for a free trial of the platform, make a payment, and start creating cool video content as soon as they like.  

As a result, they also had to reevaluate their entire marketing strategy - from the lifecycle stages that are now a part of their customers’ journey, to the content that they’re creating in order to improve a user’s experience at every stage.

Here's how Sarah and her team maximized organic marketing:

• Blogs: Before the shift in strategy, a large percentage of the team's organic marketing efforts went into their blogs. Sarah mentioned that they worked to improve free trial conversions from their most high-traffic blogs by optimizing for new priority keywords, adding more conversion points, and updating the content with more videos and product-driven stories from our customers - to show how Wibbitz has helped them overcome specific challenges with video.
  
  

• Wibbitz Website: Sarah highlighted that they also worked on optimizing the SEO on their website for increased customer acquisition. They created more pages that shine the light on the unique use-cases customers can use Wibbitz for. They also included how-to guides in the in-app experience and developed an email sequence for sending quality content at the right time.
  
  

• Social Media: Sarah says their strategy is to be more customer and product-focused, and video-driven. On their social media platforms, they post educational video content that they create using the Wibbitz platform - to show all the awesome things it’s capable of, and all the different ways it can be used to improve any social media or marketing strategy.
  

As a content marketer, Sarah's goal is to create quality content that gives users an incredible UX journey through the platform, helps them solve their challenges and do their jobs better. Sarah is particularly proud that her team has built a well-oiled marketing engine that they can now improve upon in order to achieve this goal.

Leverage Video Content for Growth

Marketers, growth leaders and business owners should hop on the video content train. A survey conducted by Wyzowl, a video marketing agency, identified that 72% of businesses claim video has significantly improved their conversion rates. Another research by Google claims that 70% of B2B buyers watch videos when they decide to make a purchase.

Regardless of industry, video is an incredible and effective way to make connections online, boost social engagements, and improve website domain authority. Sarah pointed out that this is especially true in this season as most of the population is working remote and live events are at a standstill.

Also, videos do not cost as much as several marketing executives think it does. Sarah told us that the kind of videos that sell on social media do not require substantial payments to production agencies. Popular videos are user-generated content, talking head videos and short clips that can be created with zero experience using easy-to-use solutions like Wibbitz.

Last Remarks

In conclusion, Sarah advises marketing departments to remain flexible. Nothing is certain and what holds true for this first quarter in 2021 might not for the next. However, she emphasizes the importance of data, KPIs (personal, team and company), and keeping track of activities in a quarterly blueprint.

She mentioned that having a master plan makes it easy to shift focus and identify adjustments that need to be made when something changes.
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What are your plans for video content in 2021? We look forward to sharing our next Rediscover Marketing post with you soon.