Item: Vidyard
Rating: 10
Author: Eric Murphy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Vidyard across our whole organization. Our Marketing team uses it to publish, manage, and analyze all of our videos in our inbound marketing campaigns, from our website, social channels, and email marketing. Our sales team uses it to create personalized outreach videos to new leads and to send follow-up videos to prospects they are working with. Our service team uses it to send welcome videos to new clients, and explainer videos for new tools or campaigns we build for our clients. Our consultants use it to reinforce the training sessions they deliver to our clients. Our ops team uses it for internal communications to explain new or changed processes.
Like everyone else in the world right now, video is the primary method of communicating. For 'synchronous' video we use Zoom, for everything 'asynchronous' it's Vidyard.

Pros and Cons

Ease of use. It's immediately available straight from your desktop via Chrome. If it's faster to say it than type it, we use Vidyard.
Show engagement. We get immediate alerts when the videos are being watched and re-watched. We regularly see Sales Outreach videos being re-watched more than 10 times. Great lead signals!
The support from the people at Vidyard is great too. Michael has built a great company of really helpful and friendly people.
The partner team engagement from Vidyard is really valuable, in terms of product positioning help, marketing and sales support, and technical support.

We are quite demanding, so the things we'd like to see improved are more about the roadmap of things we are hoping will be possible soon rather than faults. The recent upgrade to the back end has solved any gripes we've had so far.
To get the cookie tracking right (so you can see who is watching and when) means you've got to follow the right steps for adding the video to outgoing emails. It's possible to get it wrong and mess up the tracking.
I once lost a video recording that I did in the mobile app which was infuriating. Simple fix, record the video using your phone's camera app, and then upload it in the mobile app.

Return on Investment

Sales outreach emails using Vidyard are far more effective than text based ones. We've split tested campaigns and proved that. Typical response rate on those emails that are opened, show text based emails is less than 10%. Video based ones are above 60%.

Usability

There's a few bits of set-up I'd recommend speaking to an expert partner for (like us!) like setting up your landing page, calls-to-action, understanding how best to embed the videos (best practice rather than technical), and some practical tips for getting your people over the fear of doing videos in the first place. There is a great short campaign that we use to help everyone become proficient and skilled at creating great videos, that take less time than typing an email.

Alternatives Considered

Soapbox, Wistia and 23 Video

It was the HubSpot integration that was the big thing for us. Because it's the video engine inside HubSpot, it's the most seamless integration.

Key Insights

Do you think Vidyard delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Vidyard's feature set?

Yes

Did Vidyard live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Vidyard go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Vidyard again?

Yes

Other Software Used

HubSpot Marketing Hub, HubSpot CMS Hub, HubSpot Sales Hub, PandaDoc

Likelihood to Recommend

Full disclosure, we are a Vidyard partner. (It was an easy decision to become one since we use it so heavily.) If you're using HubSpot and you use video, you really need to be using Vidyard. I can't speak to the other integrations that Vidyard has.
If you have a sales team who are tasked to engage with new leads, either from inbound marketing or outreach activity, then you should definitely get them using it. The free version is totally usable, and the paid tools add superpowers.

Support Rating

Proactive, supportive, they listen to feedback and respond. Easy to engage with, very responsive. Online resources are great. Watch the videos!

Ease of Integration

This score is for the full-blown marketing enterprise product. Simple enough to integrate with HubSpot. We needed a bit of help (that was provided) in setting up some more technical aspects. Not 100% self service.

For the free tool, and the paid 'sales' tools, 10 out of 10.

Making video so easy that it's the first thing you do. Vidyard enables you to go video-first.

Overall Satisfaction with Vidyard