Nextiny | Inbound Marketing & Sales Blog | Sarasota, Florida

How Soapbox by Wistia Videos Changed Daily Operations at Our Growth Agency

Written by Gabriel Marguglio | September 18, 2017

Monday at 10 am, a customer sent a question about “How to segment leads on the HubSpot CRM” so Kara, our Senior Account Manager, created a Soapbox video in 5 minutes and sent it back to the customer via email. At 10:45 am the same customer asked about Hubspot custom fields and Kara created another soapbox in 3 minutes and sent the email back to the customer.


*While some thumbnails are linked, video's including client information are not linked.

Later that morning, Nick, our Sales Enablement Specialist, created a Soapbox video for one of our customers as part of our continuous training program to educate new salespeople on how to enroll contacts in a sales sequence from the HubSpot CRM. When he was about to start we had a 2 minute conversation and decided that we should actually make this video generic so that we can add it to our knowledge base in the future and use it for other customers every time they onboard a new salesperson.


Right after lunch, Megan, our video specialist, had a strategy meeting with Kara and Amy, our website designer, to create a better video gallery for one of our clients that would help improve UX and increase conversions. The problem was that this customer had more than 60 videos and we weren’t sure how they wanted to organize it going forward. Megan mentioned that Wistia had a new feature to tag videos and organize them inside the tool. She created a Soapbox video in 1 minute, showing the customer how to organize everything by using the tag feature. Problem solved!


While all these support Soapbox videos were being created, Gabriel, our CEO got an email from a customer asking how things were going. We had a meeting scheduled for the following week to go over the account and could have just waited until then to do so, but instead, Gabriel decided to create a 3 minute Soapbox video showing Hubspot, Wistia, and Databox reports, letting the customer know that the website launch was a success and that metrics were moving in the right direction. The response from that email was, “Great job! I’m also getting leads from the website and two of them last week turned into opportunities already.”


Happy customer? Let’s send him a Soapbox on how he can leave a review on our HubSpot partner directory page…


Later that day, Kara and Gabriel were analyzing data for one of our multiple account customers and reviewing their SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) definitions and lead scoring rules, and found that there was a correlation between certain page views and customers closed in HubSpot. They created a 2 minute Soapbox video explaining these findings and showing how we were able to change the SQL definition in accordance with the new data findings.

But wait, there’s more… At the end of the day, 3 more soapbox videos were created. Two of them were sales videos created to re-engage with leads we met the week before at a speaking engagement at the National FPRA conference. One of those leads responded the next day to that video/email with very positive comments about the way we engaged with her, and that lead has now gone through our process and could become a customer soon.

Last but not least, Kara had an issue she was working on with HubSpot Support and decided to convey what was happening instead of enduring the difficult task of explaining a complex issue via text, so….. She created a 1 minute Soapbox video explaining and presenting the issue and sent it to HubSpot Support. After getting a response from support, Kara created a last video showing how it was better, but still not completely fixed. The problem was solved by the end of the day.

As you can see Soapbox has changed not only the way we create engaging content for marketing and sales, but also changed the way we operate our growth agency on a daily basis.

What is Soapbox and how to use it? 

Soapbox is a Chrome Extension that allows you to record a video with 2 clicks directly from your browser and webcam. It simplifies communication and the creation of human interactions through video. Since the launch at WistiaFest 2017, Soapbox has become one of our core tools to communicate better with leads, customers, and colleagues.

Learn more about how to use Soapbox for video marketing, sales and customer service.

How did we start using Soapbox at the office?

We started by creating a couple of Soapbox videos to test the product. We could not believe how easy it was. 

One day Gabriel was sending an email to a customer with 3 snapshots and explanations of each of them, with red circles (using Apple Preview). This email took him 20 minutes to put together when he was explaining something that takes just 2 minutes to explain in person. Gabriel had an epiphany, he looked at us and said...

 

“Starting today. Snapshots are banned at Nextiny.” 

Every time you see yourself taking a snapshot and trying to explain something, create a Soapbox video instead.

This got the whole team to test the tool and experience personally how awesome it was, but it was when we decided to create a video blog series with Soapbox that it became a tool loved by everyone. We told everybody to create a Soapbox video by Friday explaining a simple task that they do or explain every day to one of our customers. We called this series “Soapbox Weekly Hacks” and we now have 10 hacks posted on our website. We even created a Topic Cluster for SEO purposes with these blogs and in less than a month got to the top of the first page of Google for the keyword “How to use Soapbox”

After making a couple of these internal decisions to invest more of our time in Soapbox, we have seen an organic increase in the use of the tool in many other creative ways. Soapbox is helping us to communicate better.

Here’s a list of some of the many ways we are using Soapbox by Wistia for our agency and our customers:

1 - Soapbox for Video Blogs (Marketing)

We are creating content faster because we are creating video faster. Video re-energizes your content strategy. When you create engaging videos with valuable content and tips for your customers, colleagues, or leads, your content strategy will move faster and it will be easier to create blogs, social posts, and emails once the video is done.

Our “Soapbox Weekly Hacks,” which usually take less than 30 minutes to produce, are better, more human, and more authentic than content from blogs that took weeks to put together.
We have also proven that this content works for SEO. Topic Clusters with video are seeing better ranking and faster growth than traditional text blogs.

This series has been so successful that now some of our customers have started creating content with Soapbox to engage internally with their teams and externally with their own contacts and customers. This easy, fast way of creating engaging and high value content, empowers our customers to create more quality content that ends up helping their overall marketing and sales strategy, and in the end, their bottom line.

2 - Soapbox for Video Emails (Marketing + Sales)

Including Soapbox videos in emails for marketing efforts and all sales emails helped increase opening and click-through rates. When you send emails with video instead of text, you control the tone, and therefore, the intent of the message you want to portray. This method has improved communication with our clients because we were able to minimize contextual misunderstandings. This makes video in email even better because people tend to have a high value perception of video and think that you spent lots of time and effort putting it together for them. BIG IMPACT!!!!

3 - Soapbox for Customer Service & Training (Service + Delight)

We are also using Soapbox as a tool to train current customers. Creating these videos not only helps us keep a more personal connection with sales teams, but it also creates a database of training videos that the customer can then use as their own sales training resource.
We have also seen the reaction from salespeople when they get the initial Soapbox videos and they start seeing the value of how this can help them keep a more human connection with their leads.

We are now also exploring the creation of quick videos to keep our customers happy, and help them to do the same with their own customers. Creating a Birthday greeting video, or a Soapbox showing how their account is growing, or how we found something awesome in their HubSpot account, etc, makes a BIG DIFFERENCE! Delighting your customers is so much easier with Soapbox by Wistia. 

The future of Soapbox:

As the tool continues to grow, we believe that there are opportunities to encourage your teams to use it more and more. Wistia just launched an update for Soapbox that allows you to integrate your videos into your Wistia account which then allows you to take these videos everywhere else.


You are able to not only embed them and use them on social media, but also edit them and make them even better by combining them with other footage, b-roll, music, and much more for specific applications.

This will also allow, through the Wistia integration, the ability to track the success of these efforts. Furthermore, when using HubSpot and their Wistia Integration, you will not only see how much of your video has been watched or if there are clicks on your CTAs, but also who is watching and how many of those views are from your leads. You can trigger responses from HubSpot, by email or tasks in the CRM, to take action on a lead if they watched more than a certain percentage of the video.

Related blog: Learn how to read Wistia Analytics Data from this Soapbox Video

Conclusion: Soapbox helps you communicate in a more human way.

Soapbox makes communication with your team members, customers and prospects a more human experience.

The extra value of all this content and how to use it to create your own Knowledge Base:
We realized we are creating so much content that we could generalize some of it, for the most common questions that could help other people. Every time we can help more people with this explanation, we make it generic and add it to our knowledge base of videos. At the same time, we can use these videos in the future to help other customers with the same problem and use that to drive content creation for our blog and promotions on social media.

So, what are you using Soapbox by Wistia for? Let us know in the comments.