Saving Company Resources with Soapbox and Wistia

For the team at CoSchedule, using video to market their products and drive adoption is a no-brainer. The North Dakota-based company provides marketers with tools that make cross-functional work a lot less stressful — and way more collaborative. And thank goodness they do! Any marketer will tell you that having one clear source of truth to work from throughout a campaign is absolutely key to success.

CoSchedule is a powerful, agile tool for marketing teams. But with so many unique features, it can be challenging to demonstrate the full value of the tool in a succinct, engaging way. To make sure their customers were getting the most of the product, CoSchedule started investing more heavily in video. We chatted with Whitney Deterding, Product Marketing Strategy Lead at CoSchedule, to find out exactly how they’re using Soapbox and Wistia to better their business and to learn more about the results they’re seeing so far.

Using video to drive product education and customer retention

Whitney described CoSchedule as a family of agile tools built to help their customers organize all of their marketing efforts. However, demonstrating the true caliber of CoSchedule is difficult due to its wide array of social media tools, content tools, and work organizer tools. To improve their customer experience, CoSchedule began creating product education videos and demos for an initiative called “Actionable Marketing Institute.”

Creating videos for Actionable Marketing Institute using Soapbox

Using Soapbox, our friendly webcam and screen-recording tool for Chrome, CoSchedule launched “Actionable Marketing Institute” to provide additional value to their customers and teach them how to get the most out of their marketing. The team at CoSchedule creates and releases a new course every month — each one featuring seven to eight videos. The videos include industry best practices, productivity hacks, demos of the product, and strategies to get more out of their marketing. Here’s an example of what one of these videos actually looks like:

When CoSchedule first started the Academy, only one to two team members were actually creating videos for the monthly course. But, Soapbox’s simple and easy-to-use interface allowed the company to onboard their entire marketing team in no time. Soon enough, team members were able to create quality videos by recording, editing, and learning as they went along, without having any prior videography knowledge.

“Team members were able to create quality videos by recording, editing, and learning as they went along, without having any prior videography knowledge.”

Whitney said she’ll typically sit down with someone on the team and provide a template for the presentation to ensure the Academy videos all have the same look and feel. Then, she shares a checklist they’ve created to ensure even more consistency. The checklist includes:

• Suggestions for what to wear on camera
• Requirements for what should be in the background
• Tips and pointers for looking and feeling your best on camera

With Whitney’s quick coaching session and a checklist in hand, everyone on her team is ready to put their video together, export the final product, and then upload it Wistia. For the final step, all they have to do is grab the embed code and drop it into their Academy tool.

Saving designers hours of time

Without Soapbox, Whitney said it would take a minimum of two to three hours to produce each video in the monthly course for the Academy. Designers would have to manually piece together all of the individual shots, like showcasing the person who’s actually teaching the course and capturing the screen for tutorials. According to Whitney’s estimate and based on how many episodes they create each month, CoSchedule saves their designers roughly 15 to 25 hours per month using Soapbox to shoot a complete Actionable Marketing Institute course.

“CoSchedule saves their designers roughly 15 to 25 hours per month using Soapbox to shoot a complete Actionable Marketing Institute course.”

The Academy covers topics like how to create strategic Facebook Ads, how to use SEO in a blogging strategy, how to use CoSchedule in specific ways, and more. By using Soapbox, the marketing team is able to introduce themselves through videos in a more personal way, create professional-quality presentations, capture their screens for tutorials, and make sure everything comes together nicely, all on their own.

Changing and updating product feature videos

Not only is Soapbox saving CoSchedule’s team hours of time, but they’ve also saved themselves some headaches by hosting their creations on Wistia. When it comes to marketing SaaS products, there’s always the chance that what you showcased in the video could change in a matter of months. Whitney commented on this pain point and how Wistia makes this burden less heavy on her team:

“With Wistia, we can easily manage product videos. If something in the CoSchedule app changes, we create a new video, replace it in Wistia, and it updates across our entire site. Now we don’t have to clean up a ton of video debt every time we make improvements to CoSchedule. By using Wistia, this process is just one simple upload instead.”

Taking steps to measure success

Once these videos are out in the world, CoSchedule will look to total video views to see which topics are the most popular with their users. As we mentioned before, the Academy covers a wide array of subjects throughout these courses, and although many of them are selected based on user feedback, Whitney said it’s still valuable to see video data on a more granular level. She’ll look at where people are dropping off throughout the video and will use that intel to inform what courses to create next and which types of topics they may want to steer clear from.

Bettering the business with video

Whether it’s saving hours of designers’ time by using Soapbox to create Actionable Marketing Institute or hosting videos on Wistia and preventing a slew of website clean-up headaches, it’s clear that the North Dakota-based SaaS company is seeing results from their investment in video. With so many features to boast for social media managers, content marketers, and more, video is helping CoSchedule clearly demonstrate all the value their tool provides to customers, while also positively impacting their business.

Find CoSchedule online and on Twitter.