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Chris SavageChris Savage founded Wistia to help businesses understand how well their video content was performing.
Early on they stumbled across content marketing, using their own how-to videos to grow their own business. When COVID-19 hit and customers started interacting with companies virtually, Wistia really took off.
We talked about:
- how he founded and has grown Wistia as a video platform to help marketers understand how well their videos are working
- their focus at Wistia on educating their customers about how to create videos
- the differences between Wistia and YouTube and Vimeo and other video platforms
- how the global coronavirus pandemic has driven huge growth in video consumption in 2020 and the dynamics behind this trend
- how the virtualization of business with the pandemic has driven both entrepreneurship and new media consumption patterns
- some of the rules of thumb and best practices around video production
- how to use video viewing data to inform the evolution of your video content
- how structuring video content opens opportunities for serialization and similar opportunities
- how owned video assets are are replacing advertising and other paid media placements and the factors behind this trend
- an example of how much more effective a video campaign can be compared to, e.g., and outsourced e-book
- how brands like MailChimp use video to engage customers
- how engaging customers can reduce friction in a company’s relationship with them
- how, regardless of the medium, the customer is in charge nowadays – and the ensuing importance of focusing on your customers needs and giving them the content they want
Chris’s bio
Chris Savage is the co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a web-based software solution that helps marketers turn viewers into brand advocates to grow their businesses. After graduating from Brown University, Chris and his co-founder Brendan Schwartz, started Wistia in Brendan’s living room in 2006. They founded the company with the goal of helping businesses effectively market their products or services more creatively through video. Recently, Savage and Schwartz turned down an offer to sell Wistia and took on $17.3M in debt instead, which allowed them to buy out their investors, gain full control of Wistia, and take the path less traveled in the tech industry. Now, more than 500,000 businesses across 50 countries depend on Wistia’s products to build their brands and their businesses, including HubSpot, MailChimp, Sephora, Starbucks, and Tiffany & Co.
Follow Chris on social media
- Wistia’s learning resource area
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
As we move deeper into the multimedia, omni-channel business communications world, video continues to rise as an important content medium. Add a global pandemic that makes face-to-face interactions more challenging and video becomes even more relevant. Chris Savage founded Wistia to help marketers get a better handle on how video engages their customers. In the process of democratizing video production and analytics, he stumbled into content marketing, further leveling the playing field for non-expert video producers.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 87 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Chris Savage. Chris is the CEO and the co-founder of Wistia, the video platform. Welcome Chris, tell the folks a little bit more about your background and what Wistia does.
Chris:
Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me, excited to be here. And so I started Wistia a year out of college, which was 14 years ago, and basically we built it into a platform for marketers to help them present, market, understand how their video is performing. And that means analytics to measure things, customization, branding control, all that stuff. And then I would say one of the things we’re really known for is over the years, we’ve really built our brand and our company by teaching people how to make content and teaching people how to make video. It started by accident. We made a video that people really liked and they were like, “Well, what camera did you use? ‘Camera doesn’t matter. It’s just about how you set it up. We made a video about how to shoot everything with my iPhone.'” Shot it on an iPhone, edit it on an iPhone.
Chris:
And they were like, “Well, what lights are you using?” And we made a video like, “Oh, well, this is how you could do lighting.” And it morphed into the degree where few years ago, we put out a feature documentary about the link between budgets and creativity called One, Ten, One Hundred. Now we make tons of podcasts, have giant video series. And basically the way we built our company is by trying to be our own best customer. So, actually making the content to teach you how to do this stuff. And then using our platform as a way to actually build and grow the business.
Larry:
I love that you were dragged, kicking and screaming into it, though. That’s pretty funny. And now it’s all you do and it works really well, so congrats on that.
Chris:
Yeah, no, I feel fortunate that people force us to do this.
Larry:
One thing I wanted to contextualize right away. I think most people, almost everybody knows about YouTube. Most people know about Vimeo, and I think it’s mostly small businesses and medium-sized businesses that do marketing and want to have more control that know about Wistia, but can you contextualize how Wistia fits in that video hosting marketplace?
Chris:
Yeah, basically, YouTube is free, but in return there’s going to be ads on your content. It’s going to be harder to drive the traffic to your site. And so if you’re looking for something that has more control over how the player looks, how it acts, interactivity within the player, capturing leads within the player, hooking it into all your marketing systems, all that stuff. That’s the sweet spot that we focused on. So we definitely compete with Vimeo, they’re a great business. They’re more lower in the market in terms of what they offer, less customization, less support, but cheaper product. And for us, we’re really focused on those people who are real marketers and they are using video to drive their business forward. And when you’re doing that, and you’re investing a lot in it, you want to understand it, you want to improve it, you want to iterate on it. And that’s the sweet spot that we focused in on.
Larry:
Nice. And I know that visual content just becomes more and more important all the time. And I don’t know if it’s that or the pandemic, but you guys… I saw a blog post that Wistia did recently that you almost doubled or more than doubled your usage this year. Well, tell me what do you think is going on there? Or you probably know what’s going on there because you’re the analytics guy.
Chris:
Yeah, no. What that blog post was talking about in just the first few months of COVID actually, the viewing across Wistia customers, the existing Wistia customers at that time and we’ve grown a lot since then, went up over 120%. And so that’s a lot. And what has been happening is basically ever was forced to be at home. Never relying on these in-person meetings or in-person events, has required an information transfer to happen asynchronously and half of the web. And obviously we’re all used to being in tons of Zooms, but there’s limited amount of time of the day and the Zoom fatigue is real. We get tired of that same thing. And so if you’re researching products to buy instead of just getting on the phone, you’re also watching the content that’s out there. If you’re pitching your product, people are… they’re having trouble getting on a meeting, they’re making videos and sending them to somebody to try to humanize the brand and stand out.
Chris:
And there’s just I think also a moment where I don’t know if you saw this, but there’s been a million more businesses registered in the US this year so far than last year at the same time. And so there’s an enormous explosion of entrepreneurship that’s happening because people are out of work, they’re innovating. They have time for that idea that they want to try. And I think people are also trying to take this moment to learn and to change careers. And I would bet that in three years on the other side of this pandemic, when we have herd immunity and there’s a vaccine and life is back to normal that we will see that there’s a whole different class of businesses that were started in this moment. There’s probably enormous job shifts that took place. And I think a lot of that activity is just causing their… It’s showing up for us in more viewing.
Larry:
Yep. Now that’s interesting too because you’re seeing both sides of that though, right? You’re both seeing an increase in consumption of the video content, but a lot of these million plus new extra businesses that have been founded, are you seeing growth in the supplier side of your equation as well?
Chris:
Yes. Signups are way up, the amount of videos that’s being created is way up, we have a product called Soapbox, which is the ability… It’s a tool to let you record your webcam and your screen simultaneously, it’s designed for somebody who is not a video producer to make a video that looks pretty good. And to do it very quickly, it’s all on the web, it’s really fast. And Soapbox’s been around for three and a half years, and it was chugging along, but we had felt like it was early in the market in the sense that the people who were using it were bleeding-edge adopters. So like, “I’m making videos for everything this is amazing.” Talk to the average person like, “I’m just going to meet someone in person. I’m not going to make a video.” And we’ve seen an absolute explosion there in terms of the amount of videos being created, the amount of people using that product.
Chris:
And everyone I talk to in this space has seen the same thing, which is… Like it or not we’ve all been forced to adopt new technologies, some of them aren’t even new but we’ve been forced to adopt them to get into this modern world. And I think that it’s more businesses being started, but it’s also just more businesses pivoting. If you relied at being a person, you have to find a way to get your knowledge and your help out into the world. And video tends to be a really good way to do that because you can show who you are, you can show your human self.
Larry:
Do you have a feel for the percentage… Because it seems like the best practice these days is to do informational, educational content in the content marketing realm, but there’s also just good old fashioned promotional stuff as well. How does that content breakdown among both your creators and your consumers of content?
Chris:
I would say everyone ends up doing everything. It’s just a question of how you get there. So there’s people who start with doing more promotional stuff and then realize they’re promoting products, but they’re missing something that’s coming up… It’s almost like when you build a muscle that you can confidently make video, you start to see problems through that lens of like, “Well, can I automate this part of the demo that we’re doing for everyone in sales? Can I automate this part of support that’s coming up over and over again.” And if it takes an afternoon or less to make a video, you can do that and never answer that question again. And so it really does seem like it’s happening everywhere at once. It just depends on what problem you start with solving and then how sustainable your solution for making the content is.
Larry:
And that makes sense that there’ll be some people that have a complex, but easy to fix product thing that they’ll just make a support video and that’ll be their… You’re outsourcing a lot of the what would have been conversations like you were saying a minute ago, one was like, “Oh, I’m just going to see that guy when he comes into the store.” And it’s like, “Oh, maybe I won’t.” Well, hey, among that content you mentioned that there’s the… Well, the Soapbox tool is that like a online production tool? I was going to get to-
Chris:
Yeah. What is it?
Larry:
Yeah. What does Soapbox do?
Chris:
Yeah, so it’s a Chrome extension. And when you install it, you click record and it records… It does a count down and records your webcam, or if you have an external camera that’s hooked up you can select that and it records your screen. And then you have these two tracks that are being recorded. So you have your webcam that you’ve been talking into and you have your screen and it might be… Maybe you have a presentation you’re showing off from the screen. Maybe you’re doing a demo of your product. Maybe you’re showing documentation. I don’t know what it is, but you have those two things. It records both tracks. Then after the fact you could pick, do you want it to show the webcam? Do you want to show both the webcam and the screen? Or do you want just show the screen? And then it just does nice little transitions between that.
Chris:
And so it’s designed that you don’t have to actually edit anything. So think of live television, the way it’s interesting is they just cut from camera to camera. But if they stayed at one camera the whole time of someone talking it gets pretty boring. And this does the same trick, just brought to life for the average person. And what it means is you don’t actually have to do editing. So if you miss say something in the presentation, we mis-say things all the time, we’re human beings. If it’s horrible and it’s a short video, just redo it. And if it’s long video, you could be like, “That’s not what I meant.” And you continue on, but it’s all to make it as easy as possible for someone to make something really quick that looks really good.
Larry:
That’s great. And you mentioned you can use just the camera in your computer or an external camera. Is there any evidence about the quality of the recording. I’ve heard, for example, that audio makes more difference than the video quality, are there rules of thumb or truisms that apply in video production?
Chris:
Yeah. So the rule of thumb around audio is a great one because it’s like, if you have great audio and crappy video, it is assumed that is a decision to have crappy video. It sounds really good and looks crappy, you’re like, “No, I guess they meant to do that because it sounds really good.” And if someone’s speaking really clearly… And also I’ll say captions are really other important thing here. If you have captions that’s much more accessible, you can get your message across. And if you have a video that looks good and sounds terrible, people will turn it off. I think quality matters for sure. The higher the quality of something you make often the brand feeling is more elevated, but today we’re working in a world where right now you can see behind me a bedroom, I’m in a bedroom.
Chris:
I can see you have a bookcase behind you. Neither of us has stunning shots for our backdrops. And that’s how it is for everyone. And so the playing field has been completely equalized at this moment from a production standpoint. And if you’re going to go shoot a person, you got to be doing it a place where there’s low community spread. Everyone’s getting tests, people are wearing masks, there’s distancing. There’s a limited number of people without their masks on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it just makes it all harder. And I think that for that reason, there’s an opportunity right now. And that’s another reason why people are making content is like it’s almost your fear of hurting your brand. Well, if you’re hurting your brand then CNN is in deep, deep trouble. Because a huge amount of people on CNN are at home and their kids are interrupting them and it’s all normal now. So I think that we can all cut ourselves some slack in this moment and try and make in things because we can, and it doesn’t have to be as elevated as it normally does.
Larry:
That’s great. If the production level is evened out, are there things that civilians like me can do to get closer to CNN or a professional studio. What’s the next level up from… Now that we’ve leveled the playing field how do you rise above it a little bit?
Chris:
Okay. Next level up. If you’re shooting in front of your computer it’s going to be upgrading your webcam. So you can get an external camera and any camera that plugs in with HDMI you can get and plug in and use as your webcam. I have an external camera I’m using right now, a Sony, and it gives a depth of field and it makes the picture quality higher. It’s a one-time setup thing, it’s hard to find these cameras they’re sold out, but that is something that you can do. There’s a great little app called Camo, and you can use your phone as your camera, as your webcam. So you can set up your phone, you’d have to attach it to the top of your computer monitor, but it will act as a webcam in all of these apps, I think that’s great.
Chris:
I think the next thing is looking at lighting. And if you don’t have access to lights, you want to set up where you’re recording to try to get the lighting on your face to be even, so the easiest way to do that is to face a window. So if you just have a laptop, you can actually make it way better. If you go and sit… So you’re facing out the window and the lights coming in and that will… The sun is very bright, it’s brighter than anything else as we know. And it will hopefully, if unless it’s truly, truly direct light, it’ll fill out your face and what you’re trying to do is remove shadows. And so first thing is camera, second thing is lighting. You can get an external mic, those are actually back in stock mostly. The Yetis are good USB mics that a lot of podcasters use are about a 100 bucks, but you could put together something with a window at a mic and the Camo app for 150 bucks that looks much better than your average webcam and sounds much better.
Larry:
And the same thing. Very similar to the set up that that CNN correspondent is doing at his apartment.
Chris:
That’s what they’re all doing. The thing that elevates is the lenses that are being used. So the external webcam having depth of field and lighting. And if you really, really dial in the lighting, you can get something that looks absolutely amazing with the exact same camera.
Larry:
Got it. Actually, I’ll include links. I saw a bunch of stuff on your website. As you mentioned at the start of this too, you’ve done plenty of content about how to do all this stuff we’re talking about. If folks want to go deeper, I’ll link to your… Because you have a resource area, right?
Larry:
Another thing I wanted to ask about, once you to have this nice video ready to go. I picture a web host, you have your website host and they serve up some files. I do a podcast so I have Libsyn host my media files. What does that look for once you get into… once you start hosting video at Wistia or something like that. What does that look from the user perspective as the business who’s publishing the videos?
Chris:
Oh, what’s the experience like in the product?
Larry:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Chris:
Yeah. Basically, we’ve tried to create an experience that works if you’re just getting started. If you have a few videos or if you have a huge amount of them. The interface is all set up around organizing videos into groups, projects, and then we also have something called Channels. Channels for us is a tool you can, with no coding, you could build a Netflix like experience that you can embed in your site. And it looks beautiful, has video backgrounds, you could have subscription built into it. Think of it as if you took a YouTube channel and a Netflix, but more of a Netflix UI. And you put it on your website, your domain, and then you made it so people can subscribe there.
Chris:
And then you can actually publish to that channel from your account. So you can upload a video, decide when you want to go live, publish to your channel. Then you could also from Wistia publish it to YouTube or Facebook, a few other places. And you could organize all of your stuff in one place, have the data all at one place. And once that’s happening, you have the viewing data on every video. So it’s all anonymous because we don’t know who people are, but people are coming in and what are people skipping? What are they rewatching? Then you could tie that data to your other marketing data in your stack.
Chris:
So show me everybody who watches product video and did their purchase rate change, or do I want to follow up with them if they didn’t purchase. You can do those types of things if you integrate your Wistia data into a tool like HubSpot. So it’s all very easy though that’s the key. Is that you don’t have to talk to anybody else. You don’t have to be technical. You can just upload and do it. And then if you are technical, and you want to do complicated things, we have APIs that let you do all of that.
Larry:
Oh, cool. Well, that’s something that I think… Well, you’ve been around 14 years, so you’re not the new startup anymore. But it seems like the newer companies, you’re better poised to do things that you just build an API. As soon as you have a new thing, you make it easy for people to access it. Do you have a lot of power users like that, or is the bulk of your folks… You do have a lot. Yeah.
Chris:
We have a lot of power users. Yes. We have people who’ve built whole companies basically on top of Wistia. Very video-centric businesses that require some of them millions of videos a month are uploaded through their APIs into their accounts.
Larry:
Wow. Like user generated content and things like that, or yeah. Interesting. Wow. And so you’re sort of a white label-able backend video service provider as well?
Chris:
At the most extreme. It starts as someone can literally sign up and have one video and purchase to be a customer and talk to no one, or they can build something on top of our platform and have thousands, and thousands, and thousands of things happening a minute. It’s really very extreme, which has been good. Honestly, it’s like we built those APIs assuming that people would build on top of them and to solve the problem of all these requests are coming in that didn’t actually make sense for us to build into the product. And then over time there’s been businesses built on top of that, which is awesome.
Larry:
Yeah. Actually, I’m curious a little bit about – there’s this concern in content strategy circles, a lot of content strategy circles around structured content. Having content that you can repurpose different parts of, is that a thing in video yet? Could you make a video that was 10 chunks, string it together into one thing or have it just two or three chunks? Are people doing that or?
Chris:
People are doing that all the time. We’re seeing these days much more long form content that is for your super fans. So behind the scenes content, exclusive content, serialized content, episodic things that are coming out. It’s almost like it’s replacing webinars. That’s what’s happened, webinars seem mostly pretty dull in terms of the format. And so as it’s gotten easier, I hate to say it, I hate to say webinars are dull, but they are. It’s become easier to produce things of a higher production quality. The tech is there and more people know how to do it. More people have confidence with it. It’s almost like, do you want to make this webinar? Or do you want to make this series? And the advantage of the series is not only would people sign up to watch it, but the brand impact is much larger often. And it is presented often in a episodic way.
Larry:
Yep. And the way you were talking a minute ago, you almost talking a major studio. Are people creating binge-worthy content? Because you mentioned Netflix also. And I’m like, “Holy cow, are people figuring out… Are people hacking that and creating . . . ?”
Chris:
Oh yeah. Yes. Yeah. A huge trend that is coming is businesses that are basically taking… It’s funny, many trends we don’t think they’re going to start in large B2C businesses, but they actually do. And what we’re seeing is people taking budget that used to be just for ads. And they’re like, “Well, instead of renting ad space in someone else’s audience, why don’t I build the audience myself? Why don’t I have the direct connection?” And so instead of making the ad for podcasts, they’re making the podcast itself. And it turns out you make the podcast yourself, and if you can actually connect with somebody, the amount of time they’ll spend with your brand is just enormously huge compared to an ad. And then if I’m having a direct relationship, you can monetize by them just buying your product.
Chris:
And we’re seeing way, way more of that. And we’re seeing that with podcasts, we’re seeing that with video shows. And it’s funny, I was talking to someone yesterday, actually, who has a new video show. And he’s like, “I put it out there. And the first episode had 600 views.” I was like, “This is amazing. This is amazing. 600 views. Can you believe that?” This thing was practically just a demo of my product. If I did 600 demos I would make the next six months. And instead it was just one day of this thing. It’s more people being confident and I think also this has become true in B2B, for many of us you get 30 clients in a year and you’ve just crushed every number.
Chris:
And what we forget is that those 30 clients are human beings and they have jobs and they want to be successful in their job. And if you can help them be successful, if you can entertain them in their work, they will love you for that. And so no one’s making a podcast for them. No one’s making a video show for them. No one’s making a documentary for them. If you’re the one who does it, they will pay attention and you could build an incredibly strong connection and that can lift your business.
Larry:
I love that. My intent in doing this podcast is… My top level intent is to democratize content strategy. To let anybody understand it, and practice it, and use its principles. And it sounds like you’re doing a very similar thing with video. And you talked about the playing field has been leveled. And a lot of this stuff you’ve been talking about five, 10 years ago, that was only big brands that could do that. Now it’s anybody with a hundred bucks a month.
Chris:
Well, we’re very aligned. We’re trying to help democratize this process and this understanding. And for me, we stumbled into it because I mentioned this documentary made this documentary One, Ten, One Hundred. And we gave this video agency $111,000. We asked them to make three ads for us at different budgets, all video ads. But one with a thousand dollar budget. One with a $10,000 budget and one with a $100,000 budget, which is interesting of itself what someone’s going to do. And then we decided to document the process and we ended up making a feature like documentary. And it did really well, it won the Webby for best brand and entertainment, which was awesome. And all this stuff, it lifted the business actually. And that was what was really shocking to me is that we released this documentary and then brand search for Wistia went way up, then direct traffic for Wistia went way up, and then all the organic channels started going up.
Chris:
You could see it very clearly in the data from when the day this documentary was released. And then I started to realize this is so counterintuitive because this documentary has nothing to do with the Wistia product at all. It’s so removed from what we’re doing and yet it’s lifting the business. And so I started talking to other companies that had done similar things. Envision made a documentary a few years ago. I started talking to companies that had made podcasts like HubSpot had done this really successfully. Bunch of small businesses. And what I realized is that in every case, people were taking budgets that in the past would have been spent on advertising and they’re making content. And their goal with the content was to strengthen the connection to their brand, really to build brand affinity. And it started to click for me, “Wow, this is a big trend and why is this happening?”
Chris:
And I think it’s two major reasons why it’s happening, maybe three. Having trust with our customers and potential customers obviously matters, but it’s become so hard to create because you can’t make it through ads anymore. When there was four television channels in the US, you could put an ad on one of the channels, people would see it. Put an ad in on all four, they would see it. That option doesn’t exist anymore. We can’t just rent people’s time, it’s almost impossible. And the funny thing about all of this is they’re all long form. So if you could get people in and focus on something that’s really targeted, then they love it. They tell other people, they build this affinity and you start to build this legion of advocates.
Chris:
And I was just surprised that so many people were finding their way to this. It’s also, as you just said, was impossible five years ago. And it’s just the fact that the tech is there. The production’s there, enough people are there, the understanding is there, the distribution is there. That suddenly, all of these businesses, we can act like media companies. And instead of monetizing with ads, we can monetize with whatever we normally monetize with, with our services, with our products, whatever.
Larry:
Hey, and I want to ask you about that because you have the data that’s one of your big selling points is that you’ve got the analytics and can analyze all this stuff. Can you demonstrate that for people to show that like… Compare it with, okay, you spent a thousand dollars on advertising you got crummy stuff over here. And you spent a thousand dollars on this video campaign and boom. So both comparing across media buys, but also comparing within video, which stuff is working better?
Chris:
Yeah. So few different answers on that one. So I’ll give you some examples. There’s a company called ProfitWell, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them?
Larry:
I’ve heard of them-
Chris:
Okay. Basically, they have tools that track your subscription business, how it’s performing. So you hook it up in a Stripe or Recurly or whatever that your payment processor is. They give you all this data on how your business is performing, BI metrics and stuff. And then they have tools to help you reduce churn things like that. They have built a media network as a way to build their brand, to build their company. And what they’ve found is that they have thought about it as like they could make a season of one of their shows. They have a show called Pricing Page Teardown where they analyze pricing pages. Sounds boring.
Chris:
Turns out if you changing the pricing of your product, unbelievably not boring, unbelievably interesting. So super niche, but it hits the right group. The format of the show is always exactly the same, two people discussing the pricing page of a company. And then they do research, primary research to try to figure out if the company is priced properly. And so they release the research in the episode. So it’s all this pre-work that’s done. So they do the pre-work for 10 different companies. They shoot all the episodes in one day because it’s the same format, same people, same setup. And what they found is they’ve been able to get their cost of a season, which is 10 episodes to be cheaper than if they outsource an e-book.
Larry:
Wow.
Chris:
And so what they do, is they just compared it to that? And they’re like, “Well, how many people will sign up for this compared to an ebook.” And it turns out way more people. “And how much time will they spend with us compared to that?” Turns out way more. “And then how many deals come from it?” Turns out way more. And so it’s cheaper and more effective. And I think there’s a lot of parts about that that are really good, but it’s like figuring out the format, making something repeatable, think about the production and just really nailing all of that. And then on another example, really extreme example, actually. So MailChimp does this. MailChimp took a 100% of their advertising budget from 2018 and they put it all into content 2019.
Chris:
And so they have a part of their website now called MailChimp Presents. And it’s all original stuff. It’s podcasts, it’s documentaries. They’ve actually licensed old documentaries. They’ve licensed short films. And it’s all about getting people to spend time with the MailChimp brand. And in this case it’s like, “MailChimp paid for this. Enjoy.” And it’s wild stuff on there, things that seem impossible for a MailChimp to do. But all of the content that MailChimp has sponsored and created it aligned to their brand value. So if you’re watching it, you feel empowered. You feel like an empowered entrepreneur, which is how they want you to feel. And when they used to do all their advertising, their advertising was all trying to make you feel empowered to be yourself, and to stand out, and do things differently. So they just took the same model they’re using for their ads and put it into their content.
Chris:
And what they’ve found is that if people engage with an episode of content, that often means 20 minutes of time. That they are much more likely to move forward basically at every stage of the funnel. So if they’re considering within sign-up, you look at the group of people who watched something and they haven’t signed up yet. If they end up signing up, they’re twice as likely to sign up. Same thing on the purchase rate. Same thing on churn even, churn is reduced. And it all makes sense if you think about it, if you have a lot of affinity for a brand you’re willing to put up with more stuff, you’re willing to ask more questions. If someone tells you, “Wistia’s amazing.” And you’re like, “Whoa, I’ve heard it’s amazing.” And if it’s not working for you, you must be like, “Why isn’t it amazing? I should go try to figure out how to make it amazing.”
Chris:
But someone tells you, “Wistia’s crap.” Then you go try it, if it doesn’t work you’re going to just leave. A lot of this is like this setup of how we get introduced to companies matter. And that’s where this content can have such a huge impact is if you can go in with a strong connection, you’re more likely to be successful and you’re more likely to move the numbers of business.
Larry:
And this explains why people are so focused on engagement these days and why video… Everything you just said is like, “Oh yeah and video is pretty engaging. I can see how that happens.” Hey, Chris, these conversations always go way too quickly. We’re coming up close to time. But I want to give you a chance. Is there anything last, anything that’s occurred to you during this conversation? Or just on your mind about video, or content, or that you want to share with the folks before we wrap up?
Chris:
Yeah, I would say, we’ve been talking a lot about video. I think the thing that’s on my mind is people always expect me to be the video guy, which I have been. But I will also say the truth of all of this is that the audience is in control. And the audience they get to choose how they consume the content. And that’s one of the biggest shifts we’ve had. If you have unlimited content, you only like to read stuff, guess what? You’re only going to read stuff. Or you only like to listen, you’re just going to listen. You only want to watch, you’re going to watch. And I think that that is actually really important for all of us. If we’re putting messages out into the world is we have to think, “Okay, I have to give my audience, all the options.”
Chris:
And if I do that, there’ll be some people who want to watch some people who want to read and some people want to listen. That’s meeting them where they are at and giving them an experience that they want. And so for us at Wistia, we’ve been switching towards, and actually, I don’t know when this episode is coming out, but in the next couple of weeks we’re launching support for podcasting. And part of the reason we’re doing it is because we’re just so committed to giving the audience what they want. And we want to make it easier for our customers to actually give them the option of, “Okay, here’s the video version,” or, “here’s the audio version.” And give them the tools to market with that stuff in the same way.
Larry:
Cool. I’m a little behind on productions, which is good for you. Because I’ll include a link to the new podcasting service in the show notes. Well, thanks… Oh, and one last thing, Chris, what’s the best way for people to follow you? Is there a social media channel you’re active in or?
Chris:
Yeah. I’m most active on Twitter. You could find me @csavage or you can say hello on LinkedIn and those are the two most active.
Larry:
Great. Well, thanks so much, Chris. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Chris:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it as well.
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