Episode Transcript
Introduction
Welcome, everybody. I’m going to be your host today, and if you have any questions, please submit them in the chat. This is live, by all means. We’re excited to host you and to answer your questions.
Today, what we’re going to cover is the strategizing process for video content for SaaS marketing teams. SaaS marketing teams have specific challenges they need to be aware of in order to win with video, and we’re going to cover some of those challenges and how the framework helps you come up with ideas for new initiatives and new videos, but also for distribution, and how important and impactful those things can be. That way, you can have a vetting layer to better understand what could work for your team.
We’re then going to talk about the factors shaping video demand and trends. After that, we’re going to talk about a story where 75% of all engagements came from video. Then we’re going to cover the actual video marketing framework and the go-to video plays, with examples. And after that, we’re going to do a Q&A.
First order of business: who am I, and who are we? We are SparkPortal. My name is Daniel Borba, and I’ve been in video marketing since 2012. I’ve done tens of thousands of videos and worked with hundreds of marketers throughout my career. In 2017, I switched from freelancing to owning an agency, and we started a video-as-a-service model. We only service SaaS marketers, so we’ve been in that industry for a while.
All right, so that’s us. Let’s talk a little bit about the factors shaping video demand.
What’s Shaping Video Demand Today
One of the first things you need to take into account, before you even start strategizing and figuring out what works and what doesn’t, is where you’re standing today in terms of video: what is needed and where things are going.
The first thing is short-form video. Short-form video is the way to go. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do webinars or that you shouldn’t have long-form video, but you always need more short-form video. We’re going to get into why in a little bit.
Another thing that’s important to understand is that when you create videos, or start thinking about videos, you can no longer think about specific videos in isolation. For example, “Oh, we need an explainer video.” Yes, that’s a great idea, but you need to ask, “Where are we going to distribute this?” A lot of the platforms we distribute on want an in-platform experience that’s native to that platform. Take YouTube Shorts or LinkedIn. You need a specific output for each one of those channels, because the algorithms function differently on each platform.
The other thing is LLMs seeing into video content. There are already tools you could start looking into, like Wistia, that let you give the LLMs direct access to your video content. With things like YouTube and LinkedIn, it’s still not a direct connection, but it is happening.
Another thing that’s changing is the algorithm. The algorithms for LinkedIn and YouTube change constantly, so your video strategies and ideas should be nice to those algorithms. Take LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn changed their algorithm three or four months ago, and it’s been a huge problem because views have dropped. Now, that’s a double-edged sword, because LinkedIn is arguing that now more of the right people are watching videos, versus before when it was just a bunch of more random people. But the point here is that all your initiatives need to be flexible, so you can adapt without changing your whole concept or initiative.
YouTube Shorts is underutilized for SaaS marketers. It’s almost like an entirely different algorithm within YouTube. You have the regular YouTube library, videos like the ones we’re used to watching, but then you have the YouTube Shorts tab, and that’s almost like TikTok inside YouTube. The great thing about this is that if you’re doing a bunch of what I call boring videos, like webinars, interviews, and things that are 15, 20, or 30 minutes long, hour-long presentations, keynotes, all that stuff, the best way to get additional views is repurposing those for YouTube Shorts. You’re basically adding additional touchpoints in a place where you’re already getting people and already engaging with your audience.
Just because I’m saying short-form video is important doesn’t mean long-form video is out the door. In fact, it’s the opposite. More and more people want to consume long-form video that’s relevant to them. They’re self-educating, so they’d rather watch a one-hour video and skip through the parts they think are important than get on a sales call with one of your salespeople.
So those are the six things shaping video today, and they should really drive a lot of your decisions about which video ideas you engage in and which initiatives you test.
Why Video Matters: The Data
Over one in five people who come across a video choose to watch it. Video is becoming, and already is, the preferred way for people to consume content. The story I’m going to share with you, and the examples, prove that. YouTube Shorts passed 70 billion daily views in 2025.
And before you say, “Ah, but Daniel, that’s consumer stuff, that’s entertainment,” yes, but the 70 people or the 50 people who saw your 30-minute webinar, YouTube Shorts is going to target them organically. It’s going to show them your clips while they’re searching for how to build a shed, how to draw, how to fix a car, or how to do whatever on YouTube. Why? Because the algorithm understands behavior way better, and YouTube Shorts has tons of users. Your audience is on YouTube. Yes, they’re not spending all day looking at what you have to say, but they’re willing to spend a few seconds, or a few minutes a day, consuming a little bit of your content. So it’s a great opportunity.
Next, commentary. A lot of companies say, “Hey, Daniel, we don’t have a lot of proprietary information to put out there. It’s difficult. Our executives, this and that.” A lot of hurdles to creating meaningful video content. One way to overcome that is to build commentary content. 54% of surveyed YouTube users said they would rather watch creator commentary on an event than the events themselves. People are interested in learning your perspective about something, about the event, not so much the event alone. What that means is you can use current events relevant to your industry and share light commentary content, so you don’t have to build net-new content from scratch, which is more difficult.
61% of B2B marketers expect their organization’s investment in video to increase in 2025. The reason this is important, and why you should care, is that LLMs are becoming more capable of producing content. So AI slop is going to hit video. It’s already hitting video. What that means is you need to focus on building brand. You need to put your stake in the ground and say, “Hey, we believe in these things. These are our points of view, and we go all in on them.” Basically, creating thought leadership content, and it doesn’t have to come from your executives. It could also come from clients. Essentially, you need to invest in the top of your funnel to build brand and to show the market the unique problem and why they should care about it.
Right now, this AI transition is creating a huge opportunity to invest more in video for the purpose of educating and leading thought in your market.
Case Study: Dotmatics and the 5X Engagement Story
I want to get into the story and then the framework. We worked with Dotmatics, and they got acquired for $5 billion at the end of 2025. What we did was implement this framework for them. As you can see here, orange is the traditional content, the white papers and all those other content types, and it was stagnant. It wasn’t growing.
Dotmatics said, “Hey, we want to invest more in video.” So they started investing in video right here, and once it started working, we came on board and helped them build more programs. As you can see, video became a huge vehicle for them to create more meaningful engagement and touchpoints with their audience. Their content engagement, in six months with video, multiplied by five. You can also see here that their non-video content stayed stagnant.
If you contextualize this with everything we’ve been talking about, why not invest in video and create a competitive advantage that’s hard to replicate? So that’s how 75% of all engagements came from video, and companies like them keep continuing to invest in video.
You don’t need a huge budget. You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. But if you start to build some cases, that’s the idea for today: to help you strategize ideas and see where you can come up with ideas to test, to start building the case for more video and secure more budget for it.
The Video Strategy Framework
I have some examples to show you of specific video styles you should consider to solve for what we talked about, but first I want to talk a little bit about the video strategy framework. Even though it looks simple, I’m telling you, this is by far the most influential thing we can do with a client: help them understand where video can fit into their marketing strategy to increase their impact and get these kinds of results.
As we all know, you cannot correlate video directly to revenue, because it’s usually an initiative that doesn’t bring revenue right away, since it’s usually attached to brand. But you will see success signals from the testing you do. That’s why it’s important to vet each video you produce. Literally and figuratively, every video needs to go through this vetting layer.
The process is simple. You have four layers: one, two, three, and four. What most people do is say, “Ooh, our competitors are doing this. We’re going to do an explainer video.” That’s okay sometimes, but most of the time it’s not a winning strategy, because it’s a race to the bottom. You’re basically choosing to join your competitor. What we should do instead is ask, “How can we solve the problems our audiences need to know about, but so much better than our competition that they can’t compete with us even if they wanted to?”
Layer one: Strategy. First, we need to make a list of four things, starting with the strategy. We ask, “Who are you as a company today, and what company are you going to be in six months, a year, or two or three years from now?” I understand this opens up a can of worms, I get it. But if you can come up with a one-pager that says, “Today we’re a product-based company, but in six months we’re going to become a platform with multiple products, and we’re going to acquire a bunch of products,” then even if you’re not going to acquire, even if you’re just going to be a platform, video needs to support that. It’s important to create a bullet-point list of those things, basically saying who we are today and what we’re going to become. You can write two bullet points, or you can write six, seven, or ten. But be very specific here, because that is really going to feed whether you’re doing explainer videos and value-proposition sales videos, or whether you’re doing webinars, repurposing clips, and LinkedIn. Not that those are mutually exclusive, but it’s going to determine what’s top priority, because you’re always going to have more ideas than you can invest your time in.
Layer two: Point of view. Once you have a bullet-point list of the things that matter to the marketing strategy, you go one level deeper and ask, “What are the points of view that we have?” Now that we know we’re going to become the platform for XYZ, what are the stakes in the ground that we own? What are our differentiators? What are the topics we own? What are the points of view we hold? Do we have specific products we want to keep pushing, or do we want to just push the narrative of a platform? This is where you start getting into specifics, not necessarily campaigns, but a layer in between strategy and campaigns. Usually this means, “Yeah, we’re going to go all in on AI for the workforce,” or “We’re going to talk about how AI is changing enterprise management software,” or “We’re going to own these topics.” Usually every company has a list of three to six topics or problems they’re going to own, regardless of whether the audience is problem-aware or not, regardless of whether there’s a solution or not, and regardless of whether the prospects have a solution for that problem today. These are problems the company has identified as crucial, that they’re uniquely positioned to solve, and they talk about them whether or not you hire them, pay them, or buy the product. That’s the list you create here. Usually, like I said, people have about four to six things. Just to give you another example, I just spoke to one of our clients and they said, “Yeah, we’re going to start focusing on government,” a vertical within their overarching industry. That alone is almost like a separate initiative, and it should be listed here in the strategic POV, because they’re going to create video content for that specific purpose.
Layer three: Initiatives. Once you have a bullet-point list on that, you go to the next level. Now that we understand where we are and where we’re going, and what problems we solve and want to talk about, you go into initiatives. This is where you start to see campaign names and specific things that are going to happen, for example events, or a new program like a partner program. You start listing these things and why they matter. Some of these campaigns, you wouldn’t be able to inject video into, because you might not have enough time. If your team ideates a campaign on Wednesday and it’s already launched on Thursday, then video might not be a good fit, because it’s not fast enough. But still list it, because you might find a video idea that fits future campaigns. If you have specific ideas for knowledge centers, for example, here’s where they should go, in the initiatives.
Layer four: Videos. Once you have a bullet-point list of the initiatives, campaigns, or programs that video could help with, you finally get to the place where most people start. And I want to be clear: I’m not saying you have to take your bullet points and convert them to video ideas. Not yet. Right now, we’re just putting down on paper, in a bullet-point list, the things that fit within these buckets. We’re going to do the analysis, prioritization, and vetting after. Usually there’s a list of videos you already have in mind, where you’re like, “I need this. Our company needs this. We need an explainer video. We need ads. We need to repurpose webinars. We have five subject-matter experts, or we have one who’s great on camera, and we’re not doing anything with them, so we need to launch that.” Most of the clients we talk to already have a list of five to ten specific videos they’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Put them down right here. And if some of those videos don’t have a length or a channel where you can see them being published, that’s okay. Just put them down here in a bullet point.
So that’s really it: the four bullet-point lists you should create to fit those buckets. You should end up with either a spreadsheet or a two- or three-page document, and now you can say, “Okay, now I understand better where we can invest our video resources.”
Prioritize where you can win. After you finish this, the last part of the process is to understand where you could win with video based on your audience, and prioritize it. If you’re the marketing leader in your company, you could probably do this on your own. If you’re working under a marketing leader, do this alone first, then bring it to them and brainstorm these video ideas together, and pick two or three you want to try and test. That kind of concludes the video strategy framework.
The Video Plays
Next up are the video ideas I want to cover. We have about five different video ideas. The first is self-shot event videos for LinkedIn. Another opportunity is repurposing webinars for YouTube Shorts and LinkedIn. Another play you can run is promos, hype videos, or sizzle reels, as they’re called. The next idea is a video knowledge center. This is a big opportunity. The reason video knowledge centers specifically are a big opportunity is that most marketers think, “Daniel, we’ve been in the industry for so long, we’re not going to invest in creating a library of 12 videos. We have other priorities.” But remember that things are going to change every month, every quarter, and having information out there to support and educate your audience on those changes is going to be crucial. You don’t have to create a 12-video library for the knowledge center to work. You can start with four, because every year you’re probably going to retouch your positioning and messaging, since things change fast.
The next idea is street interviews. This is huge, and again there are multiple ways to distribute it. I’ll show you some examples in a little bit, but essentially you interview people in your industry: some are partners, some are customers, some are people in your company. The last one is case studies. It’s worth pursuing because once you have that interview, you can repurpose it for years, and across multiple channels: LinkedIn, sales enablement, YouTube, and your own website.
Let me keep showing you each idea.
Play 1: Self-Shot Event Videos for LinkedIn
Let’s start with self-shot event videos for LinkedIn. I’m going to share the audio so you can hear it, and I’ll walk you through it.
The reason these are a huge opportunity is that they’re low-lift, meaning they don’t take a lot of effort. You don’t have to be present at the event. You can have someone else do it for you. Your company needs to be present, but what I mean is that you, as a marketing leader, don’t have to be. You can easily hand this off to somebody, and they don’t have to be a senior person. Let’s watch the video so I can show you what I mean.
Essentially, it’s just a walk-up to the booth. It was sped up in the beginning, and it got a lot of engagement. The reason for this is that the algorithm rewards you when you do anything related to what’s going on in your industry in today’s world, and it’s easier to produce. This one isn’t very branded, but you can easily brand it. You can pre-create some of the text to add on top, and you don’t need an agency to do this. This is the way things are going. We want organic, natural, something raw.
Let me walk you through the process. For this one, you capture the video at the event with your phone. You could do something like that, or you can just record a little pan. This is very basic stuff that has a lot of impact. You can usually edit it on the spot, so just do 10 or 15 seconds, no more than that. You can do one clip, and then you publish it on the spot. You can pre-create the text and send it to the person who’s going to post it, or have them send it to you so you can post it yourself if you’re the manager of your company’s page.
All right, so that concludes self-shot event videos on LinkedIn.
Play 2: Webinar Clip Extraction for YouTube Shorts and LinkedIn
Webinar clip extraction. We’ve updated our playbook here. Essentially, you take a clip and add a hook, text, a lower third, subtitles, and a logo outro. That’s extracting clips. Those types of clips are becoming less valuable on LinkedIn, but on YouTube they’re becoming more valuable.
Here’s the way to distribute this on YouTube when you extract clips from a long-form video. Let’s say you extract five clips. I’ll use an example. In this one, we created “How CPG Brands Lost Their Innovation Muscle.” For that same clip, create three versions: two more versions with a different hook and different text on screen, keeping everything else the same. If you do this on YouTube, you’ll be able to test which one gets more views, because not all videos get the same number of views. Depending on the hook, you’ll get more views. What we’re seeing is that some Shorts get 150, 200, or 500 views while others get thousands, and it’s the same clip, just with different on-screen text.
You may say, “400 views is not a lot.” Yes, it is, because these views are coming from people who have already engaged with your webinar, with the long form. In your long-form video, let’s say you get 100 views, or 75, or 50. Some of those people are going to be organically retargeted by the YouTube Shorts algorithm to show them your Shorts. So yes, YouTube Shorts views are not as valuable as regular YouTube views, but they’re correlated. And who wouldn’t want to get five times more engagement from the same content with the right audience? Some of these audiences are already planning to invest money in your company and do business with you. You’re adding additional touchpoints with them.
In turn, you’re also learning the terms and topics they’re interested in, faster. Think about it: how many webinars can you post? One or two a month? With YouTube Shorts, you’re uploading 15 clips per month, if not more. So when you check in every month, you can say, “Wow, this topic is consistently getting more engagement. Let’s see if we can adjust the webinar and the wording.” Now you’re learning faster than before.
The process for webinar clip extraction: you record the webinar like you normally do, identify five to six clips, and then edit those videos with Descript, Zoom, or Riverside. You can even prompt it now so that it finds the specific clips for you. Then you post them on LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts.
Play 3: Promos, Hype Videos, and Sizzle Reels
Let’s talk about promos and hype sizzles. Let me share an example. These are the type of videos where you’re creating something like a music video, with text on screen coming on and animating. There’s no voiceover, and it’s 16 seconds. The whole purpose is to make an announcement or bring more excitement to something. In this case, in the example I showed you, they decided to go with a report they do every year, so they decided to promote that. But when you create the bullet-point list, you can pick any one of those things and create a promo video for it: any product update, any new hire, any new partnership, any new positioning, anything like that.
Ask ChatGPT to create a 15-to-30-second high-energy promo script outline, and use that as your starting point. After you have a few scripts, you’re going to need to hire an animator. You could use some templates. I think Descript and Canva are adding features to help you do this right now. But the best way is to hire somebody to do it, and then post and distribute the video. Essentially, you just create a storyboard of the text on screen and animation, and that’s basically it.
Play 4: Video Knowledge Centers
All right, so we have video knowledge centers, street interviews, and then case studies. With a video knowledge center, you want it to be high-level, stake-in-the-ground content, saying, “Hey, here’s three minutes, here’s five minutes, here’s ten minutes on the main core problems you should be paying attention to,” even though you might not have a solution, or you may not be aware that there’s a solution for it.
You should start with three or four videos. You don’t have to create a 15-video library, because then it becomes a project you have to update every year. If you create three or four videos, even if you have zero right now, you can start there. If you already have a library, then update it and skip this section.
Let me show you a little bit of an example. This is an animated example that we did. Yours can be more like demo style, where it’s just a screen and a product person talking through stuff. But I’m going to show you this video.
[Sample video audio] What is customer journey orchestration in banking? It is the difference between disconnected workflows and one unified experience. OvationCXM gives banks the power to design, automate, and optimize onboarding and servicing journeys across their entire ecosystem. Internal teams, tools, and third-party partners stay aligned in one place instead of working in silos. When everything moves together, handoffs stop breaking, customers move through journeys faster, and banks reach revenue sooner with less friction. Leaders also get real-time visibility into each journey, so they can spot issues, fix them quickly, and keep customers from slipping away. Banks using journey orchestration see lower operating costs, fewer support calls, faster journey completions, and stronger revenue growth. The results speak for themselves: 26% lower operating costs, 25% fewer support calls, 10% more revenue, and 33% faster journey completions. This is how banks create experiences that actually work. Want to see how journey orchestration could help your bank? Visit OvationCXM.com to learn more.
Okay, so that one was animated. We also have some other examples that are more like traditional demo videos. I can show you some of that. This one, right here, we just created an intro, an animated intro, and then we launched into the actual demo, walking through the problem and how to really think about that problem and address it.
Again, there are different ways of doing this. The whole idea is that you put these stakes in the ground about the main problems you own, regardless of whether there’s a solution, or whether the audience knows there’s a solution for it. If you think of this strategically, you say, “Okay, so we have four pillars,” four problems. We’re going to create one three-to-five-minute video on each one, and on top of the video, we’re going to create an actual written page with images, so that now the LLM has the context it needs. You play by the LLM’s rules. You give it the context it needs, and if people come to the website, they have a video they can watch, so you can build rapport, brand awareness, and affinity with them. That’s where this type of video shows up best: not necessarily to drive traffic, but to keep that traffic on your website and help them understand things better. Educate them.
What you’ll see is that it’s okay to create long-form video for this. It’s okay to go 10 or 15 minutes breaking down a concept. The process is to find the best keywords and Q&As. After you find the keywords and the Q&As, you create the boring walkthroughs, under 10 minutes, and you might want to have your product person do this. I know you might not like what they create, but within this context it’s okay, because knowledge centers aren’t necessarily owned by the people who own the budget and make the financial decision. They’re for your advocates, the ones who feel the pain. The person who’s going to be using your solution versus the person who’s going to be funding it usually has different problems, so you might want to create knowledge centers for each. Usually, the people coming from underneath are the ones advocating for you and self-educating. So don’t be afraid to get technical here, and boring, and nerdy.
Then just slap on a logo intro and outro. I purposely say “slap,” and I know some marketing leaders who care about brand don’t like this language, and I get it. But I purposely chose that word because, creatively, that’s how I want you to think of it. Just an intro, then launch into the video right away. That’s the value. Then you publish them as a series on your website. They don’t have to be launched all at the same time. You could do one at a time.
Play 5: Street Interviews
I’m going to speed through these examples. If you stuck around this whole time, kudos to you, and thank you for supporting.
Here’s what we have. We trained our client: “Here’s what we want you to do. Go buy this microphone, come up with 10 questions, make a list of 10 people, and ask them. Ask 10 people 10 questions, and they’ll each give you about five minutes.” It’s fun, and people are open to it. They’re usually at an event, and it’s a great way to generate content that’s relevant. And by the way, this video is 30 seconds.
[Sample interview audio] “What’s the craziest thing that’s ever derailed one of your projects, and how did you fix it?” “Went into labor. Thankfully, we had a great team, and they stepped in while I went ahead and had a baby.”
Okay, so: support system, 100%. Having teamwork, where you’re all connected and understand the overarching goal of your project, means that when resources do happen to fall out, you can fill in.
So, simple and straightforward. You just make a list of people and questions you want to ask. You buy an iPhone-compatible microphone, because you want to make sure you capture really good audio. Then you go up to people and interview them, and you edit those interviews down to 30 seconds or one minute. You can do one question with one person, one question with several answers from several people, or topic-based. If you do three questions per person and interview three people, you literally have three times three, nine. You could do at least nine videos. And if you interview 10 people and ask five questions, you can literally create content for the whole year. That’s not the only content you should create, but with one event, you can diversify your content with this initiative for the whole year.
Play 6: Case Study Videos
The last one is case study videos, and these are self-explanatory. I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with this. Essentially, you interview customers, and we do that through Riverside. You add graphics and ask questions back and forth, with title cards as they’re speaking, to better understand their case, the benefits they received, and their results.
You follow the same process here. This one’s a little bit easier, because you can do it remotely. You just get a Riverside subscription and record remotely. You interview people over Riverside or Zoom, and then you edit those interviews. Again, you post them throughout the year. You don’t want to just extract the videos, post them, and then forget about it. You want to make sure you’re posting them throughout the year.
Q&A and Closing
All right. I guess there’s not a lot of time left for Q&A, but if you want to raise your hand, I’ll be happy to answer any questions. There’s one right there. Let me see. Oh yeah, you’re welcome.
Okay, this concludes our webinar. Thank you so much. We look forward to doing another one. Maybe we’ll do specific initiatives like the ones we talked about. We definitely want to maybe do one on AI, so keep an eye out for that. And thank you for joining. See ya.