Video Drives Customer Engagement Up and Costs Down for this Manufacturer

How do you create personal and authentic connections with customers and prospective customers amid a global pandemic? For automation technology manufacturer SPOC, the meaningful engagement came two minutes at a time via an inspired video-based sales and service campaign designed by B2B marketing and sales agency FitzMartin. The highly successful campaign, powered by Vidyard and HubSpot, has driven astounding social engagement and the highest email open rates ever achieved by FitzMartin’s team.

Innovative Training Inspired by a Desire to Lift Up Out of Adversity

For SPOC Automation, 2020 turned into the perfect storm. The company, which manufactures automation technology for the oil and gas industry was first hit by a historic fall in oil prices, which sent massive shock waves through the industry and around the world. Then, in March 2020, the global pandemic was declared, forcing the entire world into lockdown and threatening the livelihood of manufacturing businesses small and large.

But rather than hunker down, SPOC leaned into its innovation mission and turned to Vidyard and HubSpot agency partner FitzMartin with an idea. With people confined and working from home, perhaps this was the ideal time for customers to complete training that they normally would not have time for.

And so, Two-Minute-Drives (TMD), a collection of short videos featuring SPOC engineering, tech support sales, and production experts was born. The video library, which offers deep insights into automation technology for upstream and midstream markets, delivers highly personal micro-training on a wide range of topics from oilfield automation to variable frequency drives.

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Real and Authentic Video ‘Lifts Up’ Customer Communications

SPOC has always been at the forefront of innovation. The business is universally recognized for championing a better, more environmentally-friendly production experience. SPOC’s culture and mission are built on “Lift Up,” a foundational concept that world-changing ideas can come from anywhere. Every SPOC employee has a responsibility to lift up themselves, each other, their customers, the company, the community, and the country.

The TMD concept was born out of Lift Up, with the video series designed as a two-minute marketing cadence built around interviews with SPOC experts.

“In designing the content series, we and the client challenged ourselves to ask the questions, ‘how can we share what we have learned, and provide best practices to provide helpful information to the community and to the industry?’,” says Will Riley, Revenue Operations Director for FitzMartin.

FitzMartin turned to Vidyard to house the video library and to capture critical video-based analytics from the campaign. HubSpot was used to manage all associated email marketing.

Just as the TMD campaign got up and running, the global pandemic was declared. “COVID changed our entire creative strategy,” says Tina Willis, account executive at FitzMartin. “Suddenly, there wasn’t lunch and learns anymore. There weren’t any field visits. No drive-bys. If a field tech did go on-site, the customer wouldn’t be on location or close by due to social distancing guidelines. So our TMD program became that much more important. Suddenly the door was opened to a much larger voice of the customer program that not only focused on customer service but on customer success.”

It also changed the way videos were produced. “Because of COVID, we couldn’t do any polished production work,” explains Tina. “We had people in their cars and on the warehouse floor shooting their own video on their phone. It may actually be the reason the campaign is so incredibly successful. Our TMD videos are very relatable, very real, very human.”

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Personal Video Drives the Highest Email Open Rates FitzMartin’s Ever Seen

By sharing TMD’s insights with SPOC’s customer base, FitzMartin was able to grow traffic to SPOC’s TMD landing page and the SPOC website, allowing SPOC to increase mindshare and build strong brand loyalty in a challenging down market. In the first 30 days of the campaign, SPOC saw a 63% increase in social media interactions, 82% increase in click-throughs, 59% increase in social shares, and overall impressions were up 58%. FitzMartin also saw a 10% increase in email open rates across the entire database—the highest open rates the agency has ever seen —and a 5% increase in click-through-rates (CTRs) in the first three months of the campaign. The TMD education initiative has also been featured in industry media.

“Vidyard allowed us to use video to turn regular SPOC employees into rock stars. While the program started as a sales initiative, the pandemic accelerated interest, and it took off through the entire organization. People from warehouse staff to field techs were essentially writing our content for us,” says Will.

One of our core values is Innovation. Because of this, we knew we
had to change the way we communicated with our clients.
Video is now a part of internal and external communication
strategies. With the implementation of Vidyard, we are able
to do more without any extra effort.

Bobby Mason

CEO & President at SPOC Automation Inc.

Following the TMD launch, SPOC and FitzMartin experienced a 69.5% increase in usage of video, a 151% increase in videos created, a 968% increase in total video views, and a 208.2% increase in the average attention span. In a single instance, one video tutorial helped customers easily perform their own repair and get their system back up and running in minutes, saving SPOC $140,000 in avoided field service visits.

From Sales to Service—Taking Video to the Next Level

The continued success of video during the COVID-19 quarantine inspired both SPOC and FitzMartin to take the TMD idea to the next level. Using HubSpot’s Service Hub, FitzMartin has developed a full-service hub for SPOC and launched an online library of FAQs using HubSpot’s Knowledge Base. All videos are created by SPOC employees and address commonly asked questions. Knowledge base articles are then added into HubSpot ChatFlow allowing the chatbot to easily field questions by funneling FAQ information to customers automatically.

Everyone absorbs information differently. A critical pillar of
delighting customers is to meet them where they are.
That’s why democratizing video as a communication tool
for customer engagement is powerful as it empowers your
teams to engage authentically on a human level—at scale.

Lou Orfanos

General Manager - Service Hub at HubSpot

“Implementing the FAQ videos through the knowledge base was a major innovation and has changed how SPOC communicates with its customers and end-users. We’re seeing an increase in chat requests on the website. The integration of Vidyard, HubSpot Service Hub and ChatFlow is having a tremendously positive impact on customer communications,” says Will. “The SPOC sales team has told us that this was the most impactful marketing effort they’ve seen in years.”

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SPOC Automation manufactures automation technology for both the upstream and midstream segments of the oil & gas industry. The company’s products help customers automate processes in artificial lift and water handling as well as vapor recovery and gas compression.

But at its core, SPOC is an innovation company. In everything the company does and for everyone who works there, there’s an expectation that SPOC shake up the status quo.

Because the company believes world-changing ideas can come from anywhere. Through SPOC’s collective ideas, through its process and its energy—SPOC is redefining the standard that drives automation in the oilfield.

FitzMartin is a sales and marketing consultancy, grounded in the science of behavioral change. Focused on sales first, FitzMartin exists to help its clients drive new growth and profitability. Since 1991, it has helped lower middle-market and emerging middle-market companies sell more, with a lower cost of sales, at greater profit. FitzMartin does this through sales and marketing consulting and, for select clients, through revenue operations and award-winning creative development and implementation.