KITCHENER, ON--(Marketwired - Mar 31, 2015) - The world's leading modern marketers are realizing the power of video to engage their online audiences, and they are increasingly converting those viewers into customers by integrating video engagement data with their Eloqua marketing automation platform.

Cetera Financial Group, Lenovo and Prophix Software have recently turned to Vidyard to power their video marketing programs and turn videos into active tools for lead generation and customer insights. In addition to offering a complete video hosting and management solution, Vidyard enables marketers to identify individual video viewers and track their viewing activities within Eloqua and other marketing automation platforms. By tracking who's watched which videos, when and for how long, marketers can more quickly identify their hottest leads and give their sales team valuable insights for closing more deals faster.

"Video is the perfect way to engage audiences," said Vidyard co-founder and CEO Michael Litt. "It evokes emotion, it uses time efficiently, and it is measurable. It is one thing to know how a potential customer interacted with your brand's video, but having that information in the context of all the additional information in your marketing automation platform makes it incredibly powerful for sales and marketing professionals."

Lenovo
One of the world's largest PC makers, Lenovo started using videos for basic product overviews but has since expanded to on-demand webinars and videos that put a fun spin on the company's products. Recognizing that video was becoming a strategic part of content marketing and demand generation programs, Lenovo recently switched to Vidyard because of Vidyard's ability to track individual viewers, see how much of each video they watched and push that data into Eloqua for better lead scoring and customer insight.

"Video is one of the top-performing assets for us," said Michael Ballard, Demand Generation Strategy and Operations Manager at Lenovo. "Just knowing whether someone watched a video is not a true measure of engagement. Vidyard allows us to score our audience based on what percentage of a video they completed. That way we know that the viewer was truly engaged and deserves the score they are getting. We follow up differently with someone who watched a video all the way through -- or re-watched it -- than someone who turned it off after 10 seconds."

Cetera Financial Group
Cetera Financial Group relies on video content to capture the interest of new prospects and increase engagement in their lead nurturing programs. But more than just a way to interact with audiences, video analytics are offering new insights into customer behavior and their actual engagement at different stages of the buying journey.

"Video engages audiences in a way the written word can't," said Eric Hansen, Director of Demand Generation at Cetera. "Seeing that engagement data quantified within Eloqua gives us a competitive edge that helps us identify and convert our hottest prospects more quickly than we ever could before."

In addition to using Vidyard to track video engagement, Cetera uses several sophisticated marketing tools for nurturing leads, including Bizo for retargeting and Lookbook HQ for creating compelling content experiences. Using all three together and integrating them with Eloqua helps Cetera qualify and convert leads faster. The combination of tools and the impressive results earned Cetera an Oracle Markie award for "Top Nurture Program" in 2014, and the company is up for three more Markie awards this year.

Prophix Software
Prophix Software, a pioneer in global Corporate Performance Management software that helps finance professionals, has incorporated video as a strategic part of its content-based marketing strategy and prospect nurturing. The company needed more video analytics to know which videos were best engaging their website visitors at different stages of the buying journey and turned to Vidyard for this video insight.

"We quickly recognized the power of Vidyard's video analytics for helping us understand the performance of each video asset," said Marnie Middlehurst, Director of Marketing at Prophix. "Equally powerful is being able to track viewers and see that data inside Eloqua and Salesforce for improved lead scoring, segmentation, nurturing and visibility for sales follow-up. As a data-driven marketing organization, it's exciting to see the power of video marketing and marketing automation come together."

Prophix is also deploying a Vidyard Video Hub to deliver a custom-branded video channel on its own website where visitors can browse the full catalog of video content. Prophix will be speaking about their experiences with video marketing at the Oracle Modern Marketing Experience conference in Las Vegas on April 1.

In a 2014 survey by research firm Demand Metric, more than 95 percent of respondents reported that video was becoming more important to their marketing and sales efforts, and more than 70 percent reported that video converts better than other content types. However, less than 10 percent were using video analytics to qualify their leads and track the true performance of video assets.

"There's no doubt video is moving to the top of the list when it comes to marketing content," Litt said. "We're thrilled to see customers like Cetera Financial Group, Lenovo and Prophix embrace video marketing as a way to improve the results of demand generation programs and extract more value from their existing Eloqua deployments."

About Vidyard
Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry's leading video marketing platform that helps marketers drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data, turning views into sales.