Paylocity Product Video Project

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About Paylocity:

Paylocity is a software company that specializes in HR & Payroll with many features within it’s app to make the employee lifecycle smooth from hire to retire.

Their Business Needs and Goals:

Paylocity wanted to increase their click through rate, brand awareness, and sales team usage of video content.

The Goal: Test new product specific videos that were delivered in the spirit of the current marketing campaign.
The Ask: We heard from sales that they wanted new videos that make our product ‘look cool’. They felt that new videos were lacking in their arsenal of marketing materials. They wanted a way to easily show what our product can do in video format.

The Solution to Their Needs:

The Creative Team, Multimedia Team, and Product Marketing Team collaborated to build new product videos that would highlight specific products in Paylocity’s platform in short-form, 45-30 second, videos that could be utilized in paid media, organic social, and by sales.

Results:

(This data was pulled in the first 4 months after the first video launch and numbers are growing.)

CTR Data: These videos have been among the top click performers for the past 4 months.
Engaged Visitor Data: Good performance = over a 1% conversion rate. Employee Voice videos are 1.05%-1.21%, Recruitment videos are 0.76%-0.93% (still strong performance).

Form Fill Data: Employee Voice has provided 31 form fills, Recruiting has provided 2 form fills.
Organic Social: Engagement rate of product videos posted is 5.92%, which is above the average of 1-3%.
View Duration: 92% on YouTube.
Overall Views: 3 million+ views on YouTube.
Highspot Views: 234 times, top 25 most actively used videos by Sales Team.

Video Concept & Buy In Challenge

The start of this project was a bit challenging since the Sales team had been asking for videos, but leadership’s answer was that they already had videos and to use them. Sales felt that the current videos were outdated. We as the Marketing Team felt that these new product videos would really make a difference for sales, but we had to test it first to prove it to leadership. So we decided to go rogue and work on this in the background.

I started with some loose concept videos of the product screens animated and with some cool 3D motion added in. Once I felt like I experimented enough with basic animations and got a feel for how I wanted them to look I made a very rough video draft. My manager wrote up a quick script, I recorded my own VO, and added some watermarked music behind the video to show as a demo of the concept. Cue the 3D animations and dramatic music!

*No audio.

*Audio muted, turn volume up at your convenience.

Concept Feedback

I showed the video to my manager and he said it was a great start and we could show it to the Product Marketing Team and Copy Team to get their feedback.

As expected the Product Team and Copy Team both said, “We can make this better with stronger pain points and copy.” We said, “Perfect! We need your help with this. We can’t do this alone.” ❤️

So the Copy Team came up with a script, which got approved by Product and we had our foundation for the video!

Storyboard

Now that the script was locked in and approved I started brainstorming the storyboard for the video. After a few rounds of revisions I had the visuals locked in with the script, timing, all animations spelled out and locked in for what the video would look like.

VO & Music

It was time to select the music and voice behind these videos. I did some digging and selected 5 VO options and 3 music options. My manager and I selected the VO and we took a vote from various creatives in the organization to figure out which music everyone thought fit our brand the best.

Video Animation

While the VO was being recorded I started animating the video based on the storyboard. Once I had the VO I started timing out my animations with her timing and after a few rounds of revisions the video was done!

I then created a thumbnail for it, worked with the Web Team to get the vanity URL live, the activation copy from the Copy Team to add to the YouTube description, and it was ready to launch! I handed the video over to the Paid Media Team to start the test and now it was time to wait for the results!

*Same video as above in the intro for reference.

The video hit 1 million views through paid media in 44 days and paid media wanted more! There it was… we had our buy in from leadership!

We partnered with the product team to identify and prioritize which products to focus on building next, then I built 3 more.

Video Feedback

Sales Feedback:

“The reps love the new product videos – the branding, production, everything “looks like a commercial”. 😊 They say these videos are ideal for getting interest or engagement (in marketing terms, top-of-funnel). The videos have been helping them book meetings as well as re-engage conversations that have gone cold.”

Sales Enablement Manager

Paid Media Feedback:

“We do like them a lot. In the past we only had testimonials videos, while those are great, they are not 100% optimized for paid. With the new product videos, they are great at telling and showing what we do, our UI, and peaking prospects' interests.”

Digital Marketing Manager

Organic Social Feedback:

“Yes! Average engagement rate of product videos posted is 5.92%.”

Senior Social Media Specialist

At this point I created 4 videos and we wanted to pause on building these to make sure that these videos were being well received by all departments using them and to collect data to prove that these videos were performing well. Not just well liked, but actually contributing to click throughs, engaged visitors, and form fills. As you can see from this feedback all parties using these videos were happy with how they turned out. Now let’s get into the data.

Video Data & Closing Thoughts

This project that started as a rogue test became an incredibly successful project that caused all departments to ask for more! These videos have gone on to be shared company wide in the monthly leadership call, helped become lead drivers for sales, and are among the most popular content used for paid media and organic social to hit their annual goals. This was a hugely collaborative effort, this project was so much fun to work on, and the results were incredible too!

Engaged Visitor Data: Good performance = over a 1% conversion rate.
Employee Voice 1.05%-1.21%, Recruitment videos 0.76%-0.93%.
Form Fill Data: Employee Voice 31 form fills, Recruiting 2 form fills.
Organic Social: Engagement rate 5.92%, above the average of 1-3%.
View Duration: 92% on YouTube.
Overall Views: 3 million+ views on YouTube.
Highspot Views: 234 times, top 25 most actively used videos.

Video Gallery

If you want to see all of the videos I created for this project you can scroll through this gallery to view the different videos. Check out all of the different animations I used to tell a story for each specific Paylocity product!