Tip #6: Measure everything.

"We get 100 to 200 views everyday, about 1,000 per week," says Chow. "We maybe haven't pushed it as hard as we can through some of our channels, but it continues to be incredibly effective.

"It blew out the open rate and click-through rates of anything we've ever done. All we wanted to do is get people to come to our website -- come see what we mean."

Tip #7: Enlist your entire company in video distribution.

"You have to full-court press it," Chow says. "You have to have enough kindling.

"Make sure everyone in your company puts it out to their networks and lists. Reinforce it through things like display on your website. Outreach to every single pundit or authority in your industry.

"You reach out to them, saying, 'I thought you'd be interested in this, I hope you'll do a share.' We actually had some analysts who are normally loathe to do that kind of thing, who actually did post and share it."

Tip #8: Don't fret if you don't get thousands of views immediately.

"The history of social media is replete with things like this that didn't go viral for months and months, then boom," says Chow.

"I suspect that because it's clearly a company video, we might not have the same potential for uplift as if it were unbranded. Once you remove the promo element you might get more social sharing, and we're going to try that, too."

Tip #9: Always provide a call to action.

"Almost everything we do is directed toward a call to action," Chow says, "which is to schedule a led demo, a self-running demo, or attend one of our daily mass demos."

In terms of revenue growth, LogiXML appears to be on the right track. The company was founded in 2000 by CTO Arman Eshraghi, and today supports the BI initiatives of over 1,000 companies worldwide.

The firm's 2011 sales grew 80 percent year over year, while its customer base increased by 60 percent. LogiXML also received a $10 million growth equity investment in late 2011; investors include Grotech Ventures, Updata Partners, and Summit Partners.
Employee count is now 150, with plans to increase that to 200 by the end of the year.

Tip #10: Tailor your registration requirements to your sales realities.

LogiXML has two divisions: The OEM group targets software companies between 50 and 1,000 employees, and the SMB division looks for firms with 50 to 500 employees. (Chow says the average sale is around $130,000 on the OEM side, and $35,000 for the SMBs.)

Because of this split, as well as geographic territories, prospects are asked to provide information that will slot them appropriately.

"Registration is simply your name, your email, your phone number, and zip code -- because we have territories," says Chow. "And we ask the question, 'Are you a software SaaS provider,' because we have the two divisions.

"What you ask for really depends. You have to bring the frightened little woodland creatures out. At the higher level, you can't gate those people. Once you get into the really valuable content, with a strong buying signal -- maybe it's the Gartner paper, maybe it's a one-on-one demo -- you can gate those more forcefully.

"I think many people gate the top of the funnel too tightly. You've got to be able to get people freely to your buying proposition."

Tip #11: Consider making a non-promo promo.

As he hinted earlier in the conversation, Chow says he suspects the LogiXML video might have gotten more views had it not been so clearly tied to LogiXML; he's got that on his "things to do" list.

"If there's one thing I maybe would have done differently, it's to create an unbranded, non-promo version at the same time we did the branded version.

"In other words, do a video that says, 'We think we understand this problem, come talk to us.' It's still a promo, but for a lot of people in IT -- these people are born skeptics, they're very analytic, they're always looking for the detail -- they'd rather not get into the overt promo.

"I just want them to walk away with one thing: 'LogiXML understands my problem.'"

Tip #12: The job of marketing, in a nutshell.

"I spent 11 years in Silicon Valley, during the insane go-go years," says Chow. "A lot of marketing succeeded even though it was bad; it was a frenzied time.

"I was fortunate to be under the tutelage of Steve Blank. { http://steveblank.com/ } I was lucky enough to get my head beat in by him for several months.

"He teaches agile marketing at Stanford. One day in class he asked, 'What is the job of marketing?'

"We all pulled out our quotes from business books and other crap, and he listened to us for awhile, then said, 'Shut up,' and wrote something on the board: Create demand among qualified prospects in the target market and drive them to it.

"He then underlined each of those key phrases: create demand, qualified prospects, target market, drive them. 'If you're not doing something that does this,' he said, 'stop doing it.'"

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