Continuing our traditional review of companies and their video marketing strategies – as we already did with Slack, Grammarly, Airtable and others – today we are taking a look at Zendesk.
Zendesk is one of the leaders in cloud-based customer service and engagement – covering all bases for your support, sales, and customer relationships.
At its core, it’s a supercharged ticketing system that pulls all inquiries across email, chat, phone, social media and much more – and puts it into a single dashboard. This makes it easier for teams of all sizes to track, prioritize and resolve customer requests – increasing the speed and satisfaction of the customers.
Currently, they have around 7,000 employees on board – making them one of the biggest leaders in tech space.
So let’s see what helps them sustain their growth.
Platforms and Audience Reach
As a huge company, they boast a large following and active communities across all of the major channels – and the content is mostly tailored to the audiences of each of those platforms. As we often mentioned during our other research into Slack, Grammarly and Airtable – these giants are able to spend millions in marketing budget on a monthly basis, to get their message across.
Luckily, to even compete with them, and punch up – you don’t need millions to throw at hundreds of videos and see what sticks. A clever video marketing strategy will allow you to resize, reuse and repurpose your assets to compete across all of these channels – while spending a fraction of the cost, and allowing you to scale these assets long term.
Let’s talk some numbers:
- YouTube: ~36.6K subscribers
- TikTok: ~53K followers
- Facebook: ~168K followers (with ~161K page “likes”)
- Instagram: ~47K followers
- LinkedIn: ~598K followers
- Twitter (X): ~104K followers
As you can see – Zendesk actively cultivates their followers across these channels – making sure their social media presence is active and attracts a diverse audience.
Talking about attracting diverse audiences – each platform is strategically positioned to play a unique role in Zendesk’s video marketing. For professional networks – they have a variety of video content built to cater towards LinkedIn. And for more lighthearted, and shorter trend driven content – they use channels like Tik Tok.
Platform-Specific Video Strategies
With many resources and marketing budgets available to them – Zendesk has a strategy native to each individual platform that they use – and their tone, formats and content lengths are fully adjusted for each individual channel that they use.
Let’s take a closer look.
YouTube
On YouTube, Zendesk has a variety of long-form and high-production value videos. The company’s channel has a well rounded mix of product explainer videos, recordings across their seminars – and customer success stories with their customer base.
Many videos are targeted towards making a decision, with prospects and users looking for more detailed insights, being more problem aware, and already some steps into their buyer journey with Zendesk.
All of these videos are neatly organized into playlists ranging from starter essentials – like “Getting started with Zendesk QA” – and up to more trendier workflow innovations like introducing Zendesk AI towards their diverse workflows and use cases.
We can clearly see that they are using YouTube’s historically more patient audiences, and not shying away from posting longer tutorial and how-to videos, with some of them even being hours long.
One insight here, is that we would really suggest cutting down those big boys into smaller, more digestible chunks – which are easier to share on demand, across the sales and marketing teams.
One of the things we really enjoy – and we think is really beneficial for bigger AI, SaaS, and tech companies – and what often is overlooked – is creating short and sweet (30 second to 3 minutes) – feature update videos.
With Zendesk – they have a whole playlist including their latest feature updates – and as you can see, this gets a ton of views.
Doing this helps out in a variety of ways – like helping to introduce and upsell new features to existing customer bases, and re-engaging with past customers that might’ve churned out as the feature you have released, didn’t exist yet.
Last, but not least – we are looking at their most viewed examples here. These include live action footage combined with motion graphics, 2D and 3D animation. In terms of formats – most viewed are their ads, promo and explainer videos. Overall, the engagement of Zendesk ranges from hundreds of views across their newest videos – up to 8.6 million on their most popular, 16 second video.
Select the video type that aligns with your marketing objectives, and receive an immediate high-level estimate of the production cost.
In terms of the overall tone – it varies from format to format used, and goes from informative, to purely human and humorous brand voice. In their approach – they are much more similar to Slack and Grammarly – as opposed to Airtable’s almost purely B2B-tailored messaging and approach. One thing that’s missing and would improve engagement – is introducing more animated formats.
TikTok
After looking at one of the oldest platforms in the form of YouTube – let’s keep things fresh and look at Zendesk’s TikTok strategy. The approach here consists of what already works best for the platform – they are not reinventing the wheel and keep the videos short-form, playful and trendy.
The company is using TikTok as top of the funnel channel to build brand awareness, with the use of already viral sounds, memes, relatable stories – mixed in with some quick tips.
Zendesk has a history of partnering with creative agencies to execute a “TikTok-first” video content approach – based on shorter, narrative-driven clips. Sometimes, they don’t even mention the product at all! They are not shying away from getting on trending audios and challenges – using humour and relatable stories to connect with their viewers even better.
Given that larger companies often try to play it as safe as possible – it’s refreshing to see this amount of creativity and initiative coming into one of the most chaotic and fast paced platforms there are.
And viewers are responsive to this, and it’s paying off – Zendesk has a strong TikTok following and active viewer engagement – with the average of ~1.4K likes and ~185K views per video.
But on their most popular video titled “How to make your customer angry” – they have a staggering 1.5 million views!
@zendesk Customer experience before ? and after ? AI. Head over to our bio for what’s trending in customer experience this year. ? #ai #business #customerservice #customerexperience #artificialintelligence #trends #zendesk #machinelearning #strategy #chatgpt #cxtrends #learnontiktok #nicktalksmoney ♬ original sound – Zendesk
Overall – this has become a great channel to funnel attention and views towards their more education formats. Once people get interested – they can visit the YouTube channel to go through a robust educational and onboarding process – reinforcing the buying intent.
That’s exactly why a strategic video funnel is so important – in our fast paced world, attention becomes the most important currency – and once you have caught it, it’s criminal to let it slip. So make sure you build a “highway” of content – for prospects to have a fast, fun and efficient journey towards their final destination – becoming a paid customer with you.
On Instagram – as dictated by the ever fickle algorithms – Zendesk shares a mix of shorter videos and reels, that often mirror what they are already doing on TikTok – using the similar, highly visual environment and storytelling methods provided by the platform.
And that’s what we call strategic video assets – you don’t need to always create unique content for each individual platform. Some of them can be used and adapted for multiple touchpoints – making your spend more efficient.
Work smart, not hard
Similarly to TikTok, they bring a more witty and personable approach – aligning more with what the platform’s preference is – lifestyle vibes. Zendesk’s Instagram Reels often include skits, trending audios – making fun of age-old customer service flops and scenarios.
Of course, some of their marketing promotes the newest and brightest innovations they have with AI – but sometimes they just post funny memes like this to help their customers relate and vent their frustrations in the comment section.
The brand’s Instagram presence, while using some of the same formats as with TikTok – is more polished, and “business friendly” – talking more about employee culture, customer support humor, and of course promoting the successful stories of their customers.
On average, the content here is around 1 minute long, optimized for quick viewing and phone dimensions. They tend to be polished and professionally produced, using captions, on-screen text (for sound-off viewing) – mixing professionalism and playfulness.
This channel also allows Zendesk to engage via stories for Q&A sessions, and additional, longer clips (like YouTube, longer formats) via IGTV.
The feed feels human, and less trend oriented when compared with TikTok – making sure Zendesk keeps their professional and approachable facade.
Zendesk’s Facebook video strategy is more of an informative content, that has a broad appeal to a variety of different audiences – and doesn’t have a strong focus or a distinct content format, or length preference.
Facebook can be seen as a combination of many assets built throughout their efforts – from tutorial, explainer, and how-to videos pulled from YouTube, to live events and trade show appearances, and also a ton of skits and customer success snippets.
Zendesk can share a myriad of different things, mixing and matching them – sharing videos from the “champions of customer success” video and story highlights, asking for them to be reshared – and also short explainer videos like you see below.
The tone of Facebook stays upbeat and positive, but slightly more general-public friendly, with a salad bowl of different formats. Thus, video lengths skew to a mid range, 1-3 minutes on average, catering to Facebook’s feeds content consumption habits.
Zendesk also uses Facebook for video ads, where they target specific types of audiences, using its large follower base for organic outreach paired with paid promotion of key video campaigns.
Overall, Facebook stands out as a cross-posting platform where Zendesk uses most of its major video content (from their newest feature demos and updates, to customer stories) – to reach as wide of an audience as possible.
A huge plus for us is that they are using an animated format prominently on their page.
As THE platform for B2B brand engagement – LinkedIn for Zendesk is a core of their professional and thought-leadership video content. Videos there, in whichever format and length they come – are mostly focused on highlighting industry insights, product innovations, and executive perspectives – while positioning Zendesk as the go-to solution.
You can see a clear shift from memes and trends of TikTok and Instagram – to raw numbers and collaborations being highlighted – all while still using the video content, animation and motion graphics.
The tone here is more formal and informative, focusing on actual value, as opposed to attracting as many people as possible, and seeing what sticks.
These are focused and clearly catered to business leaders and customer experience professionals. Video formats are also more business focused – like mini case studies, geared towards ROI and measured outcomes, employee spotlights, even recaps from conferences like Zendesk Relate.
Because LinkedIn’s algo favors native video (by the way, all platforms do promote videos with native dimensions more) – Zendesk uploads clips directly with subtitle, or even fully text-on-screen formats, for the silent autoplay.
Although – TikTok and LinkedIn are a far cry from one another in terms of style – a big similarity can be spotted in terms of lengths, which are shorter here as well.
Having a mind blowing 600K followers on their LinkedIn, Zendesk uses the platform to build up even more credibility and product awareness using strategic videos.
At the core of this – is their philosophy of “customer service is human”. And even while the LinkedIn presence is filled with numbers, ROIs and cast studies – you can still see that Zendesk’s witty personality shines through (even though it’s more muted) – allowing their videos stand out in the feed of strictly corporate, buttoned up content of other brands.
Twitter (X)
In similar fashion to Facebook, Zendesk uses Twitter (X) as their relay post for video content, sharing snackable video clips, gifs and other content that it builds and uses across other platforms.
These can be ultra short chunks from longer videos, highlights from the webinars – with links to the longer content. Zendesk’s team also uses videos to do product announcements and updates for events – or sharing stats in an engaging animation piece, like you see below.
The tone of Twitter (X) allows Zendesk to follow up on its friendly and concise approach – which combines really well with the platform’s bite-sized style.
As with the TikTok – trends and humour appears too, sometimes with videos that are shared both originally on TikTok and on Twitter (X).
Twitter’s (X) character limit pushes the punchy messaging even further – as videos and any content are often accompanied by a punchy one-liner or hashtag.
Overall – videos are used strategically, to increase engagement across key content and messages.
Most videos are short, and stay at 15-30 seconds, almost never getting longer than 1 minute.
Optimized for mobile and no-sound viewing – Zendesk takes the full advantage of Twitter’s real time, viral nature.
Video Content on the Zendesk Website
We really like how the Zendesk website looks, and how they integrate video in the buyer journey. This is a center that combines all of the formats, approaches, strategies and video styles – in one place.
A prominent example is the Customer Stories section on zendesk.com, where many case studies feature embedded videos. On a typical customer story page, visitors can watch a short testimonial or mini-documentary about how a client uses Zendesk.
For example – here Zendesk tells a story of how LATAM Airlines achieves 90% employee satisfaction with Zendesk:
In addition to case studies, Zendesk’s website uses video for product education and marketing. All these illustrate that Zendesk’s own site treats video as both a marketing tool and a user enablement tool – enhancing landing pages, enriching content with multimedia, and ensuring that site visitors can engage with information in video form.
Let’s also review their AI Agent solutions, and how they are implementing video here. Here they have a 3 minute masterpiece – which combines live action, motion graphics, 2d and text animation.
fThis piece is a great introduction to the Zendesk AI agents solution – and a great microcosm for the Zendesk overall video marketing style.
One of the most amazing things, is their “choose your own adventure” style of demo videos:
As you can see – it’s a LOT of videos. You can’t keep up with competitors like this, if you do a single video. To even touch this level of engagement, you would require a robust, multi-part video system.
Types of Video Content Produced by the Zendesk Marketing Team
With their system in place, they have videos from a mix of different types, across different use cases:
1. Educational Explainers & Tutorials
A large portion of the video content that they produce is educational for a reason. Complex SaaS platforms, especially with different ICPs benefit from having a system of training videos, to reduce churn and make the onboarding easier. These videos, that range from shorter, quick tutorial clips – to hours long workflows breakdowns – serve to assist users in their day to day use. These are primarily used across YouTube, Zendesk Website, and LinkedIn.
2. Customer Testimonial Stories
These stories are normally 1-3 minutes long, highlighting the quantified results and outcomes, usually with a combination of live action, motion graphics, and 2D animation. These serve as social proof, and are normally used on YouTube, Facebook, and website’s customer stories page.
3. Entertaining Social Shorts
To feed the main top of the funnel platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter – Zendesk uses bite sized videos. These can be anything from skits, trend driven memes – and relatable moments to break through to the scrolling audience.
These videos rarely mention the product directly – but they don’t need to. They are used to build brand awareness and affinity, by making the support professionals laugh and feel like Zendesk “gets it”. These are mostly under 60 seconds, optimized for shrinking attention spans.
4. Product Marketing & Brand Campaigns
These top of the funnel examples are used as polished flagship videos for promotional campaigns and launches, and primarily in ads. These videos appear on YouTube, LinkedIn, and the website during key announcements or big marketing pushes. They are also often repurposed and shared on all other supplemental platforms. These videos are usually 1-2 minutes, have great production quality.
5. Event Highlights and Thought Leadership
With these video formats, Zendesk shows their industry authority, especially when it comes to the conference keynotes, panel discussions and research insights – packaged in convenient videos. One example is their Zendesk Relate conference, and the company uses content from there to publish highlight reels, and full session recordings across YouTube.
There are also many formats that come as a mix of some of the above – making Zendesk’s video marketing toolkit infinite.
Zendesk’s Overall Approach to Video Marketing
As mentioned above in this overview – Zendesk’s video marketing approach can be described as “business, with a human touch”. Across all channels, the company stays as authentic as possible, employs storytelling and a bit of fun and whimsy to stand out in B2B space.
Unlike stereotypical corporate videos that companies release because “competitors are doing it” – even on LinkedIn, Zendesk’s content often feels conversational and sometimes playful. This is because their core identity and cheerful brand personality shines true.
One of the most important things here – is that Zendesk’s masterfully aligns each video with the appropriate stage of the customer journey and platform.
It’s also important to point out that Zendesk is not pulling its punches when it comes to taking creative risks, like making satirical posts and other types of collaborations, as the main goal here is to get genuine engagement.
This philosophy has paid off in strong numbers that their pulling with their viewership on these videos and posts, as well as a resounding positive feedback from audiences.
Given this – we can clearly say that Zendesk marries platform-specific tactics, with an overarching commitment to humanize their brand in the B2B space – using marketing through video.
Conclusion: Key Takeaways and Tips for a Similar Strategy
Zendesk’s use of video offers a great insight for marketers, looking to build a robust video strategy and replicate this kind of success. Here are some of the key highlights:
Know Your Audience’s World
Zendesk always shows a deep understanding of their audience, and caters content that speaks to their day to day experience. Every video they have starts with deep research.
Tailor Video to Each Platform:
Something that works on Instagram, might not catch traction on LinkedIn. Zendesk works around platform requirements to make sure they maximize their reach.
Mix Education with Entertainment:
Entertainment and skits used for top of the funnel brand awareness, and educational and thought leadership content, like case studies and how to videos – this is a system that helps attract large numbers of prospects, and then steadily convert them into paid users.
Leverage Customer Stories Creatively:
Instead of just creating a PDF with a case study and throwing some numbers – Zendesk is showing that customer testimonials and stories can be engaging in the video format. This makes it that your value proposition becomes fun to watch, and easier to retain. This showcases the result of the product in action, and builds trust.
Maintain Authentic Brand Voice:
Staying true to brand voice is sometimes more important than showing your professional side. Zendesk knows this, and stays consistent with its voice – friendly, slightly witty – and always human first.
Optimize for Engagement:
Spraying and praying with videos – hoping that something sticks – is not a good strategy. Theory + strategy – paired with creative optimization should be used for the best results.
As you can see – there are a lot of moving parts in creating a video system like this. But a great thing is – that you can work with us, to build a system that will be impactful across all interactions, from top of the funnel to bottom.
With Zelios – you can also build your own video strategy, that will become a central piece and a catalyst of your growth.
Select the video type that aligns with your marketing objectives, and receive an immediate high-level estimate of the production cost.
