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4 ADVANCED STRATEGIES TO BOOST YOUR VIDEO MARKETING

bsp-admin-1 on October 17, 2022

With big ambitions and lots of planning, you led the charge to launch your company’s video marketing program. And it seems to be working. You’re seeing visitors spend longer amounts of time on pages that feature video. You’ve seen an uptick in engagements on social posts that contain video. And you may have even seen higher conversion rates on campaigns that incorporate video.

But as a marketer on the front line, you’ve also continued to see the clear shift in buyer preferences for a more personalized experience. Not to mention the new level of creativity today’s social videos exhibit.

With a number of successes under your belt, you’ve proven to marketing colleagues, executives, and sales teams that video marketing is worth the investment. But as the hype settles, you’re now tasked with building upon this foundation to achieve even higher performance and strategically align video with other marketing tactics.

Lucky for you, with these advanced marketing strategies, you can take your video initiatives to the next level and exponentially increase the impact of your overall marketing program.

INTEGRATE VIDEO ANALYTICS INTO YOUR AUTOMATION PLATFORM

Integrating your video analytics into Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) may be one of the most powerful tools for both optimizing video performance and increasing conversions. While there are numerous benefits to MAP integrations, there are three in particular that can have an immediate impact.

SEGMENTATION

Creating segments within your MAP based on viewing habits will help you offer a personalized approach to the buying process. Depending on your goals, there are a variety of rules you can apply to segmentation. Four examples of segmentations you could start with include:

  1. Which videos they have watched
  2. How many videos they have watched
  3. Interest level in certain videos (based on time spent viewing)
  4. The topics of the videos they’re watching

Imagine you’re promoting a webinar in an email campaign. A common tactic is to re-engage non-openers of the email invite with alternate content. In this case, that content could be a video on the same topic as the webinar to stimulate interest.

Rather than segmenting by opens or clicks, you could segment the recipients by how much of the video they watched. If they watched more than 40%, you could resend the email invite to this segment. If they watched less than 40%, it’s pretty clear they’re not interested and you can remove them from the nurture track.Advanced Video Marketing - Segmentation Example

TARGETING

Integration with your MAP will also give you valuable data to help you target various audiences with the content they’re most interested in. For example, you may notice trends in video consumption based on persona attributes like:

  • Industry
  • Title
  • Function
  • Seniority

Your analytics will help you uncover these trends and apply the learnings to future targeted campaigns that can personalize your approach.

LEAD SCORING

Video consumption habits can also indicate how close a prospect is to converting and which videos are most effective at guiding the buyer to the next stage. Your data can paint a clearer picture for you, but there are some key indicators you should consider relative to prospects who have already closed:

  • Which videos are they watching?
  • How long are they spending watching the videos?
  • How many videos does the average MQL consume before becoming an SQL? Which ones?
  • How do these trends compare with prospects who have converted?

Based on these answers, you’ll be able to add nuance to lead scores with specific video and consumption habits.

ARM YOUR SALES TEAM WITH THE DATA THEY NEED

Integration with MAPs not only benefits your lead nurturing efforts, it can support the sales reps tasked with creating touchpoints and follow-up conversations with buyers.

Just as important, the data gained from prospects’ watch habits can help fuel successful sales enablement programs. The analytics can help you determine which types of prospects are most interested in which topics and apply those insights to drive all types of content, not just video.

Simply put, by integrating with MAPs, you’ll be able to combine video analytics with other analytics from landing pages, email, and website visits. This holistic approach will give sales reps a clearer picture of a prospect than ever before.

Key questions that can help arm sales reps with the data they need to close deals include:

  • Has the number of videos they’ve viewed increased recently?
  • Which videos produce the most leads?
  • At what point during the buyers’ journey do we notice the biggest uptick in video consumption?
  • Are multiple people from the same organization watching videos?
  • Which videos that the prospect watches have over an 80% completion rate
  • Which ones are under 20%?

These questions can help sales reps better understand what’s most important to the buyer as well as what’s not.

OPTIMIZE YOUR SOCIAL VIDEOS

By now you understand that social video is pretty much table stakes in today’s competitive digital content environment. In fact, according to Hubspot, 67% of marketers say that sharing marketing videos on social media has the biggest ROI. Furthermore, Twitter states that tweets with video get 10X engagement.

However, the social landscape is littered with millions of brand videos that failed to reach their full potential. So while publishing social video is a normal practice among businesses, creating great videos that engage your audience is less common than we’d like to admit.

The good news is that with effective video marketing processes, you can increase the performance of not just your videos, but your social presence as a whole.

CREATE A SOCIAL VIDEO COMMAND CENTER

Integrating your social profiles into your video marketing platform is not only extremely efficient, it also helps optimize your video for maximum delivery on each specific platform. It gives you the ability to:

  • Make specific edits for each social channel
  • Automatically ensure that each video is uploaded with the right dimensions natively to each platform
  • Save time by scheduling or auto-publishing your videos

All of these can be quickly achieved from within a single social video command center.

BUILD EFFICIENCIES INTO YOUR PROCESS

Just as there are many different types of social posts, you probably already have access to a variety of social videos. With categories ranging from product highlights to employee spotlights, webinar clips to tutorials and beyond, organizing for quick access becomes particularly important. By creating well-defined folders, you’ll be able to quickly sort, locate, and deliver the right video at the right time to the right audience.

Beyond the convenience of a well-organized video library, the most powerful video marketing tools also offer batch editing features for further efficiency and optimization. For example, if you’re creating a campaign around a specific product, you’ll likely be using videos from many different sources, like webinars, tutorials, and feature spotlights. With batch editing features, you’re able to quickly edit all of the videos in the series with just a few clicks.

Want to add a specific landing page URL for all videos in the series? Need to update the tags for all of them to include relevant keywords related to the series? Want to change the title of each video to include the name of the series? Batch editing makes it possible while saving time and ensuring consistency.

USE ANALYTICS TO UNDERSTAND PLATFORM PREFERENCES

One of the best things about the social ecosystem as a whole is the distinct culture and personality of each platform. This is clearly evident in video consumption preferences on a per-platform basis as well. While longer, more detailed videos will perform better on certain channels, others will see videos that are shorter and to the point perform better.

However, it can be a painstaking task to get a direct comparison, since each social platform will offer different video metrics. By integrating your social channels into a video marketing platform, you’ll have one set of consistent metrics to compare across all platforms.

Whatever the viewing trends may be, using consistent metrics will help you uncover which videos perform best on social across platforms as well as on specific ones. This insight will also be valuable for sales reps who are actively posting video on social. Understanding viewer preferences will help them better engage their unique audiences on each platform. Furthermore, understanding the topics, depth, and interest in your videos can also give you more data about the type of topics users prefer in general and can be applied to all types of content, not just video.

EXPAND YOUR REACH AND ENGAGEMENT WITH LIVESTREAMS

Livestreaming can significantly deepen your relationship with followers through an interactive format that allows users to be immersed in the experience. The real-time aspect of the videos gives users the chance to engage with you in ways they never could before. Add to that the interactive features you can incorporate into your videos, and you see how this can become a truly collective experience.

Whether you’re launching a new product or hosting fully digital conferences, the possibilities are endless. One has to look no further than the creativity shown during the COVID-19 pandemic for proof.

While going live for the first time can be scary, with a little preparation it offers a level of engagement that brands could not have dreamed of just a few short years ago. As you prepare your live video strategy, there are a few things to keep in mind.

UPTIME IS EVERYTHING

Going down in the middle of a livestream for even just a few seconds can spell disaster. Viewers may tune out without ever coming back to see if your video is back online. Make sure your livestreaming platform has the resources for preventing downtime by choosing one with a reputation for 99.99% uptime (bonus points if they offer live redundancy).

ON DEMAND IS EXPECTED

While some users may join your livestream, they may not all be able to stay for the entire program. Others may want to join but have prior or last-minute obligations that prevent them from doing so. Offer them the opportunity to watch at their own pace and on their timeline with on-demand viewing options.

For many, watching at their preferred time is no longer just a feature, but a necessity. As video technology has evolved from VCR to DVR to VOD, so too have user expectations. Today’s media companies are simply expected to offer live content on demand. And in a content-driven world, all companies are expected to act like media companies.

FAKING IT IS ACCEPTABLE

From broadcast delayed call-in segments to pre-recorded halftime shows, faking live has been an acceptable practice for decades. The reality is that live will always present variables outside of your control, and some may be too far for comfort (like product demos or customer Q&As).

When preparation isn’t enough, it’s time to de-risk your event with a simulated live broadcast. Live events are complex productions, but with a product like Brightcove’s Simulive, you can have all the benefits of live without the risk or complexity.

BOOST YOUR VIDEO MARKETING

Through MAP integration, marketing/sales alignment, advanced social videos, and livestreaming, you’ll see a bigger impact on your overall video marketing efforts. Furthermore, you’ll continue to discover the many ways that video analytics can provide important data points to fuel your entire marketing program.

Learn more in our PLAY episode, “7 Ways the Right Streaming Platform Can Accelerate Video Marketing Performance”.

HOW TO USE VIDEO TO BOOST YOUR BRAND PERCEPTION

bsp-admin-1 on October 11, 2022

As we’ve seen over the past few years, a company’s brand has become one of its most valuable assets. True, a company’s brand has always been a key part of any business. But we’ve also witnessed a huge shift in consumer preference to do business with companies they trust, that show authenticity, and can connect on an emotional level.

With the explosion of video marketing, ensuring a strong brand and consistently communicating that brand across content is more important than ever. This is especially true since it’s not uncommon for the first interaction they have with your brand to be through video.

SECURE YOUR BRAND WITH AN ENTERPRISE-GRADE STREAMING PLATFORM.
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But what exactly is a brand? How do iconic brands like Apple, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s evoke specific associations and emotions?

HOW IS BRAND PERCEPTION FORMED?

At a fundamental level, brand perception is what others believe about your company and product.

Trying to nail down an exact definition of brand can be elusive. However, it’s safe to say that if something influences how customers perceive, think, and feel about your company, it’s part of your brand. Think about a company brand as you would your own personality: we create it, but we can’t control how others perceive it.

While there are a variety of interconnected factors that create your brand, there are also some common elements that contribute to all brands.

  • Visual identity
  • Authenticity
  • Connection
  • Emotion
  • Experience

You can incorporate these brand elements into your video marketing strategy by focusing on two key areas: the video content and the viewing experience.

HOW TO ESTABLISH BRAND PERCEPTION THROUGH VIDEO CONTENT

While not every video is going to be specifically used for branding initiatives, branding should still be incorporated into all of your videos. Every time a customer interacts with your brand, you’re telling them a story about your company. That story starts and ends with your brand, so make sure it’s the story you want to tell. The old maxim “consistency is key” truly applies to your long-term branding initiatives.

That said, some of the most effective branding videos often fall into the categories that help build trust, showcase authenticity, and help build community.

  • Company brand narratives. Videos that highlight your origin story, mission, values, and milestones create a deep connection with viewers. They build trust and create the authenticity required for positive brand perception.
  • Product videos. For fairly obvious reasons, your product will always be a key part of your brand. Product videos can help viewers experience it before they actually make a purchase. When developing your product videos, aim to showcase its features, benefits, quality, technology, and what differentiates you from competitors.
  • How-to/tutorials. These are great for community building. Consider incorporating user-generated content as well that helps viewers see product usage from “people like me.”
  • Company culture videos. Both B2C and B2B customers understand that happy, engaged employees create better products and offer better service. These videos help humanize your brand and offer a glimpse into parts of your company the general public may not get to see.
  • Thought leadership videos. These showcase both expertise and involvement in the industry. It’s another great way to humanize your brand while introducing them to top executives throughout the company. They can also highlight the forward-thinking and innovative approach your company takes to creating products—which in and of itself should be part of your brand.
  • Video case studies and testimonials. Since so much of brand perception is generated from word of mouth, allowing others to hear directly from users of your product can be a powerful tool.
  • Behind-the-scenes videos. There’s perhaps no better way to bring viewers from around the world deep into your company than with behind-the-scenes videos. These are great for building a strong sense of connection between your product, customers, and brand.
  • Livestream videos. Livestreaming builds a sense of community and connection to the company. It evokes a “we’re all in this together” emotion that’s hard to replicate through other forms of marketing and communication.

HOW TO ENHANCE BRAND PERCEPTION THROUGH THE VIEWING EXPERIENCE

Many companies spend considerable time carefully crafting their brand through video content. Yet fewer take the final, and perhaps one of the most important, steps to ensure the brand perception is also reflected in the viewing experience.

How was the video delivered and consumed? Where was it viewed? What was the user’s experience before, during, and after they viewed a video? All of these factors play a role in shaping brand perception.

Investing in an Online Video Player (OVP) will allow you to fully customize the viewer’s experience to support your brand. Here are some tips for maximizing your video branding efforts with an OVP.

1) CREATE THE ATMOSPHERE WHERE YOUR BRANDED VIDEOS WILL LIVE

Videos on an owned, branded web page create a deeper personal brand connection with the viewer. It allows you to tailor your brand experience in many ways that popular social video platforms simply can’t.

For starters, you’re able to incorporate your visual brand identity throughout the page. Not only will an OVP allow for seamless embedding, it also eliminates the display ads, “watch on YouTube,” and other outside branding that can override your own.

2) PROVIDE A DISTRACTION-FREE VIEWING EXPERIENCE

Few things are more frustrating for video marketers than having engaged viewers interrupted by an ad for your competitor in the middle of the video. Yet on free platforms, we see that over and over again. Beyond the ads on the video, viewers will be surrounded by ads on other parts of the page to watch promoted content or otherwise click away from your video.

When you host your video on public sites, you inevitably give up control over the display ads that appear on your video. Instead, use an OVP to create and insert your own custom (and, yes, branded) overlays. Not only will these reinforce your visual branding, they can also add further context and encourage users to continue exploring other brand content.

3) TAKE THEM ON A JOURNEY

Creating a custom viewing experience with an OVP allows you to build a user journey that offers a fully branded experience. For some this will mean a highly branded and effective landing page that the video lives on. For others this could include creating a completely branded video portal.

When posting your high-value branded content to a public site, you ultimately have no control over where users are being directed to before, during, and after watching your video. Using an OVP, you can include your own CTAs that invite them to view other content that specifically builds upon the video they’re currently watching. This could include another video, landing page, or product page.

4) BUILD CONNECTION THROUGH INTERACTIVITY

A core tenet in crafting your brand includes building connections with your followers, which can come in many different forms. For videos specifically, try inserting fun quizzes, polls, and other interactive elements that keeps users engaged and fosters two-way engagement.

5) DON’T FORGET ABOUT EMPLOYEES

Your employees should also play an important role in shaping your brand perception. When it comes to video branding, they’re also an excellent resource for a wide range of creative ideas. Consider arming them with the tools for creating day-in-the-life videos to provide users with a truly authentic experience.

Employee spotlights, volunteer efforts, and company get-togethers can also be a great way to involve your employees while creating highly valuable video branding content. Remember, your employer brand is an important part of overall brand perception.

VIDEO BRANDING DRIVES LASTING BENEFITS

Whether you’re new to video marketing or have a content library full of video assets, effective branding will help drive lasting benefits. Done correctly, it can lead to long-term revenue by generating ongoing sales and increasing the overall customer lifetime value. With a strong focus on creating quality content and delivering a seamless viewing experience, you’ll boost your brand perception and continuously engage your most important audiences.

WHY MEDIA BRANDS NEED TO MONETIZE CONTENT BEYOND YOUTUBE

bsp-admin-1 on October 3, 2022

Hundreds of successful media brands have gotten their start in online video by creating a channel on YouTube. All it takes (at least initially) is a sizable content library and enough of an investment to keep making or acquiring great video content.

Once your YouTube channel has found its audience and you continue to fuel it with high-quality video, your business can open up plenty of options to monetize content. The most successful media brands on YouTube already employ a variety of them:

  • Advertising
  • Sponsorships
  • Merchandising
  • Licensing
  • Donations
  • Crowdfunding

Making the most of these monetization strategies depends on the quality of your content. But it also depends on the size of your marketing budget to tap into YouTube’s built-in audience of 2.6 billion monthly users.

YouTube may be the world’s largest video-sharing platform, but its shiny promise of monetization is not without pitfalls. Ultimately, the success of your content (and therefore your business) is dependent not only on someone else’s platform, but on someone else’s audience.

Monetizing content on YouTube means standing out against the other 2 million Partner Program members actively competing for ad dollars. That’s 2 million reasons why you should start thinking beyond YouTube. When you realize your media business can stand on its own, you only need five reasons to consider advancing to your own branded video streaming platform.

1) RENTED AUDIENCES

For years, businesses have built their audiences through content hosted on major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. On the plus side, they’re all flush with millions (or billions) of people already using the platform. You might have tens of thousands of them subscribed to your own channel.

However, the subscribers to your YouTube channel aren’t yours, they’re YouTube’s. Their accounts are beholden to YouTube’s terms of service, not yours. The way you organize your subscribership fits YouTube’s business model, not yours. Even the available analytics are subservient to YouTube’s discretion, not yours.

So long as your audience exists on another platform, you’re merely “renting” that audience. Which means if that platform is prohibited in certain viewing situations (schools, institutions, countries), your content isn’t reaching its full audience potential.

2) FREE-FOR-ALL MARKETING

Famously, the major social platforms have been forever free, easy to use, and filled with advertising opportunities. Each has clever search functions designed to serve up your content to the right people typing the right terms.

But then came the algorithm changes. And with each iteration came a little bit less certainty over when or even whether the target audience would find your clip or promo. On top of that, the same algorithms would note your target audience’s habits and feed them your competitors’ content as well.

A free platform is exactly that: a platform where everyone is free to distract each other’s audiences and dilute their marketing tactics.

3) CONTENT MODERATION

There are two words that can strike fear in any popular independent media business: content moderation.

Between AI errors, fallible human reviewers, and non-target audiences wandering onto the wrong channels, content gets flagged for removal that doesn’t necessarily spark controversy. Similarly, it’s possible for a guest in an otherwise mild programming lineup to make a remark that would get bleeped in prime time. But if it violates platform policy, it gets removed.

If you want to retain the freedom of (and responsibility for) your own content, you can’t do it on someone else’s platform. You need a monetized video platform whose viewers belong to the target audience and signed up to be there, rather than stumbling upon it by accident.

4) LIMITED DIVERSIFICATION

YouTube offers several ways to capture revenue, and many individuals, personalities, and celebrities have found incredible success this way.

But like any of those free video monetization platforms or video platforms that pay, diversification options are limited. Once your business model can sustainably grow your content library and audience, scaling to the next level requires multiple monetization models.

For example, serious media companies are finding that they can supplement advertising video-on-demand (AVOD) with subscriptions (SVOD). However, they’re using their own subscription platform because they can’t monetize the subscribers they “rent” on a free platform.

Some companies are also offering occasional one-off events, such as pay-per-view (PPV) live streams or downloadable, transaction-based premium content (TVOD). These tactics keep subscribers engaged and satiated through exclusive, fresh content.

Becoming a recognized video brand with thousands of hours of your own (or licensed) video is the YouTube dream (and it often comes true). But your business cannot truly capture the value, preferences, and habits of the audience you’ve built until you operate your own video streaming channel.

5) BUDGET EXPERIENCE

Creating content within YouTube’s AVOD economy is as simple as uploading your videos. Getting your audience to pay for that content, however, is when a free platform can only give what you pay for.

Premium content requires a viewing experience that “feels” premium—something enjoyable, of high quality, and in an environment that matches the way the content is being consumed. Try creating that experience with a private YouTube link and you’ll find it simply doesn’t communicate value to the viewer. Not to mention leaving them vulnerable to your competitors’ content.

A secure video platform with your branding doesn’t just protect your content and elevate the viewing experience. It architects the ideal environment for your business to cultivate customer loyalty over the long term. Whether through your existing website, an elegant gallery page, or an OTT app, there are several ways a world-class platform can give your viewers the experience they want.

MONETIZING CONTENT ON YOUR OWN PLATFORM

No one can argue with YouTube’s role in today’s creator economy. However, it’s still a channel, not a platform. And its built-in audience belongs solely to YouTube. It sets the rules to market, moderate, and monetize content within an environment it controls.

Growing your business means growing your audience, not someone else’s. Whether that’s through SVOD, PPV, TVOD, or taking the leap into live linear programming, you need complete control over your audience and your content. You need control over your video branding and experience. You need your own platform, not another channel.

USING VIDEO ANALYTICS TO IMPROVE THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

bsp-admin-1 on September 26, 2022

Losing employee connection is an increasingly concerning challenge for HR teams. We’re all busier than ever before. We’re more distracted and less embedded in the company culture. Mass emails and intranets have their place, but to meet today’s challenges, internal communications will need to embrace video and learn from video analytics.

WHY VIDEO IMPROVES THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

No medium is better at connecting people than video. A July 2022 study commissioned by Brightcove reported 76% of non-management professionals feel more connected with leadership through video communications. In fact, 83% of all respondents agree that more video content would improve their overall employee experience.

However, only 31% of employees say their organizations use video for corporate communication from leadership (despite 80% preferring video). Similarly, about a third say their organizations use video for training or corporate events even though the majority prefer on-demand or livestreamed video.

In a disconnected world, it’s imperative to align an internal comms strategy with today’s content consumption habits. People are an organization’s most valuable resource and, just like customers, retaining them isn’t a given.

Successfully attracting, recruiting, and onboarding talent is just the beginning. Employees need to be nurtured with career development opportunities, engaged in the company culture, and ultimately retained to ensure knowledge stays within the organization.

Video has the potential to address every facet of the employee lifecycle. But it must be analyzed, optimized, and deployed at the right stages and with the right parameters during this journey to generate the most impact.

HOW TO IMPROVE THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE WITH VIDEO

For many HR departments, data literacy is an obstacle to effectively tracking and optimizing video.

According to a survey Brightcove conducted with HRD Connect, 69% of organizations do not currently measure the engagement of their video communications (“Driving Employee Engagement and Culture Through Video 2022 Survey”). Moreover, 24% stated that video measurement is something they plan to start doing.

You can’t build a business case—let alone a strategy—for internal comms video if you don’t measure the impact it’s having on your workforce. You need to understand what you can measure, how you can measure it, and how you can apply it.

Beyond building the business case for video, the insights gleaned from video can inform your entire approach to internal communications. It’s often assumed that the total number of views is the extent of video analytics, but this barely scratches the surface of video metrics. In fact, video metrics can help make data-driven decisions to optimize internal comms throughout the employee experience.

MEASURE PLAY RATE TO ASSIST RECRUITMENT

Video is the best way to make a great first impression with prospective employees. From office tours to employee testimonials to describing your perks and benefits, video can convey your employer proposition in a meaningful and measurable way.

When recruiters share employer brand videos, you can easily see what resonates better with different people. Video metrics like play rate allow you to see how often a video was played by the audience who saw it. By comparing play rates, you can see what drives prospective employees to inquire about job opportunities as well as what will secure new hires and ultimately retain them.

MEASURE ENGAGEMENT TO TRACK ONBOARDING

Onboarding used to mean overextending multiple teams with endless meetings and forcing visual learners to sift through countless pages of documentation. Today, and especially for hybrid workplaces, video can equip new hires to execute their roles according to your unique procedures related to HR, Finance, and Legal.

Producing onboarding videos not only tracks onboarding progress, it improves employee comprehension. For example, engagement is a video metric that shows how much of a video viewers watched. Watching for high engagement rates can ensure new hires are up to speed on company policies, while lower rates can identify communication problems with a given protocol.

MEASURE VIDEO VIEWS TO SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT

Investing in your employee’s development is key to retaining them. Whether you’re training staff for management or training teams in a new technique, video allows you to upskill your workforce en masse.

With a career development video library, you can track which skills your employees are most interested in learning. Total video views will not only show the most popular skills, it will show you which employees are the most eager to develop. This data not only informs the kinds of trainings to invest in, it can frame the conversation with individual team members during annual reviews.

HARNESSING VIDEO’S POTENTIAL FOR YOUR EMPLOYEES

As the working world continues to evolve, businesses need to reevaluate the efficacy of their current internal communications methods. Indeed, over 80% of organizations see company culture as the most significant challenge that video is equipped to solve (Brightcove/HRD Connect).

HR teams simply cannot afford to leave video on the back burner of their internal comms strategies. But with a good understanding of its data and applications, businesses can harness video’s potential to improve their employees’ experience.

EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT CONNECTORS: AEM AND SITECORE ENHANCEMENTS

bsp-admin-1 on September 23, 2022

We’ve made some significant enhancements with our AEM and Sitecore experience management connectors so that they continue to deliver stellar video experiences for our customers.

The Adobe-AEM-Brightcove Connector allows users to manage Video Cloud content and Players within their AEM environment, as well as embed videos in AEM pages. The updated connector supports several new features:

  • Labels. Labels can be applied to videos within AEM and sync with Brightcove Studio when activated. Additionally, the admin console can create new labels and filter assets by them.
  • Subfolders. Subfolders built in Brightcove Studio are created within AEM upon sync.
  • Clips. Video clips can be filtered on each page of search results within the admin console.
  • Scheduled Activation. OOTB AEM functionality can be used to schedule the activation of videos at specific dates and times.
  • Playlist Creation. Video playlists can be created in the AEM environment.
  • Multilingual Metadata. Multilingual metadata, or metadata variants, are visible within the admin console when a video is selected in search results.

We also released an update to our connector for Sitecore 10.1 with additional functionality.

  • Sync experiences and Players with their Video Cloud account
  • Update or create new Payers from the connector and sync them with Video Cloud

These updates allow our customers to take greater control of their content experience and reduce inefficiencies so they can spend more time creating innovative videos. For more information on Brightcove integrations, visit our integrations support page.

HOW TO INCREASE VIDEO VIEWS

bsp-admin-1 on September 19, 2022

You did it. You finally finished that video you’ve been working on for months. Now comes the moment of truth, the moment all that hard work finally pays off. You check your video analytics: 23 views.

We’ve all been there. As frustrating as that is, trying to get more video views can be equally aggravating. That’s why it’s time for a better understanding of video views.

WHAT ARE VIDEO VIEWS, REALLY?

To product managers and engineers, video views are how many times a video is played. It means a play request was sent to the player, and the player began playing the video.

To marketers, video views are opportunities. They’re opportunities to make potential customers aware of your brand, consider your product, and decide to shop with you. But these opportunities imply more than play requests. They assume the right audience is consuming your content.

The reason marketers get frustrated with video views is because that’s the only metric they’re tracking. Remember when pageviews used to be the primary web KPI? Marketers quickly caught on that they also needed to track metrics like bounce rate and time on page to see how their content was performing.

To be clear, video views aren’t a bad metric. In fact, video views are fundamentally the same metric as pageviews: they both measure the number of times your content was viewed. But if you want to increase how much your content is consumed by the right people, you’ll need to track other metrics.

HOW TO MEASURE VIDEO VIEWS

Going viral used to be considered a legitimate marketing tactic. That is, until marketers realized that lots and lots of views from the wrong people didn’t help them achieve their goals.

Tracking video views the right way means treating digital video like any other form of online content. And the same rules for measuring digital content also apply to video: you have to start at the beginning.

MEASURING IMPRESSIONS

Before anyone can view your content, they have to arrive at it from another channel (like clicking off an email) or within a channel (like scrolling through a social feed). When they do, that’s called an impression.

Impressions do not represent individual viewers (a single viewer can generate multiple impressions) and they do not indicate video plays or views. Whether hosted on a web page or a social post, an impression is when your video is loaded on that page or post. That’s the technical definition.

To marketers, impressions measure how effective your video strategy is at attracting potential views. Impressions are key to tracking views because total views can only be as big as total impressions. So if you want more views, you’ll need to start by getting more impressions.

Impressions can be tracked using your CMS, the native social platform, or third-party tools like Google Analytics or HootSuite. You can also track the results of videos distributed across multiple channels in one place with platforms like Brightcove.

MEASURING PLAY RATE

After someone sees your video, the next step is to play it—to view the content. This is where video views finally get some screen time, but even then, they’re not a solo act. Play rate is the percentage of loaded videos that were actually played: total video views divided by total video impressions.

To marketers, play rate measures how effective your video strategy is at converting potential viewers into actual viewers. Play rate is also key to tracking views because total views are only as high as your marketing promotions are true to the video’s content.

Play rate can be tracked using your online video platform or native social platform. However, not every tool automatically calculates the percentage. If you want to quickly compare videos by this metric, you’ll need to export the data into a spreadsheet, build your own dashboard, or invest in a solution that does all of that for you.

MEASURING ENGAGEMENT

Tracking video views doesn’t end once a viewer presses play. For a view to matter, the viewer has to consume some meaningful amount of the video’s content. This is commonly referred to as engagement.

Also called view-through or retention rate, engagement measures how much of a video was viewed. While video views aggregate all durations (from less than a second to the entire length of the video), engagement can show you the average amount of your video that viewers watched.

To marketers, engagement measures how effective your video strategy is at converting actual viewers into potential or engaged customers. Engagement is key to tracking views because total views are only as valuable as the percentage of content consumed.

Engagement can be tracked using your online video platform or native social platform. While most tools display this data in the form of a chart, Brightcove also provides an Engagement Score. This metric divides a video into 100 equal parts and calculates the average percentage watched per view, so you can compare videos with a single number.

HOW TO INCREASE VIDEO VIEWS

Increasing video views primarily depends on serving up the right content to the right audience. You wouldn’t expect a video about Roth IRAs to get a lot of views among middle schoolers.

Assuming you have the right content for the right audience, there are several tactics that can help you increase your impressions, play rate, engagement, and ultimately your video views.

OPTIMIZING IMPRESSIONS

Video impressions are not unlike search impressions. Both metrics measure how much your content resonates with your audience.

For example, SEO marketers optimize keywords to align with the queries of their target audience. In the same way, video marketers can pick the channels that most align with the behaviors of their target audience.

  • Use display and paid social for top-of-funnel content. If your goal is awareness, you want high-volume, low-intent channels so your content can reach as far as possible.
  • Use paid search or organic social for mid-funnel content. If you’re targeting buyers at the consideration stage, you want medium-volume, medium-intent channels. Your content needs to reach a good-sized audience interested in specific topics.
  • Use email for bottom-of-funnel content. For buyers at the decision stage, you want the best low-volume, high-intent channel. Your content needs to reach an audience that knows you, likes you, and is primed to buy.

Following this paradigm will help you set expectations for your video views. Decision videos will be limited by the size of your email list, but awareness videos are only limited by the size of your budget. Once you know how many views are possible, you’ll know how many to aim for and be able to identify areas of improvement.

For example, low impressions don’t always mean you’re promoting in the wrong channel. It could mean your video player isn’t loading properly—especially if you’re using a free web player. Compare your source channel’s clicks against your impressions to confirm that your player is working properly.

OPTIMIZING PLAY RATE

Play rate is similar to email’s open rate (at least it used to be—thanks, Apple). Both metrics measure how well the content matches the marketing promotions.

Just like email marketers optimize subject lines, video marketers can employ several tactics to improve the content experience.

  • Set landing page videos to autoplay. Your audience already demonstrated intent to watch by clicking off of your source channel. Don’t make them click again.
  • Tell viewers to watch the video. Vague CTAs make play buttons optional, not the next step. They also make autoplay unwelcome.
  • Write clear copy. Don’t be clever. Don’t be cute. Explain your video as you would to a stranger in an elevator, not a friend at the bar. This applies to the title, description, and keywords.
  • Create custom thumbnails. Never let the player decide how to promote your video. Select the still that best represents the content, and add concise copy for channels like social.

Even with these tactics, play rate is dependent on the situation. Homepage videos compete with lots of other content for numerous audiences of varying intent. They will never achieve the play rates of landing page videos with a dedicated email audience, especially if the latter is set to autoplay.

Without a doubt, the wrong copy can have just as much of an effect as the wrong content. But be sure to benchmark your play rates by video location before rewriting your campaign messaging.

OPTIMIZING ENGAGEMENT

Video engagement closely mirrors social engagement. Both metrics measure whether your content was consumed.

In a sea of competing content creators, social marketers focus on optimizing their content to be eye-catching—from custom graphics to emojis to the spacing and placement of the copy itself. Video marketers share the same opportunities to ensure their content keeps and retains their audience’s attention.

  • Trim your intro. Whether you forgot to set your trim points or overindulged on a title screen, a long intro is a great way to lower your engagement. Your audience is busy enough being distracted by the rest of the internet, so hurry up and get to the point.
  • Add subtitles. Subtitles not only make your content more accessible, they make it more engaging. An estimated 92% of mobile users watch video with the sound off.
  • Consider interactivity. Engagement can only get so high in a lean-back experience. Adding interactivity will transform passive audiences into engaged consumers. You also won’t have to wait for them to take the next step. You can put it right on top of the video.

Like play rate, engagement is subject to a couple different factors like length and location. Shorter videos typically have higher engagement than longer videos, so be sure to benchmark your short- and long-form content. You don’t want to try to compare the engagement of a 30-minute webinar against a 30-second sizzle.

Similarly, videos promoted on higher-intent channels tend to have higher engagement than those promoted on lower-intent channels. You may have already found that it’s hard to get social media viewers to watch much more than 30 seconds. Conversely, the majority of an email audience will probably give you up to three or four minutes of their time.

WHY YOU NEED MORE THAN VIDEO VIEWS

The whole point of a video marketing strategy is to get people to watch your videos. But just trying to increase your video views will be surprisingly disappointing. You need to measure and optimize all of the metrics related to views before you see the ones that matter increase.

Don’t be intimidated by the jargon that comes with video analytics. Video is still content, and the metrics aren’t any different than the rest of digital marketing. The sooner you recognize that, the sooner you’ll be able to adopt the best practices you’ve learned from other digital channels. You may even discover advanced strategies that also apply to video marketing.

4 OPPORTUNITIES TO GROW YOUR SVOD STRATEGY

bsp-admin-1 on September 16, 2022

How much do you think you know about your audience?

Are you plugged into everything you need to know about your subscribers to retain them and keep them engaged? Enough to re-engage various cohorts and create marketing programs targeted just to them? Enough, even, for you or your executives to make confident decisions about what kind of content to invest in next?

If you are, consider yourself fortunate. And maybe a little lonely. (Even Severance creator Ben Stiller had to attend Comic-Con to learn anything about the people who actually watch his Apple TV+ series.)

At IBC 2022 – where 50 exhibitors and 20 conference sessions focused on this very topic – it became clearer than ever that streaming-content measurement and viewer analytics are becoming increasingly important for subscription services.

Knowing your audience – being so tuned into its viewing habits, preferences, and behaviors that the programming you serve them next feels like it materialized from your analytics crystal ball – is vitally necessary for engaging and retaining subscribers. But it remains an area that’s notoriously difficult to conquer without focusing on the right technology investments.

Here are some other newsworthy topics from IBC that prove media technology is evolving to address the most critical obstacle to SVOD success: keeping your subscribers watching.

DATA-DRIVEN, NOT DISCONNECTED

In many media businesses, marketing and content teams are dealing with too many disparate, disconnected sources of data across various departments. All the data in the world won’t help with subscriber loyalty, engagement, and retention if each piece is sitting in a different bucket or with different teams in the organization.

Harnessing audience data from across the tech stack, aggregating it in one place, and harmonizing it so the connection points are relevant and causal is the key. Aggregated audience data allows you to:

  • See engaged viewer usage trends and identify key audience cohorts to target for messaging
  • Explore content titles with a deeper analysis of performance and decision-making around which titles to promote
  • Discover content trends such as popular, top, first watched, and even which titles are better at holding the attention of various audiences
  • Discern actionable insights to steer trials, promotions, reminders, and new content

Once media businesses can observe the correlations across their workflows, their tech stack, and their content, they can proactively reduce churn, retain subscribers, and inform SVOD strategies.

AUDIENCE EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING

If there’s one thing everyone at IBC 2022 could agree on, it’s that audience experience means something different to everyone – but for media businesses it’s the lifeblood of their success. When your audience grows, your company grows.

For some, it’s the performance of the player. When the viewer clicks “play,” the video must load immediately and start instantly – period. For others, it’s pristine quality, with the stream adapting automatically to the available bandwidth and streaming conditions, as seen in cutting-edge demos of Brightcove’s Context-Aware Encoding and Low Latency at the Ultra HD Forum.

But the considerations we saw on display at the event are expanding to include innovations in personalization, AI-driven recommendations, and even ad relevance.

SCALING MUST BE SUPPORTED

As media brands add livestreaming to their portfolios, the burden on technology becomes more complex and less predictable. It’s one thing to plan a live event with a fixed number of pay-per-view viewers; it’s quite another to have a news cycle rocked by an urgently breaking story that entire nations want to hear first – for instance, as happened during IBC with the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

From encoding massive amounts of video all the way through the “last mile” deliverability in the viewer’s home, any number of bottlenecks can keep a stream from reaching its destination. Ensuring scalability – enough to power, say, a 2-million spectator live sporting event – will require more than brute force and faith in technology. Rather, according to Brightcove’s SVP of Product Strategy and Marketing, Marty Roberts, in the IBC issue of Digital TV Europe, to achieve scale with rock-solid confidence, “it’s important that a team is in place to resolve any critical issues in real time.”

MULTI-MONETIZATION STRATEGIES

An important takeaway from several IBC talks was the importance of viewing your subscription business as only one in a portfolio of media offerings. Diversifying your revenue streams into a multi-monetization strategy is a sound way to ensure you reach all facets of your audience.

From ad monetization through the passive “lean-back” experience of FAST, to OTT apps with content curated to your audience’s tastes, to premium transactional offerings and pay-per-view, the way to hook viewers into your brand will be to provide the content they want regardless of how they view it, and the experience they want when they’re viewing it.

OVERCOMING SVOD OBSTACLES

Here’s the reality: we saw clearly at IBC 2022 that media businesses are learning that they must use data-driven decisions to know which audiences to reach out to and to devise strategies to nurture longer-lasting viewer loyalty. It’s now clearer than ever that this isn’t just a fad or a passing trend, but for long-term growth and success, subscription media businesses need to crack the audience insights code if they want to compete.

EXTEND THE POWER OF STREAMING VIDEO ACROSS DEVICES WITH SDKS

bsp-admin-1 on September 16, 2022

Brightcove continues to maintain and enhance its Native SDKs for Android, iOS, and tvOS. The latest enhancements, Android SDK release 6.18.6 and iOS/tvOS 6.10.5, enable users to build powerful video apps for mobile devices and connected TVs.

Brightcove’s SDKs can facilitate a simple player experience or feature-rich experiences, incorporating both analytics and advertising. Developers can easily adapt SDKs to work with Brightcove Video Cloud and the Brightcove Player and ensure that teams can deliver their content quickly and easily. A number of features are supported, including:

  • Captions
  • Advertising
  • Analytics
  • Content protection
  • Live playback
  • Standard UI controls
  • 360° video
  • Offline playback

You can learn about supported features such as analytics, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and others, in greater depth on our Native SDK features support page.

Brightcove’s Native SDKs were made with native platform developers in mind. They follow the latest standards in application development across each environment to ensure clean, minimalist code and to minimize the time and effort placed upon developers.

Built on top of native player frameworks, Brightcove Native SDKs can take advantage of the speed, performance, and flexibility of the native OS. This allows developers to extend it into a complete video experience that is easy to integrate.

Brightcove’s engineers are active in the iOS and Android communities and adhere to current standards. By following established conventions for memory, naming, and design patterns, our Native SDKs make it simpler to get started.

To stay up to date with the latest enhancements and updates to Brightcove’s Native SDKs, or for instructions on creating video apps with Native SDKs, visit our SDK support page.