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REPURPOSING CONTENT FOR SOCIAL VIDEO MARKETING

bsp-admin-1 on September 6, 2022

Video is so much more than a one-and-done investment. It is an asset that can be dressed up, trimmed down, and modified to find new life in an omni-channel video marketing strategy.

Here are a few important questions to ask yourself as you embark on creating a social video strategy:

  • What are my audience demographics across various platforms?
  • How can I best showcase and amplify my video assets through social media?
  • What tools should I use to streamline these processes?

We’ll take a look at each of these questions in more detail and offer best practices for getting the most out of your library of content with a sound social media video strategy.

KNOW WHO YOU’RE SPEAKING TO, AND WHERE

According to global research leader GWI’s Biggest Social Media Trends For 2022 report, user engagement on social media has stabilized, yet we’re making more purchases over social media than ever before.

Understanding the demographics of your various audiences and what their social media habits are is central to creating a social video strategy that delivers the right message in the right format suited to its platform.

What flies on LinkedIn may not appeal on TikTok. However, you can still use the same video assets on each of these platforms. Just be prepared to tweak caption copy, clip length, and other creative elements so your video drives engagement on each platform.

OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO LIBRARY

Your video library holds a lot more content than you might realize.

A single video is never a “single video.” It has the potential to be turned into unique video content across all platforms where your brand has a presence.

Optimizing a single video across multiple platforms and touchpoints increases the ROI of the original content. This social video strategy also amplifies the message of the video, casting a wider net and drawing more potential customers to your brand.

The key to optimizing existing content is being intentional about the way you use these valuable video assets. Given the size, makeup, and mindset of their audiences, social media channels should rank near the top of any priority list.

But remember, you’re competing for the attention of people who are used to certain behaviors on each platform. In this kind of attention economy, you have to earn their time.

Here are some ways to earn your audience’s attention and repurpose existing content for your social video strategy.

CREATE SNIPPETS

Sometimes you have a great video asset that runs longer than the brief attention span most people have while scrolling social media.

This is where snippets can help.

Much like a movie trailer, snippets entice audiences and make them want to see more. What you’re offering with video content is an experience – social media is a perfect place to tease it.

Snippets should be visually captivating to entice the user to stop the scroll. Some simple yet proven ways to capture attention include starting on an emotional close-up or using big text instead of relying on a voiceover.

Including a call to action to like, share, or comment will also draw attention and create additional engagement. But be sure to bookend the snippet with that CTA, or you might miss the viewers who don’t watch to the end.

Depending on the size of your marketing team and the resources available to you, snippets can be as simple as a single cut of a highlight or as complex as a trailer-like mash-up of peak moments. Both are effective ways to optimize video into smaller segments, so it’s really up to your discretion which you use.

By creating a number of snippets that highlight different parts of your video, you can reach different audiences on different platforms by offering them tailored content.

MATCH THE PLATFORM

The trend of TikTok videos being shared to Twitter, Twitter posts being shared to Instagram, and Instagram videos being published on YouTube illustrates that the value of your content isn’t limited to one platform.

However, people do generally go to specific social platforms for specific reasons.

  • Facebook. Commonly used by people wishing to stay in touch with family, friends, and community.
  • Twitter. Attracts the more media-savvy and politically vocal folks who enjoy being witty in small doses.
  • Instagram. The gathering place of artists and people who communicate more effectively through visual mediums.
  • LinkedIn. The platform where business professionals network and grow.
  • TikTok. Home to Gen Z content creators and burgeoning young thought leaders.

With this variety of targets to reach, it makes sense to post content that matches the platform.

By creating intentional design and messaging features to make the most of what each platform has to offer, you can create more seamless experiences.

Anything you can do to optimize your content for the platform you’re publishing on will make it more appealing to the audience there. Think about this both in terms of substance (tone, talking points, etc.) but also in terms of specifications. Most major social platforms offer video spec guidance to help ensure your content fits the feed or advertising format:

CHANGE THE TONE

The same video set to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” plays differently when set to Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax.” You can easily adjust the tone of your video for a more serious or more casual audience by changing up something as simple as background music or which brand logo set you use.

This is also a great way to test your message. If you find one version of your video is doing incredible numbers while another has barely made a blip, see what you can replicate from the success.

LIVESTREAM TO MULTIPLE CHANNELS

Livestreams have become popular and familiar events in business, entertainment, and even within our own social circles.

Most platforms have native livestreaming features, but that limits your streaming efforts to a single platform audience. While you can cross-promote on other platforms, that isn’t nearly as effective as appearing to each audience in their native setting.

Livestreaming to all your social platforms will give you the greatest reach. With the right video marketing tools, you can also monitor engagement and performance across platforms in real-time.

This brings us to the next point: the right tools to make this all possible and practical.

PUT THE RIGHT SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEO TOOLS TO WORK FOR YOU

By employing a video marketing platform that integrates with your social media management tools, deploying your optimized social video strategy should be a snap.

CENTRALIZE CONTENT MANAGEMENT

Disseminating your video content from a centralized platform gives you a way to both manage your video library and track performance metrics over all stages of the process.

To get the most out of your video on each platform, you’ll want to publish the content directly to the native player. Linking to video that is hosted elsewhere is a common – and costly – mistake. Algorithms favor native video, and platforms deliver more in-depth analytics for video hosted internally.

A centralized content management platform makes publishing to multiple channels easy.

STAY ON TOP OF PERFORMANCE

An enterprise video communications platform empowers you to streamline distribution, easily manage and access your full video library, and stay on top of performance metrics that will help you streamline your campaigns, even beyond social platforms.

This omni-channel performance tracking gives you insight into opportunities to promote content on other channels. For example, if you have a case study that’s blowing up on a page with heavy organic traffic, that case study is a prime candidate to try out on social.

While each social media platform does offer its own sets of analytics, those metrics exist in isolation – within the walled garden of that platform. To complicate things further, not every platform tracks the same metrics, and you will find that certain platforms will change the metrics they track with frustrating frequency.

The only real way to arrive at a reliable side-by-side comparison of performance metrics is to have the data tracked and analyzed in one platform. This coherent view across platforms gives you a fuller picture of how content is performing from platform to platform, audience to audience, apples to apples.

GET STRATEGIZING WITH SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEO

These tips and tools are a great way to get started on a social video strategy that will see results. Gaining buy-in for additional video production budget is always easier when you have success stories to share with the C-suite.

By getting more mileage out of your existing video library and demonstrating the value of investing in the right tools, you can calculate a more accurate—and more impressive—ROI.

4 STEPS TO SECURE VIDEO FOR INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

bsp-admin-1 on August 29, 2022

Remote work has become more prevalent than ever. Many workers are doing their jobs from home full-time or part-time. One survey found that 62% of employees now work remotely at least some of the time and 92% expect to be able to work from home at least one day a week.

A modern internal communications strategy has to be ready for the reality of a hybrid work environment. Internal communications that could be done in office at a town hall meeting or a conference room now take place on Zoom. New employee onboarding can’t always be done in person, and even company culture has to transform to a digital-first experience in many cases.

Further, internal communications can be difficult to juggle with a distributed workforce. When you want to make sure that teams are aligned on company objectives, resources, processes, and big milestones, it’s important to get the message across effectively. Otherwise, company culture can start to fragment and silos become a real challenge.

Video is a powerful way to make sure that everyone in the company can still feel connected, whether they’re working in the office, at home, or on the road. But when sensitive internal information is shared, it’s also important for secure video to be integral to every new communication.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SECURING VIDEO FOR INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

Would you want a competitor to see your onboarding video on YouTube? Or your engineering town hall? How about a brand strategy session from the leadership team?

The answer is probably no. For most collateral in companies, security is easy. You can store documents and spreadsheets on a secure cloud platform accessible by VPN or keep sensitive customer data secured in a customer relationship management system.

Videos, since they’re often produced by many different teams, can end up on channels where security isn’t quite as easy. Internal comms teams want to make sure that every relevant video is accessible – but not too accessible. Both internally and externally, access matters, whether it’s a new company direction or just a training video, secure video should be the foundation for your internal communications video strategy.

Here’s how to make sure you can develop engaging videos that are both accessible and secure for your entire workforce:

1. KEEP VIDEOS IN A SECURE PLATFORM

Password-protected streaming or social media websites can often be the go-to place for an internal comms video strategy. But if employees leave the company, are cookied at a public computer, or have credentials for confidential videos, sensitive internal communications could be accessed outside the organization.

Finding a video platform for internal communications with built-in security can keep employee access streamlined, making videos more accessible and more secure.

2. BUILD USER PERMISSION TIERS FOR VIDEO ACCESS

Ensure you have control to set correct viewer access rights based on the category of video.

Common categories for internal communication videos can include:

  • Town Halls
  • Training Sessions
  • Workshops
  • Employee Experience
  • Culture
  • New Hire
  • Department-Specific Announcements
  • Leadership Strategy
  • Mentorship
  • Corporate Responsibility
  • Legal

When you know the access tiers for each video category, you can use a video platform to assign administrative access to internal comms leaders and configure role-based access for other users.

3. ENABLE SINGLE SIGN-ON (SSO) FOR VIDEO COMMUNICATIONS

Single Sign-On (SSO) support can guarantee that employees can access a third-party platform with the same email and password they’re already using with the company. This helps verify the identity of video viewers and allows them to seamlessly log in and engage with video content.

For maximum security, your video solution should map identity to the full email address, including user domain (i.e. [email protected]), instead of granting access based on email domain (i.e. @company.com). If your company offers different email aliases for a single user, you can easily include those in the parameters as well.

With SSO, employees have a more seamless, secure video experience.

4. CONNECT YOUR INTRANET WITH A SINGLE SOLUTION FOR VIDEO CONTENT

In an age of remote work, internal communications often end up on the company intranet. If teams are already used to checking the intranet for the latest updates, your video portal should be accessible and visible there.

The key to secure video is making sure there’s a single solution to store internal media content that ensures only the right viewers get access to the right content. With an integration via SSO, employees can easily access a video portal from the intranet and discover the latest internal communications videos there.

Integration via SSO enables the enterprise to control viewer roles and permissions by IT. If the video solution has API access, admin users can keep user permissions, video content, secure access, and identity verification completely secure. Likewise, internal comms teams can have the data rights management (DRM) that they need to make sure all the video content is viewed by the right teams.

UNDERSTANDING THE METHODOLOGY FOR SECURING VIDEO

Video is one of the most important ways to connect with teams today. It’s also one of the most common forms of content to be controlled by many different teams and distributed across many different channels.

The first step for a better secure video strategy for internal comms teams is simple: find one video solution that can centralize all your content and be as customizable as your company needs.

By building a single source of truth for all internal communications videos, you can make it easier for employees to discover what they need and how to watch it. Onboarding, announcements, town halls, executive updates, and other important videos all easily fit into an employee’s day-to-day process.

HOW TO CREATE INTERACTIVE VIDEOS FOR E-COMMERCE

bsp-admin-1 on August 22, 2022

Interactive video is one of the biggest opportunities to turn video viewers into e-commerce customers.

Why? Buyers are already interacting with video content before they make a purchasing decision, and most of the journey is done before they say they’re ready to purchase. So it’s critical to leverage this content in a way that tells you not only who these people are and what they care about, but allows you to draw them in and get them to convert.

But buyers today are tough critics, and abandoned carts can come from the smallest details like page load times or too many clicks to purchase. Buyers demand a frictionless online shopping experience, and they’ll expect no less from shoppable video. Taking advantage of interactive video means incorporating video into your e-commerce strategy just like you would any other web-based tactic.

HOW VIDEO PLAYS INTO AN E-COMMERCE STRATEGY

Ideally, every video in an e-commerce strategy has a purpose. As with any digital strategy where that next click is king, it’s the same with video. Interactivity is just a fancy term for getting to that next click to keep those people engaged.

Further, there is a natural convergence between e-commerce video strategy and content marketing: A brand is trying to sell products, and there is an accompanying flow of nurturing content. The establishment of deferred intent is critical in order to build up to that purchase moment. Paired together, interactive video and content marketing ultimately lead to more transactions.

So how do you get customers to convert and buy? This depends on using the right type of video to achieve your goal.

TYPES OF INTERACTIVE VIDEOS FOR E-COMMERCE

E-commerce videos specifically have unique features that ladder up to different results, so it’s important to decide on which type of result you’re looking for.

  • Clickable videos. Promote products or services with a clear call-to-action throughout (like a “Buy Now” button). These videos usually have an ending title card with a link that takes the viewer to the product page where they can make a purchase immediately.
  • Deep content videos. Inform prospects about products and build purchasing intent (think product videos or how-to videos). These videos might include a chapter menu, questions and polls, and resource links for viewers to start their own buying journey.
  • Immersive videos. Build a branded, memorable experience for the viewer. These offer a personalized journey into the brand’s values, usually as branching or 360 video experiences. Though the intent isn’t always e-commerce, they can drive people to a brand’s brick-and-mortar store.
  • Custom experiences. Personalization is powerful—it gets results. Address the customer by their first name in the video or provide viewer-specific content based on information gleaned from polls or quizzes.

TYPES OF CONTENT FOR E-COMMERCE INTERACTIVE VIDEOS

Content matters as much as the experience. Knowing the consumer trends around video is imperative to creating a successful video e-commerce strategy.

  • How-to/product review. The most popular types of videos on the web after entertainment and music videos are how-to and product reviews. Along with an appetite to understand products, prospects use Google to purchase products or solve problems, so the SEO benefits are significant.
  • Brand overview. Brand overviews—another popular video type—communicate with customers, clarify the brand’s competitive differentiators, and create the expectation of follow-up content. They should be beautiful as well as branded, communicating with sight and sound, not just words.
  • Behind-the-scenes. Behind-the-scenes content builds transparency and loyalty while putting the product front and center. It’s a rich vein of content that you can tap into over and over again, allowing your e-commerce strategy to feed your content marketing plan.
  • Lifestyle. Lifestyle content showcases your brand and products, demonstrating their value in the real world with real people. Testimonials are some of the most powerful pieces of marketing for any brand, and lifestyle content captures this.

STEPS TO DEPLOYING E-COMMERCE INTERACTIVE VIDEOS

Once you know the role and importance of interactivity in your e-commerce strategy, it’s time to get started with interactive video.

  1. Expand your definition of shoppable video. Start with what you have. Whether you have a few videos or thousands, you can make them shoppable today with simple, clickable CTAs. Pro tip: CTAs on a video perform 3–4 times better than CTAs on a page.
  2. Select your best video(s). Choosing your best video is easy if you only have a few, but choosing among several thousands can be hard. In this case, it’s best to start with a good group of related videos. As you go, assess your current video performance and create a wishlist of what you’d like to improve upon or test in the future.
  3. Optimize throughout the customer journey. Embrace the whole buyer’s journey, and don’t just test interactivity on product pages—every video and page can be improved. Think about where the video is positioned on the page, and get creative with where you can subtly insert content.
  4. Scale your operation. Automation is key. For example, manually inserting product page links on a video or two works for a while, but your video strategy will need more to scale. With video platforms like Brightcove, dynamic CTAs can be automatically created and applied to a video based on its metadata, allowing you to nudge even more viewers further along the check-out process.
  5. Employ the right set of video marketing tools. There are many different measurement methods to employ to track e-commerce performance, from a cart system to web analytics. Regardless of which system you end up using, think about the calls-to-action on a product page, and then translate those web-based CTAs to video. Remember, interactive video operates like the rest of the web, so track e-commerce video as you would any other e-commerce web page.

With the right types of videos aligned to your goals, you’ll find that interactivity fits seamlessly into your e-commerce strategy. And with interactive video, you’ll find the opportunities are just as flexible as anything else on the web.

Learn more in our PLAY episode, “Interactive is the Future of E-Commerce Video”.

LOW LATENCY LIVE

bsp-admin-1 on August 19, 2022

Reducing latency in livestreams is a challenge that numerous Brightcove customers and others in the market strive to address. Consumers expect near-instantaneous streaming, but providing that is getting more and more complex.

Several industries like sports, arts, live performance and others are introducing interactive elements to attract, retain, and further engage audiences. However, this requires reduced latency streaming to facilitate these experiences.

As part of a series of recent enhancements, Brightcove provides low-latency, near-real-time streaming with delays reduced to approximately 5–10 seconds. These enhancements are supported in the following Brightcove player versions:

  • Brightcove Player (web) release 6.62.0 and newer
  • Native SDK for iOS release 6.10.3 and newer
  • Native SDK for Android release 7.0.1 and newer

There are numerous factors that determine whether a low-latency feed can be delivered (encoder, viewer bandwidth, etc.). Brightcove addresses the unpredictability of low latency streaming by falling back to a regular or standard latency stream if there are disruptions. In addition to Brightcove’s low latency capabilities, Brightcove also offers support and best practices for improving the quality of livestreams in its support materials and documentation.

Further documentation and other materials is available on our support site, as well as more information regarding requirements for low latency source encoder setup:

  • 30 frames per second, drop frame rate is not supported (29.97)
  • Codec: H264
  • Profile: Baseline

It’s important to note that there are specific limitations not supported with livestreams using reduced latency:

  • DRM
  • SSAI
  • Multi-language audio tracks
  • Redundancy
  • B-frames on the output

For more information regarding low latency, steps to set up, or inquiries about enabling low latency on your Brightcove account, contact us or reach out to your Brightcove Account Manager.

USING VIDEO DISTRIBUTION FOR LEAD GENERATION

bsp-admin-1 on August 16, 2022

NEC Corporation began holding online events and webinars in response to the spread of the new coronavirus. It has been over two years since they first held an online event. In that time, they have set up their own in-house studio and have put in place a system for video distribution, complete with equipment and staff.

KNOW YOUR ROI WITH INTERACTIVE VIDEO

bsp-admin-1 on August 15, 2022

Calculating return on investment (ROI) has been a vexing challenge for marketers ever since companies began to invest in marketing. Given the complex nature of influencing purchase decisions via content, it’s often very difficult to illustrate a clear 1:1 correlation between marketing touches and sales revenue.

Even with the metrics-rich environment of video marketing, there remains uncertainty around how exactly to demonstrate impact. Which metrics are measured, when they’re gathered, and what weight they are given can vary depending on campaign goals.

Many emerging tools and innovations are helping provide clarity on the path to video marketing ROI, and interactive video is among them.

CONNECTING THE DOTS WITH INTERACTIVE VIDEO

Video content is already a metrics goldmine. As marketers learn to think beyond only view counts, they’re discovering how repeat views, view duration, playback scrubbing, and behavior before and after viewing can paint a full picture of where a potential customer is along their buyer journey.

Interactive video takes the experience of viewing video from a passive act and transforms it into an active conversation of sorts. Within this conversation is the opportunity for marketers to glean even deeper metrics by creating opportunities for buyers to take more actions within the video beyond playback.

MAKING IT EASY TO OPT IN

In an ideal world, marketers would always know who was interacting with their content so they could track the path to purchase from awareness through conversion.

The reality is that the way marketers gather user data is changing. The phase-out of third-party cookies means customers need to willingly provide data at some point along their journey for marketers to connect online behaviors with a real-world customer.

Consumers won’t simply part with their data because you ask them to—they must receive something of value in exchange. This is why marrying the success of video as a content format with the conversational nature of interactivity is among the easiest ways to create that value exchange. When consumers feel empowered and heard, they are more willing to opt in.

Interactive video offers an easy way to drive opt-ins—and it’s working! You can employ interactive features that allow consumers to bypass traditional steps on the path to purchase or make opting-in feel like the natural conclusion of a good conversation.

SHOPPABLE VIDEO

With add-to-cart functionality, shoppable videos take buyers directly from viewing a product video to an online store where the item is already in their cart. This eliminates the friction of several manual steps between point of interest and point of sale. Attributing these sales is simple and straightforward.

LEAD GENERATION

Identifying the conversion stage with your video marketing is even easier with interactive video. Adding chapters to a product feature video allows viewers to “skip to the good part” and see the specific information they need to make a decision. Adding a lead gen form to the video experience allows customers to opt in while their interest is at its highest.

GAINING BUY-IN FOR INTERACTIVE VIDEO

If interactive video is such a powerful tool, why aren’t more marketers using it?

A lot of what has been holding up interactive video comes down to the need for education.

CMOs probably aren’t interested in the nuts and bolts of how to produce interactive content. However, they will perk up if you explain how interactive video plays to today’s audience and fits into current marketing trends and best practices, such as brand differentiation, personalization, engagement boosting, and more robust metrics.

POWERFUL BRAND DIFFERENTIATION

Video is already a great tool for building brand awareness. By adding interactivity to your brand campaign videos, you create an experience for your audience that draws them into that brand moment.

In terms of brand awareness, that message retention is the key to attracting customers who are not yet actively researching a purchase, so they’ll think of your brand first when they’re ready to buy.

It all comes down to the difference between brand recognition and brand recall. Impressions and views can amplify brand recognition—people recognize your brand because they’ve seen it before. But what spurs sales is brand recall (remembering your brand without needing to see it). Engaging with interactive video creates a stronger connection to your brand in the minds of your customers, increasing brand recall and impacting the ROI of brand campaigns.

PERSONALIZATION OPPORTUNITIES

Personalization is the fastest way to grab your audience’s attention.

Interactive video opens the door to a number of features that walk viewers through their buying decision, such as next video suggestions, questions that determine viewer interest, and interactive product overviews that allow them to skip around and explore the product features that matter most to them.

ENGAGEMENT BOOSTING

Today’s consumers are more interested in conversations than lectures. We’re in the habit of consuming information in bite-sized pieces, often in settings where we can also offer our feedback.

Recent data shows that 70% of marketers say that in terms of engagement, their interactive video performed well or very well, while only 1% said it performed poorly.

Interactive video can boost your engagement by adding frequent checkpoints to your videos where you ask viewers questions. These questions can be tailored to the experience you’re creating—quizzes in education videos, preferences in product demonstration videos, and so on. This is where your team can get creative about driving engagement.

DEEPER MEASUREMENT

The key to connecting interactive video campaigns to business results lies in integrated analytics, which help you understand this tactic’s impact in the broader context of other marketing activities.

With solutions like Brightcove Interactivity, marketers can track a wide range of metrics including:

  • Click-through rate from a video to a landing page
  • Submission rate of in-video polls and surveys
  • True engagement of individual leads and prospects (including dwell times, skips, and rewatches of specific sections)
  • Direct answers to questions (at a user and audience level)
  • Viewer navigation rate to specific sections of the video

This is one model for measuring ROI based on internal benchmarks. As mentioned earlier, selection and weighting of interactive video metrics will vary based on the organization and its goals, but clearly this content format provides a great deal of data to fuel your integrated analytics engine.

START THE CONVERSATION

Interactive video is unique in its ability to start a two-way conversation between your audience and your brand.

Interactivity empowers your viewers and enhances the personalized experience. They can respond in real-time by navigating in-video menus, taking interactive quizzes, and making purchases with shoppable video features.

Best of all, you can measure and track this journey all the way through.

BRANCHING BEST PRACTICES FOR INTERACTIVE VIDEO

bsp-admin-1 on August 8, 2022

Branching videos are the Cadillac of interactive content. From pre-production to post, interactivity is baked into every step of the content creation process. This makes them one of the most engaging types of interactive videos and one of the easiest to get wrong.

If you’re just getting started with interactive video, you may not realize how different branching is from other interactions. But once you understand the power of branching video, you’ll better be able to apply our best practices and harness that power for your business.

WHAT IS BRANCHING VIDEO?

“Choose your own adventure” or branching is a type of interactive video used in content marketing that is getting more and more attention as customers come to expect a digital-first, personalized buying experience.

First, it’s important to distinguish between branching videos and chapters in a video. Both are navigation tools, but they are designed differently and achieve different objectives. If a chapter is a fixed menu, then branches are a buffet. Chapters add a fundamentally linear form to a video, while branching is non-linear: branches allow viewers to explore a choice of topics.

Branching sets up a user-driven scenario where a user can make a choice, and see the results play out. Branching can work in a single video (jump-to-time) or between videos (video-to-video branching).

THE POWER OF BRANCHING IN INTERACTIVE VIDEO

Branching video is beneficial both for the viewer and for the marketer.

For the viewer, it gives them control of the video experience from the get-go, allowing them to explore topics that are relevant or interesting to them. In turn, this means they are more likely to complete the branching video, leading to higher engagement. Completing a video means they’re moving along the marketing funnel, learning about solutions to their challenges and getting closer to making a decision.

For marketers, these viewer choices give marketers access to more data about what users are interested in, to improve future experiences. This is data that might not be readily available elsewhere, too. Audience surveys can be overly complicated, from formulating the right questions to tying responses back to business goals. The results also become stale after a while, too. Branching provides fresh, actionable insights on what customers like, don’t like, or want to see more of.

Branching works best in scenarios with a lot of information to be conveyed, like testimonials, conference or webinar presentations, virtual walkthroughs/tours, and more – any opportunity where the viewer can navigate areas of personal interest or choice. Each viewer comes to the video with different background knowledge and different goals for viewing those videos. Branching video allows you to reach those goals much faster, much more efficiently, and provide a much happier and engaging experience.

FIVE BEST PRACTICES FOR BRANCHING VIDEO

Ideally, branching videos should be designed and produced with interactivity in mind from the start. When you’re writing the script, drawing up your storyboards, filming on set or in the studio setting up the shots, you’ll want to consider these best practices.

  1. Design for space. Design with your medium in mind. A lot of viewers are going to be on tablets or smartphones, so reserve half the screen for the talent or subject matter expert, and the other half for interactions. This signals to the viewer that this is an interactive video, and that there are actions they can take.
  2. Encourage interaction. Be very explicit in your call-to-action. Keep the interactions simple by having only two to three choices per branch, and ensuring the video’s targets are big and clickable so that the action is clear. Let your subject matter expert gesture toward or react to the choices available—this will increase interaction too. Pro tip: always let the viewer click back to a previous choice.
  3. Limit distractions. Stick with a simple background for any branching video. It doesn’t have to be white, but it shouldn’t be too eye-catching either. The underlying aim of a branching video is to have a conversation with the viewer, so don’t distract from that conversation.
  4. Timing is everything. Design the rhythm of the video as well as the visual look and feel of the video. Make sure each choice is onscreen for enough time for the viewer to read and comprehend it. Ten seconds is a good rule of thumb. Additionally, add 5-second bumpers, or sections of white or black or motion graphics, between the different choice sections to ease the transition.
  5. Don’t forget audio. Visuals are key, but don’t leave audio until the last minute either. Continue the audio track underneath the choice points and bumpers. This creates a more seamless experience for the viewer. But don’t forget #3 and ensure the audio isn’t distracting viewers from the action you want them to take.

Our mantra is make video work like the rest of the web, and create a clickable, interactive experience where you can guide your experience. Video has never been like that, but with branching, now it is.

GETTING STARTED WITH INTERACTIVE VIDEO

bsp-admin-1 on August 1, 2022

Imagine a video that acted like the rest of the web. You could navigate a menu, skim to find something interesting, click on related links, even “like” what you’re consuming. That’s interactive video.

For businesses, interactivity transforms passive audiences into engaged consumers. Instead of trying to win back their attention after the video, businesses can help their audiences take the next step while their interest is highest. Meanwhile, marketers can finally solve one of their biggest pain points: video attribution.

Especially in a cookie-less future, tools that can connect marketing spend with revenue have never been more valuable. Interactive video content can help you justify your video marketing budget while also meeting your customers’ expectations for engagement. Once you understand what it can do, you’ll see how an investment in interactivity can provide more insights into both your videos and your customers.

WHAT IS INTERACTIVE VIDEO?

Interactive video does more than allow viewers to interact with a video. Interactivity enables you to easily create two-way communication with your audience, making the video experience more engaging for your viewers and more insightful for you.

Each type of interactivity offers the viewer different experiences, from social media-like reactions to clickable related content links to “choose your own adventure” journeys. Each feature is also a data point, providing highly detailed engagement data that can be used to build comprehensive customer profiles.

There are several different types of interactions that high-end platforms like Brightcove offer.

OVERLAYS

Overlays allow you to place strategic, clickable hotspots throughout the video content. They provide a next step or action for viewers to selectively increase engagement. They also enable viewer-controlled experiences like pause on click or “are you still watching?” dialogs. And they can be used for e-commerce to sell directly through the video.

Overlays can be utilized in different formats, including text overlays (text box format), image overlays (image or logo), and transparent/hotspot overlays (opaque or clear box placed over full or partial screen).

CHAPTERS

Chapters allow you to break up the video into sections, letting the viewer navigate directly to the content most relevant to them. This not only prevents a stale viewing experience, it provides detailed viewer analytics on which chapters they view, skip, and rewatch.

Chapters can be customized with colors and timing, and they don’t need a table of contents to function; in fact, adding chapters without one can allow for purer behavior tracking. Videos with a table of contents encourage viewers to browse, whereas videos without one focus their attention on selecting the topic most relevant to them.

QUIZZING/POLLING

Quizzes and polls allow you to get direct responses from your audience with in-video questions asked at the exact moment it makes the most sense. The responses can be used as a decision point to enable distinct next steps based on an answer, or simply as aggregated audience feedback.

Quizzes can be multiple choice, “choose all that apply,” or open-ended responses. Different actions can be triggered at the completion of a quiz or on a pass/fail basis. Also, each answered question is a data point on your viewers’ preferences and behaviors that you can use to inform future marketing efforts.

IN-VIDEO WEB CONTENT

In-video web content allows you to include content from external sources on the video for a more seamless and uninterrupted customer experience. This means next steps or additional content can be presented in the video itself without the risk of losing viewer attention. It also increases the flexibility of the kind of content that can be used.

In-video web content can use any external content that is iFrame-compatible.

PERSONALIZATION

Personalization allows customized interactions to appear on the video, such as displaying the viewer’s name. Viewer-specific elements in videos not only capture attention and encourage engagement, they improve the overall experience, which in turn improves the viewer’s loyalty.

Personalization can be controlled by user input, metadata, or URL parameters.

BRANCHING

Branching lets you create ties between in-video overlays to have a connected, linked experience. Viewers are able to control the experience, leading to higher engagement with the content. This generates more data points about what interests viewers and can inform a hierarchy of interest to improve future experiences.

Branching can work in a single video (jump-to-time) or between videos (video-to-video branching), setting up a viewer-driven scenario where viewers can make choices and see how those choices play out.

VIEWER SENTIMENT

Viewer sentiment allows you to gather feedback from audiences in real time by letting them rate their experience. Lowering the effort to respond can yield higher response rates than more involved forms offer, generating more data that can be used to improve the user journey.

Viewer sentiment collection formats include thumbs-up/thumbs-down, emoticons (sad, neutral, happy), and a five-star rating system.

WHY SHOULD YOU USE INTERACTIVE VIDEO?

Interactive video isn’t just another short-lived trend or fad. In fact, the first interactive film predates CGI by several years (1967’s “The Cinema Machine” allowed the audience to select scenes that were manually switched by camera operators). It’s only been a matter of time and technology before interactive video became mainstream.Consumers and Interactive VideoFor example, according to Brightcove’s exclusive research, 55% of B2B decision-makers today value interactivity nearly as much as speed and load time. Similarly, 83% of consumers—specifically, those who spend the most money online—agree that interactive elements are helpful as they shop.

What does this mean for video marketers? According to Hubspot, 28% of marketers are already using interactive content in their videos. If you’re running a SWOT analysis on your video marketing strategy, go ahead and add that to the Threat column. It means at least one out of four of your top competitors are likely using interactive video.

Experienced marketers know better than to adopt a new technology just to keep up with the competition. There needs to be a clear business case for the investment. And interactive video has three key benefits for any business:

  • More engagement. Once a viewer has interacted with the video, we see every metric increase. Not only do they watch more of the current video, they watch more and interact more with all your videos.
  • More conversions. In our experience, using interactive CTAs notably increases a video’s conversion rate. For example, videos with CTA overlays see a 3–4x conversion improvement over videos with CTA’s outside the video.
  • More data. Especially when you integrate your video platform with your CRM and MAP, the insights from this data can inform everything from finding new customers with lead generation forms to driving new revenues with in-video purchases.

HOW DO YOU START USING INTERACTIVE VIDEO?

Businesses with mature video marketing strategies may think adding interactive features to every video is too time-consuming. Likewise, businesses just starting out in video may think interactivity is too complex to justify the effort.

But whether you have hundreds of videos or just a few, getting started with interactive video doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are five tips for successfully incorporating interactivity into your video marketing strategy:

  1. Start with existing videos. Grab one of your most popular videos, and write down the main goal of the video (lead qualification, compliance, audience engagement, et cetera).
  2. Only add interactions that enhance the video’s goal. Is the video requesting that an action be taken? Allow the viewer to take that action inside the video with a form or link. Is it teaching something? Add a text overlay to highlight key points or add an in-video quiz.
  3. Add no more than one to three interactions on your first video. Some of the simplest and most valuable interactive features are your brand/logo with a link to a landing page, a name-capture form, and quizzes to assess how well the content is understood.
  4. Mind your data. Metrics vary from video to video. Sometimes you need to track views and engagement. Or, as with interactive video, you need to track interactions. Ultimately, a video’s success should be measured based on a viewer taking the desired action. Ensure your video metrics support your business goals.
  5. Get feedback from others. Feedback can reveal areas for improvement that you are not used to looking for. Once your colleagues have provided their feedback, it will help determine new and better places to add interactions.

OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO STRATEGY WITH INTERACTIVITY

Interactive video is just video that meets the same expectations we have for other forms of web content.

Ever been frustrated by menu-less homepages, rambling articles, or unlinked sources? Now you know how you should also feel about digital video that isn’t interactive.

Your audience is ready for interactivity. And armed with the direct attribution and behavioral data it offers, so are you.

USING AND MEASURING VIDEO THROUGHOUT THE BUYER JOURNEY

bsp-admin-1 on July 25, 2022

This era of explosive technology we’re living through has B2B marketers scrambling to develop a sound methodology around ever-evolving video tools and platforms.

While video marketing remains one of the most effective ways to usher people through the buyer’s journey, video alone should not do all the heavy lifting. Neither should it be an afterthought. Ideally, video should be a complementary component of a complete campaign, developed and executed strategically.

B2B marketers are still learning how to find this middle ground, where the video content they create is produced and deployed with measurable goals in place. What’s needed is an increase in focus, and alignment with the buyer’s mindset as they navigate a complex decision path.

The following guidance will help your team craft a data-driven video marketing strategy that delivers the right content at the right time to the right audience.

GET YOUR DATA IN ORDER

Data is a powerful tool. Unlike other forms of marketing content, video offers metrics that go deeper, such as view duration. The data derived from video can help you obtain a complete view of the buyer’s journey, but to see it clearly, this data needs to be connected.

Integrating the tools you use to manage, distribute, and track your video content is the fastest way to access the meaningful metrics that can drive your video strategy. With a seamless flow of data between your CRM, website, ad platform, and other tools, you can gain insight into your customer and their online behavior that will shape your campaigns as you go.

Not only will you know who’s watching, what they’re watching, and for how long, but you will be able to see what other content they’ve consumed, where it was consumed, and the pathway of touchpoints that led them through other channels to your content.

PINPOINT MOVEMENT IN THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

With this data in hand, your marketing team can work on identifying movement within the buyer’s journey so they can make more intentional decisions around lead nurturing.

By reviewing historic video engagement data, you can extrapolate which content worked best for clients at various stages of the journey. These are the metrics to monitor at each stage:

AWARENESS

Brand awareness is a vital part of developing brand salience, attracting talent, and casting a wide net for future audience growth.

View count and play rate are the most telling metrics in the awareness stage. The more views, the more folks are thinking about your brand. A good play rate means more of the right people are aware of your brand.

CONSIDERATION

Buyers at this point of the journey are looking for a solution to a problem. They’ve started exploring possibilities and are researching ahead of reaching out.

To find what’s working at this stage, you’ll want to dig down into the metrics that deliver data on time spent viewing. The more engaged your audience is, the more they’ll remember about your brand and product the next time they’re looking for a solution.

To make discovery of this metric a lot less time-consuming, Brightcove has developed an engagement score that analyzes overall engagement with your video and assigns a score based on number of views at each point in time across the total length of the video.

CONVERSION

While it is possible to see the results of a conversion based on lead capture data, it isn’t something that shows up in the video metrics. There is no single piece of data you can look at and conclude, “At timestamp 2:41 in the third video we published this month, we earned a conversion!”

Sure, you could embed a lead form in every video (which is a great way to fatigue your audience and depress engagement). But that won’t show how many future conversions the video contributed by keeping the lead engaged.

This pivotal point is the product of all the touchpoints that came before. Those are the metrics you want to focus on to ensure you’re moving your leads to that conversion point effectively.

Touchpoint mapping helps you see where a video falls along the path to conversion and allows you to identify optimization opportunities.

For example, after generating a lot of awareness with display ads, maybe you decide to embed a product review video at the top of your homepage. Just as you hoped, it has lots of views and a high play rate (awareness metrics), indicating the right people are viewing the content.

However, it has a really low engagement score (consideration metric), and most of those viewers leave your site and never come back.

Though they were clearly interested in your brand, they weren’t ready to buy your product. They were still researching solutions, not choosing the best product, and your video addressed the latter, not the former.

Remember, the right audience at the wrong time is the wrong audience.

RETENTION

Bringing the journey full circle, you once again want to pay attention to engagement numbers.

MAP integration can show you if new customers are watching onboarding and training videos, if existing customers are engaging with video content about add-on products and services, and if new users within existing accounts are engaging with video content.

Once you understand these trends, you can make changes to optimize your retention strategy.

BUILD A STRATEGIC VIDEO MARKETING PLAN

You’ve got the data. You know what metrics to monitor. Now it’s time to build a video marketing strategy across the full buyer’s journey.

Again, let’s look at each stage of the journey and consider what types of video are most effective at driving those metrics, getting your audience engaged, and capturing lead data when buyers are ready to talk.

AWARENESS

The 95:5 rule states that at any point in time, only 5% of buyers in your category are in-market for what you’re offering. You want to capture the attention of those other 95% so when they are ready to buy, your brand is top-of-mind.

Videos that are effective at this stage include educational, explainer, and brand videos. Audiences will see these videos through paid ads, video syndication, or on social media. These videos will ignite the audience’s interest and help create mental associations with your brand.

CONSIDERATION

The awareness videos have done their job and active buyers are ready to look to you for a solution to their problem.

Videos that deliver for buyers at this stage are ones that focus more on buyer pain points and the direct solutions you offer that can help them solve their challenges or achieve desired business outcomes. You should be referring to your products at this stage, but not in a pushy or overly promotional way. Put viewer value at the forefront with practical insights and explainer videos that address specific problems and actionable solutions.

CONVERSION

One of the best ways to gain buy-in is to have other people speak positively on your behalf.

Customer testimonials and other forms of social proof are powerful tools at the conversion stage. Under pressure to use their budgets wisely, buyers want to know that other organizations have experienced success with your product.

At this stage, you’ll want to include a lead capture form so you can facilitate a next step of sales outreach. Make a compelling pitch and be clear about what users can expect if they share their contact info.

RETENTION

Once buyers have experienced a win with your product, they’re ready to discover what else you can do for them.

Videos that cover new features, updates, and new products will keep your current customers excited about continuing to do business with you. This is also an opportunity to build community and deepen rapport, so think about ways to showcase your company culture and even the avid fans in your customer base.

IT’S TIME TO BE STRATEGIC WITH VIDEO

You don’t need to deploy your video marketing strategy with a firehose. Nurturing leads is best done with a watering-can approach—purposeful and measured amounts delivered at the right time.

Learn more in our PLAY episode, “Video Marketing Best Practices for Better Results”.