Introduction

Video is highly effective in driving marketing success. Its wide adoption has transitioned it from an innovative marketing tactic to a standard and essential part of the marketing mix that many companies now need to refine. Whether you’ve been using video for a long time, are a newcomer, or need help on where to start, we’ve compiled five key questions and answers you need to ask to ensure you’re getting the most out of your video content.

This whitepaper will prompt and answer questions on the following topics:

• Analytics
• User Experience
• Web Integrations
• Marketing Technology Integrations
• Future-proofing

Question 1: Are Your Videos Converting to Business Results?

Strong analytics help you understand if you are hitting your goals. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve or evolve your strategies. There are two levels of video analytics that need to be measured: macro and micro. The macro level is about total viewership. How many viewers do you get a day? What are your best performing videos? How are landing page videos helping the conversion rate? They can also get more granular like, “What day is the best for viewership?” The answers to these questions will optimize understanding of your video assets and help determine things like the best day to launch a video campaign.

In addition, these analytics can help at a micro level with video content strategy. By understanding the engagement and performance of each individual video, marketers can leverage this information to make content changes. This is something that we do at Brightcove all the time. For example, after monitoring the engagement score of a recent video we launched, we observed a large drop off rate within the first 15-20 seconds of the video. We realized this was caused by an intro that was too long since after the 15-20 second intro, engagement stayed high and constant until the end of the video. In response, we cut down the first 20 seconds and significantly grew overall engagement and completions.

Question 2: Are You Delivering a High Quality Experience?

Creating a video is only the first step. Next you have to think about the experience you’re delivering to viewers and that means taking a closer look at things like quality, load times, and distribution across devices. If you take the time to create an engaging video asset, but consumers can’t view it on their Android device or the quality is poor, then the value of that asset quickly minimizes.

While video is a powerful piece of content, viewers are also very sensitive to poor quality experiences. According to recent consumer research, over a third of consumers (35%) cited brand video content as most memorable when it’s of high quality. Consumers expectations rise every day, and they will no longer stick around for a low-quality video. It makes sense that higher quality will likely lead to higher engagements.

Mobile video is also growing at an astonishing rate as a percent of total video consumption. As more and more brands and enterprises identify both mobile and content marketing as their long-term goals, it is essential to be sure that video can be effective within this framework to help maximize results. This is also a matter of meeting consumers where they want to be reached. People are on-to-go more than ever and expect to be able to view content no matter where they are and what device they are using.

Question 3: Is Your Video Content Seamlessly Integrated Into Your Web Experience?

There are two elements involved in creating awesome video experiences that align with your brand and drive engagement: actual video player experience and seamless integration with web properties. The actual video player experience refers to the player technology that you embed in your website and digital channels. Controlling the player experience is essential for high quality delivery. Studies show that generic platforms that have third party branding are not popular among the vast majority of viewers. As much as 66% of consumers favor professional video player experiences with high quality to generic ones, like YouTube.

The second half of the video experience equation is the ability to seamlessly integrate engaging video portals into your web properties. Portals supercharge the benefits of video content strategies. By providing engaging portals with compelling visuals and great video content, you can help achieve your marketing goals faster, and even exceed them. Portals create captive video experiences and enable consumers to get fully immersed into your brand.

Question 4: Is Your Video Technology Integrated With Your Marketing Tools?

Your video technologies have to be able to play with your other marketing technologies. Digital channels are the way that you engage with your audience for 57% of their journey. If you cannot effectively incorporate these video technologies into the overall digital strategy, then you will have a tough time growing your video marketing efforts in a scalable way.

Video has the ability to amplify many aspects of your marketing workflow. So it is essential that it can be easily incorporated into your CMS and user management systems, your social channels for sharing videos, and your overall web presence. It’s also important that you gather video specific analytics that inform the decisions you make about your content marketing strategy. Needless to say, if you are only incorporating video into a few of these parts of the workflow, you are missing out on some big opportunities.

Question 5: Is Your Solution Easy for Internal Teams to Handle Video Marketing?

If you have growth plans it is important that you choose a solution that can grow as your needs grow. What does that mean, exactly? It isn’t just about being able to scale to a level of high volume video delivery. It means having the infrastructure in place to facilitate the organization of content and users so that the video marketing workflow is as streamlined as possible.

It also means having a partner in the video marketing space who is dedicated to helping you grow. Whether it is advice about integrations or deep strategic discussions, having a video marketing expert ready and waiting for you is a powerful tool. Also, having a support organization is essential. When you have a technical hiccup or need management of a live stream event, support and service organizations are important, and good ones are hard to come by.

Conclusion

Utilizing video in your marketing strategy is becoming essential for companies looking to drive engagement. You can ensure that you get the most out of your efforts by having a plan in place that will allow you to answer “Yes” to all of these questions. If you’re not there yet, check out Video Marketing Suite! Video Marketing Suite offers all the tools modern marketers need to optimize and simplify video marketing strategies - and in one simple solution, will get you to “yes” across the board.