Using video, Avanade has completely redefined their relationship with their customers.  “Over the last two years, integrating video … led us to redesign our site, reevaluate our digital ecosystem and place more focus on the client experience,” says Matt Stegen, Director of Digital Marketing. “Our focus has been to improve engagement with our site and content, reduce bounce, and deepen our insights about our visitors.”

Embedding video in marketing strategy

Video is a key part of the Avanade experience that cascades across the entire B2B customer journey. It’s part of the content development mix, the engagement lifecycle of their audience; it’s even embedded into KPIs. Why? It turns out, video is what the Avanade audience craves, and putting it at the center of their user experience has resulted in major payoffs.

“We’re seeing strong results,” Stegen said during his keynote address at PLAY 2018. “Visitors who engage with video visit twice as many pages, engage with four times more assets, stay on site four times longer, and bounce four times less.”

Making it possible with key integrations

Three critical technologies—Sitecore, Marketo and Brightcove—sit at the core of Avanade’s MarTech stack. By integrating all three, Stegen and his team are able to bring the client experience to life with video. Beyond providing the nuts and bolts of delivering video content, this martech ecosystem also delivers insights into how video helps attract, engage, nurture, and convert along the clients’ and prospects’ journey with Avanade.

For more on Avanade’s customer-focused, video-driven marketing overhaul, read the full case study —you’ll learn exactly how Stegen used video data to drive engagement and nurture leads.

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Today’s video advertising space is growing rapidly, offering a variety of exciting opportunities for publishers. In fact, according to eMarketer, the US digital video advertising industry will increase by double-digit percentages annually between 2018 and 2021—eventually topping $22 billion.

Interested in staking a claim in the world of digital ads? You’re in luck! I pulled together some tips, tricks, and best practices below.

Getting started

When developing your video advertising strategy, you’ll need to take the following basic steps:

• Know your audience: In order to keep viewers engaged, you need to understand their interests, their location, and the types of devices they’re using.

• Create engaging video content: It’s important to remember that your content must be compelling enough that your audience is willing to sit through a 15- to 30-second ad break.

• Establish an ad operations team: Whether your team is in-house or outsourced, ensure you have the right people in place to oversee technical implementation and manage monetization efforts.

• Choose the right ad server: This is a really important decision for publishers, as an ad server can make or break your ad strategy. You have many options, including Google Ad Manager , FreeWheel , SpotX , and SpringServe . When making your choice, consider factors such as the ad server’s revenue model , support, ease of use, and unique capabilities.

• Choose direct or programmatic advertising: Most publishers use a combination of direct and programmatic ads , but you have to think about what will work best for your business.

Best practices

Viewability is critical in the video advertising space. In fact, advertisers gauge the success of their ads based on viewability metrics provided by MOAT, IAS, and other solutions. For instance, the MRC requires 60 percent of an ad to be in view on a screen for two seconds to be considered viewable. You can ensure better viewability by pausing the player when it’s not in view or making the player “float” when the user scrolls past it.

Another best practice is to ensure you understand which platforms your viewers are using so that you can keep any associated restrictions in mind. For instance, an ad that plays perfectly on a desktop might fail to work in an in-app environment. You need to develop your strategy accordingly.

Finally, make sure you understand common video ad errors, what causes them, and how to address them. For instance, Error 303 means that an empty VAST response has been returned. This is an expected error that’s usually the result of a specific business decision. Publishers should protect themselves by making sure they have set up DFP Fallbacks and Passbacks.

Interested in learning more about the digital advertising space? Check out the recording of our recent webinar, Jumpstart Your Video Advertising Strategy .

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Leading demand gen marketers recognize that their job doesn’t end once a prospect signs on the dotted line. It’s crucial to the marketer’s and the organization’s success to continue nurturing that customer’s relationship with the brand’s product and/or services.

One engaging way to nurture that relationship is to incorporate informative video content throughout the customer journey. Not sure which types of videos you should be creating for each stage? Check out the following tips:

Awareness

During the awareness stage, you want to get your brand name in front of prospects’ eyes as much as possible. While it may be tempting to start diving into all the details about your amazing products and services right away, it can be valuable to take a step back and take this time to establish yourself as an industry leader in your audience’s eyes.

Consider creating how-to videos that answer common questions your target customers may have. For example, a marketing agency may produce a video about how to launch your content marketing strategy. Or a cybersecurity company could release content around how to respond to an attempted phishing attack.

These types of videos highlight your brand’s expertise to viewers, making them more willing to continue down the sales funnel. The extra bonus here is that how-to content can be easily optimized for search, making it even easier for new prospects to find your brand.

Consideration

Your goal during the consideration stage is to keep prospects engaged and lead them toward taking a specific action. At this point, you’re focused on reaching an audience who is more likely to need your product or identify with your brand.

One type of video that can be particularly powerful during the consideration stage is a product demo. These assets should give a quick overview of what your product is, how it works, and why your audience needs it.

By creating videos that highlight the features that make your product suite unique, you can be one step closer to landing a new sale.

Purchase

Of course, the purchase stage is one of the most exciting. You’re so close to officially converting another prospect, and you just need to provide some final affirmation to confirm they sign on the dotted line.

At this stage, you can offer one final wave of encouragement through customer testimonials and case studies . These types of videos should incorporate first-hand stories from your customers about how your product offerings have helped them streamline a specific process or achieve a particular goal.  

Testimonials will resonate with your audience on an emotional level and help you establish trust, a crucial part of any customer relationship.

Need a little inspiration? Check out the video from our Crash Media case study:

Retention

Now that you’ve earned another customer, it’s time to do all you can to keep them on board. Of course, the retention stage involves meeting customer needs and continuing to take your product suite to exciting new levels. But it should also involve cultivating and maintaining your desired brand image.

And part of your brand image comes down to the team you have in place. Customers appreciate the opportunity to see the people behind the brand. They want to know about your core values and how your team abides by them every day—and company culture videos can be a great way to showcase this.

There are a variety of different tones you can set with these types of video assets. If you’re looking to do something a little more fun, you can incorporate footage of team members enjoying office perks, such as a ping pong table or free bagels on Fridays—which shows that your organization appreciates its employees and values work-life balance. Or you can strike an emotional cord and talk about a great community service initiative employees took on.

When customers believe in the values you have set forth and the people that make your brand great, they’ll be more likely to stick around for the long haul.

Advocacy

There’s no better win than having your customer turn into an advocate for your brand. Word-of-mouth marketing can be extremely powerful, so the more brand advocates you have the better. These will be the customers who truly believe in your products and brand, and want to tell others about their positive experiences.

The best advocates will want to share content, such as event videos, that highlights why your brand is their top choice. These videos can feature events like your team celebrating an exciting new launch or one of your leaders presenting at a big industry conference.

This type of video content reaffirms that you’re a leader in your industry and gives you a chance to highlight some of your big wins. Be sure to make these assets easily shareable so that your advocates can spread the word on all their social channels.

Of course, we’ve only just scratched the surface here. There are a wide variety of videos demand gen marketers can incorporate into each stage of the customer journey. But one thing remains clear: Engaging, informative video content can help you turn a prospect into a customer and a customer into an advocate.

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With any new OTT service—and even among the OTT behemoths that have been around the block a few times—the focus is often on acquiring new users. But what then? It doesn’t matter how many new users you acquire if they churn after their free trial. We spoke with Jason Wong, Product Director SVOD at Cleeng, a Brightcove partner that manages OTT churn, to find out what separates the success story from the flash-in-the-pan.

“With top-tier media companies racing ahead to create the best immersive OTT experience, those organisations who embrace churn reduction analytics and optimise subscriber retention stand to become the leaders in their respective market,” says Wong.

So how do you go about identifying your churn rate? And once you know it, how do you keep it at a reasonable level? Let’s start with the basics and work our way up from there.

What is OTT churn rate?

Churn rate is simply the number of OTT service subscribers that cancel, or let their subscription lapse. They fall into one of two categories:

• Voluntary churn: These are users that purposefully cancel their subscription. For example, they’ve binged the entire series that they signed up to watch, and now they’re done.

• Involuntary churn: These users churn unintentionally, whether their payment method has expired or a transaction is declined.

Understanding OTT churn metrics

The first step in identifying your churn rate is examining your subscriber management dashboard and separating voluntary churn from involuntary churn. The methods that you take to address each category will be vastly different.

But there’s much more to understanding churn than identifying the immediate reason. Providers also need to compare their user acquisition, or conversion rate, with their churn rate on a month-over-month basis in order to know where to focus their efforts. If the churn trend month-over-month is steady and reasonable—in other words, you’re retaining most of your existing users—you’re free to focus on acquiring new users. However, if churn is trending up—let’s say toward 20 percent—you’ve got a problem on your hands.

Deeper analytics can provide helpful insights that drive more informed actions. The most successful OTT providers know everything about their viewer demographics and have them sorted into audience segments. Stay-at-home moms have a different user experience than pro athletes; users who binge-watch series after series have a different user experience than the Netflix-and-chill weekend warriors. Knowing your audience, and how each segment is performing compared to the others, is priceless insight.. Advanced analytics partners can help OTT providers better parse those numbers; for example, a solution like Cleeng’s Churn IQ illuminates audience data plus video engagement metrics.

Once you’ve got a handle on the data, it’s time to take action.

Reducing involuntary churn

The easiest way to reduce involuntary churn is to partner with a service that automates the process. For example, users are notified when their payment on file is nearing expiration, so they can make an update without a lapse in their subscription. Some services take it a step further by communicating with the banking system on the back end to automatically update credit card information when a new card is issued.

Changes like these may seem small—but reducing churn by even one or two percentage points can have a massive impact on revenue down the line.

Reducing voluntary churn

Unsurprisingly, numbers come into play again as you decide how to tackle voluntary churn. If video engagement is poor—for example, users are abandoning videos halfway through—maybe you need to improve the content. On the other hand, if users are coming to the app and abandoning it without starting any videos at all, that tells you something about user experience. How about users that go for long stretches of time without opening the app at all? In that case, maybe the answer is push notifications that reel them back in.

Reducing voluntary churn often comes down to three main issues:

• Content: Having a compelling, constantly refreshed content library is essential. If your library is stagnant, viewers will assume they have seen all the content they might like—and poof, they’re out the door.

• User experience: If your users have a hard time finding the content that is meaningful to them, or your app is performing poorly, they’re going to spend less time there. Low engagement times are a high indicator of negative experience and potential churn.

• Engagement: Engaging with your users is essential. If you’re adding new content that they might like, why not tell them? A push notification that you have new episodes of their favorite show isn’t a nuisance; it’s an improvement on their experience with your service.

How to compete with the big guys

When Netflix raised prices last week for the first time in years, the entire media industry took note. Would Netflix’s giant base of loyal subscribers find the added expense too much and abandon ship? Or is the original OTT behemoth strong enough to charge what they please?

The answer remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure—consumers have a limited tolerance for subscriptions. The average OTT user has the capacity and budget to absorb one to five subscription services per month, with majority of users signed up for no more than three. Of those three to five subscriptions, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime (and eventually NBC and Disney’s OTT offerings) probably take up the main spots, leaving little room for niche providers. With prices on the rise, consumers will be squeezed even further. OTT providers will have to provide something truly special to earn a loyal and passionate audience that will stick by them when the big guys are demanding more and more of their hard-earned entertainment budget.

Managing OTT churn from Day 1

In the rush to stand up a new OTT service, customer acquisition models can take precedence over churn management. But if providers aren’t practicing churn management from Day 1, they’re already behind.

“Churn must be a high priority for large organisations to tackle,” says Wong. “They must bring focus and unity to a challenge that’s shared between multiple parts of the organization such as video streaming, content acquisition, customer success, the payment processing team and more.”

Ready to take a deep dive into the world of churn? Cleeng has published an ebook called Getting a Grip on OTT Churn so you can do just that.

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Industry conferences and events offer an amazing opportunity to network with your peers and learn more about the latest innovations in your space. Of course, there are a wide variety of exciting, engaging marketing events to attend throughout the year.

Not sure which conferences you should prioritize in 2019? Check out our guide:

1. B2B Marketing Exchange

1. When: February 25–27, 2019

2. Where: Scottsdale, AZ

3. Content details: This event offers over 90 sessions broken down into six tracks (Content2Conversion, Demand Gen Summit, ABM in Action, Digital Strategy, Sales Impact Summit, and Channel Marketing). The agenda covers topics ranging from B2B email creative to driving partner engagement and optimizing ABM execution.

4. Why you should attend: You’ll have the opportunity to learn about all that’s new in the B2B space—empowering you to tackle today’s buyer realities and market conditions head on.

2. MarTech

• When: April 3–5, 2019

• Where: San Jose, CA

• Content details: This vendor-agnostic forum offers a variety of different sessions and workshops that focus on marketing, technology, management, and solutions. The agenda covers topics ranging from the advantage of agile marketing to the new era of v-commerce and how to use data to drive results.

• Why you should attend: You’ll get to learn from martech superstars about how to rethink your marketing strategy and integrate a variety of different solutions.

3. PLAY

• When: May 14–16, 2019

• Where: Boston, MA

• Content details: Our annual event includes a variety of exciting keynotes, spotlight sessions, workshops, and TechTalks that provide all the information you need to take your video marketing strategy to the next level. The agenda covers everything from getting started with live video to creating a visual brand and telling better brand stories.

• Why you should attend: Check out our recent blog post for five reasons to attend PLAY 2019 .

4. INBOUND

• When: September 3–6, 2019

• Where: Boston, MA

• Content details: This four-day event offers over 200 educational sessions about the latest topics in marketing, customer success, and sales. This year’s agenda covers everything from developing and running a growth marketing team to sharpening your value proposition and leveraging artificial intelligence in inbound marketing.

• Why you should attend: You’ll have the opportunity to get inspired by amazing spotlight speakers, who’ve previously included First Lady Michelle Obama and Bozoma Saint John.

5. Content Marketing World

• When: September 3–6, 2019

• Where: Cleveland, OH

• Content details: This year’s event offers over 120 workshops and sessions focused on storytelling, strategy, demand generation, AI, ROI, and more. The 2019 agenda covers everything from building your audience to content optimization and measuring your content marketing success.

• Why you should attend: You’ll leave with the materials and information you need to implement a content marketing strategy that will inspire your audience and grow your business.

By attending these top marketing conferences and events, you’ll have the opportunity to connect with potential partners and customers—while gaining the tools and insights you need to continually optimize your campaigns for 2019.

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Throughout the year, a variety of exciting media events bring together the best and brightest broadcasters, publishers, and OTT providers for learning, networking, and more. By attending these in-person events, you can take advantage of the opportunity to connect with prospective clients face-to-face—while also learning all about the latest innovations in your space.

Not sure which conferences to attend this year? Check out our guide to the top five media events you should prioritize in 2019:

1. DigiDay Publishing Summit

• When: March 27–29, 2019

• Where: Vail, CO

• Content details: This year’s event will focus on how publishers are keeping up with the changing advertising landscape and diversifying their revenue. The agenda covers topics ranging from how to balance subscriptions with advertising in OTT to where diversification is heading.

• Why you should attend: You’ll have ample opportunities to make valuable connections—from eight-minute business meetings to cocktail receptions and after-hours hangouts.

2. NAB

• When: April 6–11, 2019

• Where: Las Vegas, NV

• Content details: This year’s NAB Show includes a variety of attractions and pavilions, as well as eight conference programs (Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference, Business of Media, Content Strategies, Creative Master Series, Digital Futures Exchange, Future of Cinema Conference, NXT Tech Symposium, and The Influencer Series). The agenda covers topics ranging from how to create compelling content to building and sustaining a franchise.

• Why you should attend: You’ll get to see the unveiling of ground-breaking new technology and innovative solutions, while gaining big-picture insights on the latest disruptive trends.

3. Streaming Media East

• When: May 7–8, 2019

• Where: New York, NY

• Content details: This year’s event includes six tracks (Business & Strategy Track, Technical & How-To Track, OTT Leadership Summit, Video Engineering Summit, Live Streaming Summit, and Discovery Track). The agenda covers topics ranging from enhancing media with machine learning to the state of server-side ad insertion.

• Why you should attend: You’ll have the opportunity to learn about the innovative approaches that leaders in your space are deploying in OTT, live streaming, content monetization, and other major areas.

4. PLAY

• When: May 14–16, 2019

• Where: Boston, MA

• Content details: Our annual event includes a variety of engaging spotlight sessions, workshops, keynotes, and TechTalks that will arm you with the insights and inspiration you need to break through to audiences everywhere. This year’s agenda covers everything from monetization and distribution to the neuroscience of fandom.

• Why you should attend: Check out our recent blog post for five reasons to attend PLAY 2019 .

5. Code Conference

• When: June 10–12, 2019

• Where: Scottsdale, AZ

• Content details: The invitation-only conference brings together the biggest names in technology to dig deep into the opportunities and challenges of the industry. This year’s speakers include David Solomon, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs.

• Why you should attend: You’ll have the opportunity to network with a global community of technology leaders and startups with exciting futures.

Attending media events and conferences throughout the year empowers you to immerse yourself in the latest trends and innovations—and leave armed with actionable insights to optimize your 2019 strategy. Which events are on your list?

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