Brands who advertise and house their video content on free video platforms are taking a risk—and that risk is even clearer in the wake of another controversy on YouTube . Major brands like AT&T, Nestlé, Hasbro, and McDonald’s have pulled their ads from the platform after appearing next to offensive, and in some cases illegal, content. This controversy follows a similar issue that cropped up in 2017 over violent content.

The latest uproar proves once again that brand safety should be non-negotiable. The very least an advertiser or content creator can ask from their platform is control over where their ads and content appear. Unfortunately, YouTube has proven again that they can’t meet that request.

Now, more brands are turning to secure streaming platforms where they have ultimate control over the end user experience. By hosting video content on a secure platform like Brightcove, marketers and stakeholders can be confident that their brand avoids association with unsavory content. That’s not to say that brands should abandon free platforms altogether. YouTube still has a place in a holistic marketing strategy; for example, it provides the opportunity for viewers to organically find your content during a Google search for related topics. But ideally, clips on YouTube eventually lead viewers to premium video content within a branded portal on the brand’s website.

Download our whitepaper to learn more about the high cost of using free platforms like YouTube. Your brand will thank you.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Ready to take your video marketing to the next level? You need a strategy—and that’s where our new Video Marketing Master Class comes in. This new ebook contains all the foundational knowledge you need to become a pro at video marketing, with industry research, quick tips, and interactive worksheets. Read on for a preview of each chapter, and be sure to download the ebook too. You’ll be the star of your marketing team in no time.

Chapter 1: Leading with Video

Video is a great tool for building brand affinity—so let your brand guide your video strategy. Have you carefully crafted a sleek, minimalist style that suggests a cutting-edge identity? Great: show off the latest update to your product in a gleaming workspace. Maybe you’ve curated a low-key, friendly groove that invites viewers to feel like family. Terrific: shoot a hand-held video of your employees cutting loose at the company picnic. Whatever your brand, video can help it stick.

Chapter 2: Convert and Retain

Your business needs customers to find and choose your product or service, and then not only stick with it but also share the word. To be successful, you’ll need to create videos to match every stage of the journey, and those videos should be aligned to your company’s goals and include clear calls to action. Download the ebook to learn the best videos for each stage, and the right calls to action for each type of video.

Chapter 3: Maximize Audience

You can make the best videos in the world—but if nobody sees them, then what’s the point? The channel where you publish your video will determine how long the video should be, whether or not it has captions, and more…so you should have the video’s channel in mind before you even get started scripting it. Click here for all the specifics you need on what types of videos fit each of your marketing channels.

Chapter 4: How to Scale

The biggest obstacle to scaling up your video strategy is production. The secret to scaling up your production capabilities lies in the answers to three questions: how long does each video need to be? Will it be scripted or unscripted? And what kind of footage do you need? We’ve put together a worksheet in Chapter 4 of the Master Class to walk you through these questions every time you produce a new video.

Chapter 5: Analytics for Growth

Video analytics gather statistics that tell you exactly how engaged audiences are with your content. You can measure the impact of a video with metrics like total views, play rate, click-throughs, referral sources, and more. If the goal is Awareness, total views, play rates, and social shares may tell you what you need to know, but if Conversion is key, you might be more focused on referral source, time of day, or player in relation to click-through rates. You have to be clear on your needs to know whether your videos are meeting them.

Ready to go forth and become a video marketing master? Download the ebook to access all our video marketing knowledge, complete with research, tips, and worksheets.

To view our Partner blog, click here

The annual NAB Show brings together innovators and industry leaders from around the world to gain insights into today’s disruptive trends—and see the unveiling of the latest groundbreaking technology. This year’s Las Vegas event will take place from April 6 through 11, and include a variety of conference programs, pavilions, and attractions. So, what can you expect to see while you’re there? Read on to find out!

Themes and topic tracks

Whether you’re interested in learning about the thriving podcast marketplace or OTT live streaming, NAB 2019 has a session for you. In total, this year’s event will feature the following 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

• The Influencer Series: Sports & Entertainment

There will also be four associated programs, including the Cybersecurity & Content Protection Summit and the Streaming Summit , which includes a session on Improving the End-User Experience for Video Advertising . And you’ll have the chance to participate in a variety of other exciting happenings, such as #GALSNGEAR and the 4K 4Charity Fun Run, where Brightcove has fielded a team for five years running.

While at the event, you’ll be able to explore a variety of attractions and pavillions, such as the Advanced Advertising Pavilion —where I’ll be speaking on a panel, The Challenges and Innovations of SSAI in a Fragmented Landscape . You’ll also have plenty of opportunities to connect and network , and learn about what’s next from featured exhibitors in various industries.

What to expect from the Brightcove team

Our team is very excited to return to NAB this year to participate in industry panels, demo our full solutions stack, and meet with attendees about how our powerful products are helping broadcasters and media companies succeed.

While we’re there, we’ll be sharing some exciting new feature announcements—including the ability to set up a multi-tiered OTT strategy. This feature will empower you to give your audience the flexibility to choose how they want to pay for your content. Stay tuned for more information on this release and other exciting new features!

During NAB, we’ll also be conducting live interviews and using Brightcove Live to distribute them directly to our Brightcove Facebook account. Be sure to check our social channels throughout the event to get a behind-the-scenes look into what’s happening on the show floor, and hear about the trending topics and themes that will be impacting your industry.

NAB is just a few weeks away and I know I speak for all the Brightcove attendees when I say that I can’t wait to hear about the latest innovations and connect with all of you. Be sure to come find us at Booth #SU1920!

To view our Partner blog, click here

Media publishers are striving for audience eyeballs in an increasingly fragmented and competitive landscape. With countless broadcast channels and OTT streaming services, launching an additional audience destination requires a dedicated purpose and strong user experience. On top of this, publishers are also fighting against the increasing demands of tight time frames and limited resources. Case in point, Your Money , a partnership between Australia’s Channel Nine and Sky News.

Launched on the 1st of October 2018, Your Money has found its place amongst aspirational Australians with a mission to help that audience grow, protect and enjoy their wealth. Working with partners such as Brightcove and the human-centred development and design agency Sitback , the Your Money team made use of best of breed technology and, within a timeline of eight weeks, created a fully responsive video-first digital destination to achieve this mission.

Leveraging Brightcove’s WordPress plugin to integrate video into the publishing workflow allowed the teams at Sitback and Your Money to save valuable time and resources. It allowed them to focus efforts on customisations central to the requirement of a strong user experience . Brightcove’s high-performance, cross-platform, HTML5-first video player , which powers Your Money’s online video, provides viewers with a quick and smooth experience regardless of the destination. And the implementation of simulcast live means viewers are able to consume the content where and when they like, whether that be via broadcast or online.

Ultimately, we expect to see more audience focused platforms launch over the next 12-18 months. And if content owners are willing to invest in making the end-user experience best in class, much like Your Money, they’ll be here to stay. Why? Because with special interest topics and an engaged audience comes the ability to monetise—the key to success of every media business.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Customer stories can be extremely valuable assets when it comes to establishing trust and moving contacts along the sales funnel. Interested in learning more about how and where to incorporate your customer story content? Read on for our tips and best practices.

Case studies

A great place to start is with case studies . Once you have a customer who’s willing to be featured, conduct an interview with him or her that focuses on the ways in which your products and services have helped them to reach—or exceed—their goals. Whenever possible, incorporate direct quotes from the customer, as well as specific statistics that prove that your partnership has helped the brand grow and succeed. Doing so will make your case studies increasingly powerful.

Video testimonials

By adding a video testimonial into the mix, you can make your case studies even more engaging. In these videos, your customer contact can specify—in their own words—how your products and services have helped them to streamline a particular process, boost sales, or achieve another exciting accomplishment. By allowing your audience to see and hear your customer speak about the value of this partnership, the message will resonate on a more emotional level. To increase your reach, you can even share clips of these video testimonials on your brand’s social channels.

Targeted emails

Incorporating customer stories into your marketing emails and nurture campaigns is another effective way to leverage this content to move prospects and current customers along the sales funnel. Call out impactful statistics and proof points in the subject line and beginning of the email to capture your audience’s attention—and keep the message fairly short so that you keep them engaged. Be sure to include a call to action that drives readers to your product or service page.

Whitepapers

Are you creating a whitepaper or guide to gain leads and highlight your team’s subject matter expertise? Consider driving your points home by incorporating relevant customer stories. For instance, our team recently created a guide to sports video , and we added various customer stories that highlighted how our products empower our sports clients to deliver broadcast-like sports streams and a professional OTT experience. This is a great strategy for calling attention to the solutions you offer in your thought leadership content.

Events your team is hosting

If your company hosts an annual conference or event, consider inviting your customers to participate in panels or lead breakout sessions. This can be a powerful way to get your success stories out there to a wider audience. And since most—if not all—of your team will be at the event itself, it will be even easier for a prospect who’s intrigued by a customer story to connect with you and learn more.

What’s the value of incorporating customer stories into your marketing strategy?

Sharing these stories benefits both your brand and your customers. At the most basic level, this content sends the message that your company is not not just “tooting its own horn.” Success stories that come from a customer’s words and point of view are increasingly believable and authentic. And, on the customer’s side, telling their stories on a variety of different channels can help to increase their exposure and brand awareness.

In addition, this content can be really powerful when it comes to converting leads. You can even incorporate these customer stories into your ABM campaigns . When a prospect learns the specifics of how you’ve helped a similar company achieve their goals, they will feel more confident that you can do the same for them—helping you to establish trust amongst your target audience.

Overall, it’s clear that customer stories can and should play a meaningful role in your marketing materials. Which story will you share first?

To view our Partner blog, click here

Video marketing is officially here to stay: according to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing in 2019, 91 percent of marketers consider video an important part of their strategy. However, most companies are still manually tracking their video data, rather than integrating it with their MarTech stack. What’s up with that?! Automating video and tying it to the rest of your marketing campaigns makes your life easier. Done effectively, it can even take your ROI to the next level.

Why video?

Video is more engaging and more effective at converting viewers than most text assets. According to our research with YouGov , 45 percent of adults say that video is more engaging than other content, and 76 percent of them have made a purchase after watching a video. Video is also easier for your audience to consume than long-form copy, and easier for marketers to set up. Think about it: using a video platform like Brightcove, you can easily drop a video thumbnail into an email (which increases your click-through rate by up to 50 percent, according to Campaign Monitor !) and create the associated video landing page with one click. Compare that to setting up a landing page with a custom form, and then tracking form submissions.

Why automate it?

Let’s say you used Brightcove to drop a video thumbnail in your email, which then leads to a landing page where the video can be viewed. Do you have time to manually track engagement statistics on that video, let alone follow up with every lead who watches it? Of course not.

Because videos are so engaging and effective, capturing details about the people who view them is essential. We use our own analytics and tracking tool, Brightcove Audience, to tie the metrics of our videos—SDR outreach videos, product videos, webinars, etc.—into Eloqua, which is then tied to Salesforce. This means we can track view activity without gating every piece of content. It improves our users’ experience and helps drive more leads to sales, which increases our funnel. Not only that, but the increased visibility into engagement metrics helps our creative team learn which types of videos are most effective, so that they can optimize for conversion.

Marketing automation makes it effortless to capitalize on the power of video. When your stack works together seamlessly, your sales team gets leads that they can follow up with—or your leads can enter an automated nurture track (yes, more automation!). Here at Brightcove, we have over thirty different nurture tracks which can be triggered by activity on our website, event attendance, users’ job titles, and more. Automating those nurtures makes our job easier, and by connecting Eloqua to Salesforce, it also makes our sales team’s job easier. They can effortlessly see which content their prospects have already interacted with, and where their interests lie, before starting a conversation with them.

Hopefully by now, I’ve convinced you that video marketing automation is a no brainer. Looking for a tool that will do all the work for you? Check out Brightcove Audience , our video marketing automation solution.

To view our Partner blog, click here