If there’s one thing that most business owners and managers realize, it’s that happy, engaged employees provide higher quality work. They’re also less likely to quit and, perhaps most importantly, they actively contribute to an overall positive company and workplace experience.
It’s also clear that employees want to work for companies that offer both personal and professional fulfillment. Office perks still play an important role, but more and more employees expect companies to offer a robust learning culture.
Training Enhances the Employee Experience
Learning and development (L&D) has proven to be a key driver of employee engagement. By providing tools and resources to strengthen employee skills and knowledge, companies can build a more capable workforce while showing investment in their employees. Furthermore, addressing skill gaps not only allows the business to grow, it lets employees grow, which improves the employer brand.
From an employee perspective, they want to feel like their current job is helping them build their career by preparing for their next role. Many are eager to continue building skills and staying competitive within their fields. In fact, they’re much more likely to stay with companies who they feel are supporting this.
From a company perspective, learning opportunities offer a competitive advantage and help them stay ahead in a constantly changing landscape. It helps the organization retain top talent, attract new talent, and maximize the potential of their existing talent.
And while there are various learning methods such as instructor-led training, on-the-job training, simulators, job shadowing, and case studies, training videos remain a top choice for employees.
Video Enhances Employee Training
According to our “Using Video to Improve the Employee Experience ” study, employees prefer video for policy training (76%), product demos (75%), and product training (68%). Also, 45% say training videos for systems and tools would increase their confidence in their employment decision.
There are numerous benefits for companies to deliver their learning and development programs through video.
For starters, it can be much more cost-efficient, especially for companies with multiple offices in different cities. In addition to reduced expenses like travel and materials, video also has a longer lifespan. Once produced, it can be reused and viewed by employees around the world in the comfort of their own homes or offices. Finally, video can also help you significantly reduce the amount of overall employee training time and even provide microlearning experiences .
There’s also the fact that video is more engaging than other forms of delivery. Multiple surveys have shown that employees prefer video to text , and the visual stimulation helps employees retain the information much longer. For HR teams who have strong learning initiatives, it’s not a matter of if they use video, but rather, what’s the best experience.
A Better Portal Enhances Employee Video
It’s important to remember that the videos themselves are but one part of a comprehensive training experience.
As you develop, update, or optimize your learning initiatives, you’ll want to consider all aspects of the user experience. This ranges from how easily they can find, access, and navigate the training to implementing active learning within the videos. The branding, layout, and functionality will also play an important role.
Similarly, you’ll want to make sure your program is as efficient and easily manageable as possible for content managers. A holistic and successful training program must consider the experiences of both the end user and the person responsible for maintaining it.
Where will your video training programs live?
One of the first steps in creating a video training program is to determine where the videos will live and how employees will access them. There are several common ways that businesses house them.

Internal servers or cloud storage. This approach often aligns with a broader internal content management structure, particularly for working files and documents. However, internal drives or collaborative cloud platforms can be less intuitive and lack the branding that adds to the overall experience. Further, navigating folders to find the different training videos and series is designed for digital librarians, not diverse employees with different learning styles.
Digital Asset Management platforms (DAMs). DAMs excel at managing high volumes of internal digital content, offering meta-tagging and versioning capabilities that allow for advanced search functions. But they’re not meant for content consumption. Not only do their interfaces lack branding, most can’t support high volumes of concurrent high-quality video streams.
Unlisted YouTube channels. YouTube is used by some companies who want to organize training videos by playlists. In theory, the videos can only be accessed by users through an unlisted link. However, most companies want better security, robust video content management, or hosting destinations they own and fully control. For them, YouTube doesn’t quite meet their needs.
Company intranet. Company intranets are perhaps the most common destination for training videos. They often combine one or more of the preceding approaches and act as a navigation overlay that users are already familiar with. So users get a much better, branded experience, and content managers get a waking nightmare. They not only have to manage all the places the content lives, they also have to manage the interface—ensuring every link is up to date and in the right place.

Creating an effective experience for the user
While each of the above systems have pros and cons, let’s look at some of the features and benefits of today’s most effective learning experiences. With tools like Brightcove Gallery’s Immersion template, you can combine the best of the above approaches and create an all-in-one training portal that both the users and content managers will love.
The first consideration is the ease with which users can access it. An often overlooked but important part of the experience is a branded, customized URL that takes them directly to the training portal.
Once they arrive at the training portal, the layout should be a completely branded, intuitive gallery that features all of the videos in any particular series. With a layout similar to the streaming services they’re already used to, users can easily see, navigate, and watch all of the videos in a given series. Additionally, related series will be easily accessible with a single click—or, if needed, quickly found through a powerful internal search engine.
Keep in mind that training videos don’t have to be a one-way experience. To be truly effective, you’ll need to keep your viewers engaged. Through Brightcove Gallery, you’re able to add an interactive experience to any video. For example, quizzes will help to ensure they retain the information. You could also have different paths within each video to give the user a “choose your own adventure” experience.
Creating an efficient experience for the content manager
Beyond the end user, it’s also important to ensure the content manager has the features and functionality they need to make the program a success. This includes ease of use and efficiency for ongoing use on a long-term basis. Take into consideration things like how quickly you can publish videos and how easily you can organize them. Choosing and adding videos to each collection should be a simple task.
For example, through the Brightcove Gallery you can select the videos you want by tags, existing playlists, or custom fields like keywords and search criteria. Similarly, if there are videos you want to exclude, those can be managed by tags as well. Finally, when it comes to creating the full training portal, you’ll want to be able to fully customize the look and feel of the page without the need for a designer or developer.
All of these features are easily accessible through the Brightcove Gallery template, Immersion. It’s ideal for companies with significant training and development needs and who want to provide users with the best experience possible.
In addition to having an effective and efficient way to create training portals, it also offers insights into employee engagement that you haven’t been able to measure before. By reviewing the video analytics, you’re able to see how often the videos are being watched, the percentage of each one being watched, and which topics employees are most interested in. This information will be vital to use for future training programs to ensure their success.
Finally, like all Brightcove Gallery templates, Immersion comes equipped with critical business features like SSO and role-based access to ensure your content stays secure.
Brightcove Enhances the Employee Experience
Delivering your learning and development programs through video is a simple, yet effective way to remain competitive as a company while retaining and attracting top talent. Brightcove’s Immersion template for Communications Studio makes it easy to customize the experience and create intuitive pages that mimic many of the most popular streaming services. By combining the power of enterprise-leading streaming technology with the interactivity employees want and security organizations need, you can provide the best experience for everyone.

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Several things hold organizations back from creating content, according to Lisa Gately, Principal Analyst at Forrester .

Siloed content
Lack of alignment on audience needs
Outdated manual processes or tools that don’t scale
Inability to see audience interactions across the full life cycle
Content management chaos

“These things are holding everybody back in this shift to a digital world,” said Gately during Brightcove’s PLAY Season 1. In her guest episode, she identifies the four major parts of the content life cycle and how to optimize them to overcome these hurdles.
Content Planning
Content planning is a foundational part of the content life cycle and should be a defined, repeatable approach across the organization. Gately observed, “In reality, this is not happening for most teams.”
In Forrester’s 2022 State of B2B Content Survey , Gately noted that almost half the respondents said they don’t have a defined approach. “That leads to a lot of siloed, reactive, ad hoc planning. It means things happen on a first-come, first-served basis, or maybe a very reactive basis, that they decide what content to put out in front of an audience.”
Marketers should approach content knowing not just what to say to the market, but knowing how audiences search for their products. “What do they call things? What did they use when they talk about issues and topics?” said Gately. This process helps marketers become very precise in their content recommendations: adjusting the content mix, knowing about past content performance, and being intentional about where future investments in content are going.
Practically, this means looking across the organization through the lens of a shared content inventory. “Is there existing content you can use? Could you get there faster? Could you reuse, customize some of the content that you have? Or think about repurposing it for some of those audiences?” asked Gately.
Content Production
“This is really the area when most people think about content,” said Gately. However, content production is more than just making content; it’s about smoothing out workflows and processes. “You’re building content with others, and you need it to go more smoothly.”
Furthermore, content is created everywhere, “whether it’s your content team, different parts of the organization, or the relationships you have with agencies and vendors, partners—even your customers,” explained Gately. Therefore, establishing repeatable processes is key.
Content Promotion
Creating content is exciting, but making sure it’s seen by the right people ensures the hard work is worthwhile. “Don’t leave content promotion to chance,” warned Gately. “We spend so much time thinking about the content we want to build, the creativity and expertise of creating the content, but we really need to focus on how it’s activated or promoted.”
To master this, Gately recommends that all marketers be prescriptive. “Think about this in terms of understanding your audience. It is knowing where they go for information, and what kinds of information they are looking for.”
The same applies for content for internal audiences as well. “When you make this content available to your internal audience, how are they going about getting this content? You want to make sure you tap into internal communications methods.”
Distribution is part of promotion too. Marketers should ask how certain content can be distributed easily for internal customer-facing stakeholders so that they can use it as quickly as possible.
“You want to make sure your analytics are right there. You want to notice who is using the content. And go back, take some extra effort. Notice how they set it up, how they customize it or serve it to the end audience,” explained Gately.
For both internal and external content, marketers need to make sure that they’re using tagging in metadata to best effect. “This is what helps you in noticing all those things from analytics.”
Content Operations
Content operations constitute the final stage of the content life cycle. “This is really an area that stands up to a big word like ‘transformation,’” said Gately. And as businesses begin acting more like media companies, this is a skill that sets them up for success. “I’m not understating it,” Gately continued. “Most marketers tell us this is the one area across the content life cycle where they want to get better.”
Gately says this is good news: “When you think about the power of content operations, that involves understanding what content you have, your use of metadata, taxonomy, the content technologies and processes in your organization, how you measure things. All of that is what sets you up for success.”
Emphasizing metadata, Gately added, “Master the metadata and taxonomy. That really is the key to the kingdom. This will help teams get a handle on content, its value, and whether they’re hitting business objectives with it.”
From there, Gately recommended streamlining workflows to make better use of what content a company does have. “Start talking about and rewarding teams for doing that,” she advised. And of course, invest in content operations, specifically by designating some leaders or dedicating resources to this. “They are going to help you build the competencies to go farther and faster.”

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The need for a strong, scalable and nimble business continuity plan is clearly evident today. Situations arise where last-minute cancellations have a drastic impact on businesses. But there is an alternative to cancellation: Innovative companies are leveraging video in their business continuity plans for both external and internal communications. This not only accommodates consumers’ immediate needs, it also fosters brand loyalty and builds new virtual communities as a result.
Here are some powerful examples of video use cases across industries that enhance external communications within a business continuity framework:
Event companies: Adopting a video strategy means supplementing offline offerings with online content by live streaming conference tracks, publishing video on websites and social media and/or making recordings of events available on-demand soon after they happen. The Brightcove video platform can scale to live stream some of the biggest events in the world, including sports, political elections, and industry conferences.
Online retailers: With foot traffic declining, online eCommerce orders have seen unprecedented surges of up to 300% in a week, with some retailers unable to cope with demand. Retailers need to create immersive online experiences to display their products, like Hugo Boss’s live-streamed fashion show. The time is now for brands to evolve their eCommerce strategy to include video, as well as cart checkout and delivery options.
Lifestyle and wellness brands: Lululemon in China opted to stream training classes directly to consumers who have little choice but to work out indoors because of gym closures. Online fitness brands like Alomoves and Peloton could experience a spike in subscriptions and video streaming traffic as more users choose to train at home.
Government agencies: In any breaking news scenario, communication is central to a government’s strategy. It is absolutely critical to connect with the public both offline and online and to deliver updates directly to devices. As government agencies roll out their digital transformation programs, expanding communication channels with citizens should be part of their core strategy. And any communication that includes a video element can be especially engaging and effective.
Education: When conditions prompt school closures and disrupt lesson plans, video e-learning can make a difference. Most schools are not prepared to implement a remote study option, but the beauty of technology in 2020 is that educational institutions can quickly adopt video streaming as a continuity plan. The once highly manual process of uploading slideware with no live commentary can now be replaced with lecturers uploading and publishing their lessons in video format with just a few clicks, then streaming them across various devices and browsers. The advances in streaming technologies make it easy for schools to serve remote students and minimize disruption to regular classes. Whether live-streamed or on-demand, video can be an effective contingency plan to make sure students can stay current with their coursework.
Faith-based organizations: These organizations have mostly relied on the physical attendance of their members but now face a challenge. With worshippers avoiding crowded environments, faith-based groups are exploring new ways to share their message and promote their events, sermons, and services – all of which can be video streamed to worshippers in their homes or on their mobile devices.
During any unexpected situation, brands and organizations need a business continuity plan that includes engaging and informing their customers and employees through offline and online channels.
In an effort to support our business community and help you avoid business disruptions, Brightcove is now offering 50 free hours of HD Live for 90 days. If you’d like to learn more about this offer, visit our page here.

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In mid-March we had a major decision to make – should we host our PLAY 2020 physical event at the Encore Boston Harbor resort, scheduled for May 18? It would be our 12th annual event celebrating video innovation, and it was unclear if we should cancel or reschedule. A few high tech companies were cancelling or moving their early spring events, but what was May going to look like? As CMO, I ultimately had to make the call. Despite intense interest and strong registration for the PLAY 2020 event, I couldn’t imagine putting customers, prospects, sponsors, and employees at risk for an event. There must be another way.
As the pandemic reality settled in, we quickly realized video is vital, now more than ever. We were fielding calls from our customers and people from across the industry about how video could help companies and people connect in new ways. In this moment, we recognized that PLAY was needed, now more than ever. We looked internally at what video capabilities we had to reach audiences at scale – and realized that Brightcove Beacon™, our new Saas based OTT platform to reach people on apps, web, and smart TVs, was the answer.
So, we decided to launch PLAY TV, a new streaming service dedicated to the topic of video – how to use it, how to be successful, and how to achieve results. This required our marketing team to think differently – this wasn’t a typical virtual event– it was a new streaming service. What would the audience expect from a streaming service about video?  How can we design a compelling content experience? What does content production look like in a virtual world? What topics are most relevant, right now? What are the new measures of success? And, how can we accomplish this as a virtual team in less than 60 days?
As we designed the new PLAY TV experience, we knew our audience at our physical PLAY conference expects thought leadership, technical know-how, and most importantly peer-to-peer video practitioner exchanges. So, we designed  PLAY TV as a place where you can hear from people managing change, using video, and looking at new ways to achieve success in our evolving world. This information is brought forward in a live and on-demand video format with a high quality user experience across web, mobile devices, and TVs.
And, PLAY TV will live beyond just a one time event, and be a resource to anyone working to develop a video strategy within their organization. Content will be updated on an on-going basis to help anyone in the video industry be successful.
The past 60 days have been a whirlwind of creativity, resulting in the launch of PLAY TV today. And it demonstrates how people and companies can truly evolve, innovate, adapt, and execute quickly in times of great change. I’m deeply grateful to the Brightcove team including our talented engineers who built this incredible new service, our creative marketers who developed and delivered a brand new content strategy, and most importantly our customers and partners who helped make this possible. You are my heroes. I’m so proud to stand with you as we launch PLAY TV. And, I look forward to the innovation that will continue in our journey ahead.
For those who are serious about video, I welcome you to enjoy PLAY TV, and appreciate your feedback.
With gratitude,
Sara Larsen
CMO Brightcove

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Year over year we continue to see an increase in video usage within marketing campaigns, in fact according to eMarketer 87% of Marketers worldwide use video as a marketing tool, this is up 6% from 2018.  However, most companies are still manually managing their video data, rather than connecting to their marketing automation platforms.
Why should you Automate?
When using an online video platform, like Brightcove, if you are not connecting it to your Marketing Automation Platform every email that drives to a video landing page, you will manually need to pull the data and then tie it all together to get a sense of exactly who is watching.
Since video is proven to be the most engaging and effective form of communication, ensuring that you capture all the engagement details around who is watching what video is vital to the success of your marketing campaigns. Brightcove uses our own analytics and tracking tools to tie the metrics of our video campaigns, into our Marketing Automation Platform which then feeds that information into Salesforce. These connections mean that we can track viewer activity without gating any of our video content, helping improve our users experience and driving more leads to sales. In addition, being able to see the increased visibility into our video engagement metrics, helps our creative team learn what types of videos are most effective, so they can help optimize existing content and improve future content creation for optimal campaign conversions.
Connecting to your Marketing Automation Platform, you can capitalize even more 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!). So my question is, have you connected Brightcove to your Marketing Automation Platform? If not, there is still time! We have out of the box integrations with the top Marketing Automation including Salesforce Pardot.
See how Brightcove Campaign can connect to video marketing automation platforms and take your marketing campaigns to the next level.

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Stories do more than just entertain, they inspire and educate people on topics that demand constant conversation. For Soledad O’Brien, renowned journalist and host of Matter of Fact, the ability to find these stories and share them with people around the world is incredibly important for solving important issues and inspiring change.
Although Soledad is often the one asking the questions, we decided to put her in the “hot seat” for a virtual discussion on the importance of video and how it helps to drive storytelling through an easily shareable visual experience.
**Soledad, how do you feel video has impacted the way we receive information? **
Video not only serves as an authentic, personable form of communication, it also makes telling stories easier. You can share a video with the click of a button, making sure everyone gets to see it, even if your audience is halfway across the world.
**Why do you believe video-driven storytelling is an important way to get information across? **
Generally information and data are often hard to understand at face value, video gives people the opportunity to use that information to build a story that is just as entertaining as it is educational.
And why do you think it is important for video experts to share their stories and ideas?
The video industry is filled with creative and knowledgeable experts that truly enjoy sharing experiences and ideas with those who are looking to tell better stories and reach more audiences.
**Lastly, where do you see the future of video going in 2020 and beyond? **
As technology quickly evolves and the ability to create and share video content becomes more accessible to everyone, the use of video will become limitless. Content creators will be able to produce videos from anywhere and stream their best work to viewers across the globe on every device.

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