Communicate sits down to discuss video content with Sophie Rayers, director of marketing for EMEA & LATAM, Brightcove, global solutions provider for the delivery and monetization of video across devices.
Could you break down the services offered by Brightcove?
At Brightcove we work across two different areas: On one side, video is the marketing mechanism and we host, publish and distribute that video content onto social and online platforms. We perform whatever management goes with those functions as well as enable our clients to measure the performance of that content. On the other side, we support media organizations whose product or service is video content, helping them monetize across different devices and unlock revenue. The Brightcove technology itself is a cloud-based solution that allows clients to upload, manage, publish, and then, in the case of media organizations, to actually make money out of that online content.
Video in itself drives very high levels of engagement, so the metrics around that industry are that web pages with video convert two times more than websites that don’t have video. From a social perspective, video is about 1,500 percent more shareable than both text and images combined. It also has extremely strong SEO benefits. Video is seen as high quality object by Google, so just having video on a landing page, is going to boost the site up the search rankings, a boost that is 52 times greater than a page without video.
You want to use video that is more generic but tells a story to that particular target audience. Once someone is seriously considering converting, with your hotel or your restaurant, you want to provide a story that gets to the core of what you’re trying to achieve. Anything that is user-generated has a lot of authenticity, so maybe a hotel marketing strategy would be to run a competition to win a weekend at your hotel through submitting a video. This type of video is particularly powerful.
Are the region’s brands and marketers provide video content to the consumers hungry for it?
Yes and no, the marketing teams here want to use video. The challenge that they have is belonging to a larger brand or parent company and typically those parent companies exercise a lot of control over their web properties. One of the ways we work around that is to provide a solution that is called Brightcove Gallery, which is a video portal. Our clients don’t have to create videos directly on their sites, but they can add the video to our portal with links on the main client site, so the infrastructure of the main page is not interrupted.
How should brands go about developing a video content strategy?
Brands should build a solid plan determining what is the goal behind that video content. Don’t treat video content in silos but as part of a wider campaign. Video should be an extension of the overall campaign and brand story. Before creating video content, brands need to ask themselves: does it fit the brand, does it serve a purpose and what is that purpose, and who is the target?
As the technology industry gets more fragmented its more and more difficult for users across devices to have the most optimized experience for their device. And this is why professional systems exist.
Most importantly, brands need to look at the metrics of video content. On the macro level, the brand should think about the number of times that content was uniquely viewed, how many times people played that content, what devices were they watching it on, where did they come from and what did they do next. And then on the micro level, brands should want to understand the engagement, so how much of that content did they watch, what did they do next with that content.
See more from Rayers in this video.
