Engaging Your Audience With Video at Every Stage of the Customer Journey

As the role of the marketer has moved from delivering impressions to delivering bottom line results, the marketing model has also evolved from the funnel to the customer lifecycle.  SiriusDecisions reported that 67% of the buyer’s journey is driven through digital channels and content. Most of that content is being created by marketers who are looking to find measurably effective ways to have their messages heard above the online noise.  

Video is proven to be one of the most effective marketing tools. Study results demonstrate that video is a powerful tool to bring people to your site, keep them on your site consuming content, and double the conversion rate of sites without video.  

So the question is no longer WHY should marketers use video, it’s HOW can marketers use video.

In a recent Content Marketing Institute webinar, Brightcove presented how to engage your audience with video at every stage of the customer journey to reach marketing and communication goals. Following is an encapsulated version of that presentation we hope will inspire your own video marketing excellence.

In the Awareness stage of the customer journey, customers are looking for a solution to a need. The pharmaceutical company Janssen is a Brightcove customer with an innovative approach to the awareness stage. Janssen strives to give prospects and customers valuable information about health issues, becoming a trusted source of information. To do this, it created microsites for the various health issues its products address, such as Intestinal Bowel Disorder (IBD). Their IBD-focused site “Get Your Full Course” features content from Food Network personality and IBD-sufferer Sunny Anderson, as well as a nutrition expert, and the head of the Crohns & Colitis Foundation of America. The content gives IBD-sufferers factual health information, as well as food and cooking content that help viewers better manage their own health. The microsite wisely includes social media links for the sharing of this beneficial information.

Engagement is the stage in marketing where artistry meets statistics and technology to serve your audience the right information to move them towards conversion. If your video platform is integrated with your marketing automation platform (MAP), you have the increased opportunity to deliver highly targeted content. OnBase by Hyland began adding video into their marketing mix very simply and easily by A/B testing gating video content with a lead form mid-roll and post-roll. By tying this information into their MAP via Brightcove Audience, they were able to find the most effective video gating strategy for their needs, and also feed valuable individual content consumption into their other analytics.

Symantec, another Brightcove customer, created a very sophisticated engagement experience by using Brightcove partner SnapApp to build interactive quizzes and lead forms into their videos, then feeding that information into Eloqua to serve up further content based on the information received. In this way, they were able to use a few simple questions to create an individualized two-way exchange of information to ensure they served the right content to the right individual at the right time.

For most marketers, the conversion stage goal is a purchase of a product or service. As we noted earlier, video has been proven to provide 2x the conversion of sites without video.  Brightcove customer Starwood Resorts proved this across all nine of its distinct global brands.  Each brand has a separate site and a separate library of video content, but all deliver the same impressive video marketing results. They place well-produced, highly targeted videos highlighting a property next to the booking module.

Modern marketers know that conversion, although important, is really a midpoint. It’s much easier to upsell or resell to customers rather than start net-new every time. So retention has gained in importance. Herbalife is a global nutrition and weight management company with over 3 million independent distributors in over 90 countries. While also looking to attract new customers, their business is focused on serving existing customers over long periods and possibly a lifetime. Brightcove helped them launch 32 sites in 23 languages with over 6,000 assets, in just 6 weeks from kick off to go-live, all using Brightcove Gallery.

Another Brightcove customer using Gallery is AccuWeather, which created an impressive “Video Wall” that was built and launched in just three weeks, allowing AccuWeather to deliver on its goal of humanizing and dimensionalizing weather in a way that engenders return visitors and even content creators. The new site led to an almost 63%, video view increase over the same month the year prior. One category of their video portal is specifically designated for user generated content (UGC) in addition to the other content categories such as weather news, storm chasers, and AccuWeather expert reports. By utilizing Gallery’s built-in SEO and social sharing features, the advocacy videos easily create awareness for new visitors and the customer journey begins anew.

For more customer examples and videos, go to the on-demand Brightcove CMI webinar.

We’ll be at Content Marketing World Sept 9-11, 2015. Visit us at booth #83 to discuss how you can better use video in your marketing strategies!