Integrating Video Analytics with Marketing and Sales Automation

Brightcove Integrates Video Analytics with Marketing and Sales Automation

As the leading provider of cloud services for video, Brightcove knows how powerful video can be for engaging prospects and customers. And by using its own innovative technology, the company’s Demand Generation team is proving just how powerful video can be in generating high quality leads for its sales force.

Brightcove’s four-person Demand Generation team manages the company’s North American customer and prospect base. They communicate with customers and prospects on a daily basis, running campaigns with up to 100,000 contacts that touch all stages of the customer’s journey. The team has been successfully using video to drive demand generation for many years. Now, they have taken video demand generation to the next level by integrating Brightcove Audience, a video analytics module of the company’s Video Marketing Suite (VMS), into their marketing and sales automation platforms.

Audience enables the team to measure video engagement at an individual level. For example, the team can identify that the VP of Marketing of XYZ company watched 90% of a specific video, while the marketing manager of the same company only watched 20% of the same video, but watched 100% of a second video.

Based on this data, the Demand Generation team can tailor its outreach specifically to each contact. The information goes directly into Brightcove’s Eloqua marketing automation database and syncs automatically with Salesforce, giving the marketing and sales teams a complete picture of the prospect’s or customer’s engagement with Brightcove.

Audience Bridges Marketing and Sales, Driving ROI

“Video is a key component of our campaigns, and tracking ROI is essential,” states Samantha Madden, Digital Marketing Campaign Manager. “We are excited to have a tool that provides actionable data and helps drive higher quality leads.”

Before Audience, the Demand Gen team didn’t have insight into how a specific contact engaged with video content. They had data on the total number of views, and a general engagement rate but no information on specifically who viewed the content and for how long.

Audience is proving to be a powerful sales enablement tool, providing a granular view of prospects’ behavior, activity, and interests. “Audience gives us insight into video viewing behavior, which signals a prospect’s level of interest,” states Madden. “Previously, we had to wait for prospects to get in touch with us; they had to fill out a lead gen form and identify themselves.” While that indicated to the Demand Gen team the prospect had some interest, there was no way to determine the level of engagement.

“Audience provides us with granular detail; it tells us not just how many people clicked the link and the average length of engagement, but who specifically clicked, how they accessed the video, how many times they viewed it and how much of it they watched,” continues Madden.

Audience Powers Tracking of Video Campaigns

Recently, Brightcove used Audience to track engagement for a customer marketing campaign introducing account managers to their customers. “Brightcove’s customer base includes thousands of companies and thousands of contacts within those companies,” explains Chris Bondhus, Director of Demand Generation. “We are always looking for ways to humanize Brightcove and personalize our interactions with customers, to connect with them. Regular html or plain text email is impersonal, while periodic check-in phone calls rarely connect, and they are hard to scale.”

The Meet Your AM video campaign consisted of:

• • 60-second videos of individual account managers discussing their role.
• Short, personalized text emails, sent from account managers via Eloqua, which included a thumbnail of the account manager’s video and a link to a unique landing page.
• Landing pages included fun facts about the account manager along with the video.
• Audience integrated the engagement data with Eloqua to capture who watched the video, for how long, and how many times.
• The team established alerts within Salesforce to notify each account manager when a contact was watching their video and exactly who was watching.

The results surpassed all performance expectations and delivered home run results. The initial video email campaign had a unique open rate of 35 percent with 567 total video views. The average video engagement was 82.84%. “Within 3 weeks more than 30 meetings were scheduled,” states Bondhus. “The best part is that many of the responses and meetings are with new contacts within the account, achieving our goal of visibility within additional business units of our current customer base.

Qualitative results were also impressive. “The account managers received about 120 direct responses, suggesting they had achieved a stronger connection with the customer. Responses ranged from ‘It’s so nice to see and hear your voice,’ to ‘This is a great campaign; I am going to show this to my management.’” notes Bondhus.

Interactive Call-to-Action Led to 100% Increase in Customer Meetings

In the second iteration of the campaign, the Demand Gen team tested interactive video available through a Brightcove partnership with HapYak. The interactivity component included a personalized call-to-action to schedule a meeting with the account manager as well as an open feedback area where they could ask the account manager a question. The questions went directly to the account manager via email in real time. At the end of the 60-second video, Brightcove added a survey asking recipients to list their priorities.

The Meet Your AM video campaign with interactivity achieved even better bottom line results than the first video campaign as a whole. It generated 16 meetings per account manager, twice the number of meetings of the video-only campaign. “We believe this was due to the the call-to-action, which also increased direct responses to the account managers by 15% compared to the non-interactive campaign,” continues Bondhus. In addition, the “cool” factor of the interactivity yielded feedback from customers who wanted to use interactive video for their own campaigns.

“We’ve only started to scratch the surface with interactive video. The personalization and creative possibilities are incredibly powerful,” concludes Bondhus. The Demand Gen team will continue innovating and optimizing with video to improve campaign performance and critical KPIs, such as pipeline creation, lead velocity, closed won business and customer retention.”