3 Key Takeaways from Video Marketing Automation Week

Hi, I'm Nick Barber, an analyst with Forrester, and today we're going to be talking about why brands need to embrace video in their marketing strategy. Video is such an important topic in 2017, and as we move through the year, it's going to be even more important because now we can start to assign return on investment or ROI on our video marketing content, and that's just going to power the industry moving forward. So, why am I talking to you about video? Well, I'm the analyst that covers video at Forrester. I cover online video platforms, video conferencing, digital asset management. But I'm not just an analyst when it comes to video, I'm a video practitioner. Before I came to Forrester about a year and a half ago, I was a video producer for a global tech media company, and I produced about 3,000 videos over the eight years that I was a video reporter and a producer. So, I've covered everything from the first iPad launch to green data centers to things like CES. So, I know not only around the content of video, but now I marry that with the technical expertise that I'm covering here at Forrester. So, let's start to talk about video, and we often say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? We think it's around 1.8 million words. That's because video is a collection of images, about 30 images per second, 60 seconds of video, a thousand words for every picture. That's how we get to about 1.8 million. And that's a good thing. Because it means we can pack a lot of information into video. And that's important, because our next statistic is 60,000. That's how many times faster your human brain processes video than text. So, again, we're cramming all of this information into video, but our brains are conditioned to consume information via video. So, these are all really important points moving forward as we craft our video. Important things to keep in mind. Now, video suffers from a history of being very expensive, being very difficult to produce. Oftentimes, you needed something like this, a control room, to produce your video content. But now, the cost is coming down. So, we're saving money on producing that video content. And now that we're moving into this new era, we're moving into the next generation of video, where we can integrate video with marketing automation platforms and CRM. We can start to assign value, and we start to see revenue coming in from video. We can attribute that to video now that we're integrating with marketing automation and CRM. And that's going to power the next generation of video, is being able to assign this ROI to our video content. So, we're coupled with cost savings from producing the format, and assigning ROI to the format. That's what's going to drive video in 2017 and beyond. And the only way that you can understand that ROI when it comes to video is by using an enterprise class online video platform. So, if you're using YouTube today, that's great. That's a great syndication tool for your video strategy. But really, an online video platform needs to be the core of your strategy. And over the next couple of slides, we're going to talk about why online video platforms can help you as a marketer drive your video strategy forward. So, how can online video platforms help you marketers assign ROI to your video content? We're going to take a look at a couple of trends that enable enterprise class online video platforms to help you as marketers. The first trend is cloud. And cloud helps you deploy more easily and scale much faster. So, when it comes to many different facets of video, so let's take, for example, user generated content that online video platforms help organize, categorize, and deliver. By using a cloud first online video platform, you'll be able to do that easier. You can give access to your video platform to many more creators around the world with a cloud based platform. And when it comes to delivery, that cloud based platform is one that's going to deliver high quality video to your consumers everywhere they are on the world and on every device that they're using. That's the only way you can do it, is with a cloud based online video platform. Something that's very key to the video strategy going forward. And we asked some digital experience decision makers, more than a hundred of them, what's important to you when you're selecting a solution? And up at the top, using best of breed applications, so that means using a purpose built online video platform to deliver your strategy. And also being able to deploy in the cloud, something that's very key to a video strategy. So, after cloud, what's our next trend? Our next trend is integrations. And this is going to be one that is going to be super important to video strategy moving forward. Especially when it comes to an idea of personalization, and especially when it comes to assigning value or ROI to these videos that you're creating. I've listed some of the integrations that we see as important to video platforms. It could be things like video conferencing, CRM, marketing automation, or even learning management systems, digital asset management, social and analytics. All of those integrations provide increased power and utility to these online video platforms. Now, today we're probably going to focus mostly on CRM and marketing automation, but it's important to realize that that's not the end of the story. There are other integrations that can power different facets of your business. Now, when it comes to CRM and marketing automation, let's take a look at a use case of video. And it's a piece of personalized video content that Lenovo launched not too long ago, about a year or two ago around the holiday season, for B2B marketers. And they took 3,000 people who were non-active in their email contact list. That meant that they had engaged with the brand for more than six months. And they pushed out these personalized videos to their email contacts. And what they found is this is actually a thumbnail of the image that went out in the email. And that was personalized. And then there were personalized elements inside of the video. And what they saw was that, their click-through rate on the video or on the email was four and a half times the average click -through rate for their email marketing campaigns. And then once their viewers went into the video, 78% of the viewers watched the entire video. So that complete rate and that click-through rate, astonishing for an email marketing campaign. Again, four and a half times the average click-through rate and 78% of those viewers completed the entire video with that personalized element. And the way that personalization happened was through a key integration through both CRM and marketing automation that powered both that personalization and that measurement. Let's go to another example. And I started today's presentation talking about my experiences at the International CES in January. in my previous job. And let's revisit that again. The Consumer Technology Association, which puts on CES every year. CES, for those of you who haven't been there, many of you probably have, draws 170,000 people to Las Vegas every January. And the Consumer Technology Association talked about the program, talked about the show through video. And through some of the key integrations with online video platforms, they were able to overlay an agenda on top of the video content. They were able to create clickable calls to action so that attendees and potential attendees could book their hotel room directly from that video content. So again, it's integrations that are powering this next generation of video. And that's going to continue to power video going forward. One of our next trends that we're seeing when it comes to video, and this is one that's going to help drive some ease of use for both you as a marketer and for your end consumers of that video. And we're starting to see a convergence in the market. There are a variety of tools that you use today as a marketer that relate to video. And the good news is that those tools are beginning to converge. So what's that mean for you as a marketer? It means that you're eventually going to be able to use less solutions and less vendors to achieve the same level of utility and of engagement. So what are some of the areas that we see converging? Enterprise video platforms with online video platforms. Those enterprise video platforms are the ones that deliver video to employees. Online video platforms are the ones that deliver video to customers and prospects. The content is the same. On-demand and live video. But the audience is different. Employees and customers and prospects. And each of those spaces can pull from one another to create value when it comes to delivering video. The other two spaces, video conferencing and webcasting. Both of them deliver one-to-one or few-to-few video or even few-to-many video. And we see functionality from both the video conferencing and the webcasting. And the webcasting space begin to converge as well. So these four technologies, the convergence around them is happening now. And marketers stand to benefit from this market convergence. The next trend, analytics. We all know analytics are so important when it comes to video. But let's just dispel a myth right here. Video views are a vanity metric. If you get a thousand views on a video, ten thousand views on a video, a million views on a video, that's great. Give yourself a pat on the back. But how do you know who is watching your content? For a B2B marketer, for example, wouldn't it be more important for your video to be viewed by, say, ten C-level executives than a thousand people who you don't know anything about? And that's where analytics comes in. And that's also where analytics integrations with marketing automation and CRM continue to provide value. Because we know how much a lead is worth. You know how much a lead is worth. But unless we're able to drive lead generation with video, you're going to be continually relying on those vanity metrics that are around views. So analytics help producers understand performance. It's often said that it takes about 13 or so marketing touches to get to a conversion. Well, if we're using live video or on-demand video with clickable calls to action, maybe we can drive three or four of those marketing touches in a single video clip. And that ends up getting us to conversion faster. So those are some of the key trends in online video. But let's talk about how the video market is changing in 2017 and beyond. First off, let's look at where investment is happening. There is some information that came out from the Interactive Advertising Bureau that talked about how the shift is moving away from traditional broadcast. Now, we've had for a long time, we have tried to decouple the idea of video and TV. For so long, TV and video have been synonymous. But now, finally, we're starting to decouple those two topics. And video can live online without the help of broadcast and TV. And you can see that specifically here in how the expected change in ad spend is happening. Desktop video and mobile video, we're seeing increased ad spend. And broadcast video, we're seeing decreased ad spend. So finally, that shift is happening. Where we can decouple video from TV and broadcast. One of the other key trends in the video space is deploying video to each stage of the customer lifecycle. Here at Forrester, we define the customer lifecycle as the six steps that customers and potential customers move through as they consider purchase decisions. So those six steps, discover, explore, buy, use, ask, and engage. And when you're creating a video strategy as a marketer, it's very important to consider how your customers act in each of those different stages. And video is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach. It could be, you could have those brand videos in the discover and the explore phase. But maybe you have quick start tutorials and how-to guides in the use and ask phase. And it's your online video platform that helps you map your content to the right stage in the customer lifecycle. You'll notice there are two rings that go around that customer lifecycle, with personalized video and user-generated content. I'd probably even add a third ring around live video content. So video personalization can mean personalized video playlists. It can mean in-video personalization. It can mean personalization through email campaigns that include video. All things that are tools inside of your marketing arsenal. Also user-generated content, something that's going to be very important in 2017 and beyond. And now online video platforms can support it. So when we talk about user-generated content, what do we need to remember? Well, we need to remember a key metric here. About a third of online adults consume user-generated content at least weekly. And in some verticals, user-generated content is outpacing official videos. Online video platforms are really important in this because they allow you to ingest, curate, organize, moderate, and preview that user-generated content before you decide whether or not it's something that you want associated with your brand. It also powers you to measure it, figure out what kind of user-generated content really gives us the best performance. And maybe what stage of the customer lifecycle is that content most important in. We also talked about live video. Now I'm going to show you a slide from Taco Bell, which did a Friendsgiving live stream last fall, in the fall of, I believe it was 2016. And live video is getting a lot of attention, especially because we're seeing Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms really empower users to create their own live video. And that's a format that marketers need to take advantage of as well. And we're seeing online video platforms step up to that challenge of supporting live content. So when Taco Bell did their live stream, what did they find? They had 150,000 live views. It went on to have 1.2 million on-demand views. And it got comments like, bring back the lava sauce, damn it. So when it comes to live content, what do we need to keep in mind? There are two key metrics around live content. One is that viewers watch live video three times longer than on-demand content. So you're getting greater user engagement when it comes to live content. And second is that two-thirds of the watch time happens after the event. So oftentimes you can get discouraged by the number of live concurrent views. Maybe you only have a few hundred. Maybe you have a few thousand, and you're one of the lucky ones. But keep in mind that 67% or two-thirds of the watch time happens after that live event concludes. So your video will go on to live a very prosperous life as on-demand content. And before I leave you today, I want to leave you with one very key metric to close today's presentation. Now, we all want this reaction when it comes to video. We want our audience to be engaged. We want them to be excited. And keep in mind, video is very unique because consumers are 39% more likely to share content if it's delivered through a video. So go ahead and share me after you finish this. With all of this in mind, go out and create. Create that engaging content and use your online video platform to deliver that engaging experience to your customers. Thanks, everyone, for your time today. Again, my name's Nick Barber. I'm an analyst with Forrester. Feel free to contact me with the information below.