Video marketing is one of the most effective ways for brands to reach their customers. But while leading brands are learning to target and personalise video with data insights, many still struggle to get full value from their video libraries and production.
You probably don’t need us to tell you about the importance of video marketing. Today, video is part of the strategy for almost 90% of marketing teams. And more than four fifths of those (83%) say it delivers a good return on investment.
Getting ROI from Video Marketing
Getting the maximum ROI isn’t just as simple as pumping out video and hoping the right audiences find it. As video marketing becomes increasingly data-led, data insights provide great opportunities to improve the success of your video distribution. And it also lets you tailor your production strategies for the best results.
It’s an important area, and marketers are falling over themselves to produce tailored or even personalised videos. But the challenges of video production, management, storage and distribution only become more evident.
Effectively coordinating multiple media partners, ensuring that video assets are securely stored and shared, and tracking views and downloads with meaningful data are all critical to getting the best results. Too many marketers are losing control of the process.
Without Media Asset Management
Stop us if the following sounds familiar… In addition to multiple internal stakeholders, you produce marketing videos with the help of one or more external media partners. Your video library is stored on-premises, perhaps on a network drive. But various versions, source files, cuts and formats are missing – presumed to be somewhere on a partner’s server.
It’s confusing enough, but informal workflows mean that you’re sharing content-in-production via freemium platforms like WeTransfer or Dropbox. And worse still, you’re not sure who’s got access to what, and whether it’s secure.
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These are common problems for anyone involved in video marketing. And often they’re the legacy of having moved quickly to embrace the format as it exploded in popularity. But even with a highly organised approach, there’s a limit to what you can do with tools that aren’t built for the job of secure video management.
The Distribution Conundrum
Today’s data-driven marketers face another key problem when it comes to distribution. Social channels such as Twitter or Facebook might be a great way to reach your audience. But the insight to help you understand and improve how your content performs is locked away in their proprietary, on-platform analytics.
It’s hard to have an authoritative overview of which platforms, formats and content types resonate with your audience when you don’t have a single set of metrics to analyse.
For businesses that are serious about video marketing, it’s crucial to get the maximum return from your content. This means streamlining and effectively managing every aspect of the production and distribution processes.
And for that, you need a media asset management platform.
Securing Video Production and Distribution with a MAM
As the name suggests, a media asset management (MAM) platform is designed from the ground up to solve these issues. A MAM manages the production, storage, retrieval and distribution of content such as videos. At the most basic level, this means providing a centralised, secure repository for all your video assets. But the best offer support for advanced metadata that enables quicker and more accurate searches.
In practice, cloud hosting means that the best MAMs go much further, providing a centralised and secure repository from which to share content. With this archive encrypted and access provided via user logins, marketers can be sure that works in progress are only available to relevant production partners and internal stakeholders.
At the same time, cloud availability means that the right people can get the right content quickly. Support for versioning eliminates confusion about who has the latest edit, and ensures that stakeholders are seeing and signing off on the correct revisions.
Control in the Cloud
This kind of control is fundamental in securing and streamlining the video marketing production process, preventing assets going missing or work being duplicated. It’s become vital to Imagen customers such as Cimpress, which produces hundreds of videos each year.
“Video has become an important communications vehicle to reach and engage our 6,500 colleagues across 40 global offices,” says Cimpress’ Associate Creative Director, Stephen Gibbons. “Imagen has allowed us the flexibility to… meet our unique requirements, from matching our brand, to providing permissions-based access to our internal and sometimes sensitive content. The platform has changed the way we communicate with our internal and external stakeholders.”
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Taking Control of Your Archive
A MAM doesn’t just make it easier to monetise or manage your video library: sometimes it’s an essential part of creating and taking control of the archive in the first place. Before implementing Imagen, most of the International Tennis Federation (ITF)’s vast catalogue of footage was stored offsite in physical formats. With content being time-consuming and expensive to retrieve, the ITF was unable to realise the value of its own footage.
Imagen is working with the ITF to digitise and ingest its archive assets, making them available for external licensing opportunities, and to the video marketing team. With a growing catalogue of fully tagged and easily retrieved content, the team can now draw on a growing library of unique content to produce standout videos.
“Thanks to the Imagen platform we can now react quickly, promoting current events with related archive content,” said Bethany Lowney, from the ITF’s commercial department. “Marketing teams are now able to quickly make use of winning points and celebrations, and the opportunities for clip sales and licensing has increased too.”
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The Insight to Succeed
As we’ve seen, a MAM provides a single, coherent archive. And it maintains security when sharing assets to, and retrieving them from, external production partners. MAMs like Imagen are also designed to act as the backbone of your video distribution strategy. They allow you to host and publish videos through a branded customer portal, for example. Or push them to the third-party channels where your audiences expect to find them.
Crucially for marketers, Imagen also collates video usage data, providing key insights into how audiences consume and share your content. Imagen manages analytics alongside the videos to which the insights relate. This provides unique information into the content types and channels that work for different audiences, offers and messages.
University Challenge Accepted
It’s this kind of insight that has helped Auburn University grow the exposure for its college athletics footage exponentially since becoming an Imagen customer. The university’s dedicated video sharing platform provides self-service access to journalists. And Imagen’s analytics provide insight to the university’s production teams, allowing them to hone their own creative strategies.
“What we found was we had a much bigger audience than we could have ever anticipated,” said Auburn University’s Director of Multimedia and Video Services, Weston Carter. “For us, we had no idea that this was how our users were looking to download this content. We found we had extended use in unknown markets. Imagen gave us the capability to benefit from these and get our content out there to grow our brand regionally and nationally.”
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Capitalising on the Appetite for Video
It’s clear that marketers face an insatiable appetite for videos. But the greater focus on data insights and personalisation is driving demand for tailored content. With more video to produce, marketers face rapidly escalating costs and risks unless they can take control of the process.
Investing in a MAM is the best way for anyone involved in video production and distribution to streamline their workflows and manage stakeholder relationships. More than that, it’s an essential tool in releasing the maximum value from existing video assets – as many Imagen customers are happy to attest.
Imagen gets your footage to the right people, in the right places, at the right time. Secure, measurable and unbelievably quick, discover how leading companies like BP, ATP Media, Reuters and the BBC use Imagen to unlock value from their video.
