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The 2018 Guide to Integrating Video Into Your Digital Marketing Technology Stack

December 11th, 2017
Video Marketing Automation, Video Marketing, TwentyThree, Video Marketing Strategy

Early last year, Forbes wrote an article proclaiming 2017 would be “the year of video marketing.” By all accounts, that was true, and video continues to grow into a medium that marketers cannot ignore. That’s why 2018 is the year of bringing video into the digital marketing tech stack, a year where it’s no longer acceptable to measure just views, impressions or shares. Similarly to the emergence of email and inbound marketing, it’s time to measure the real impact of video:

Who watched a video, when, and how long that user engaged

  • The ability to manage all video from one central location
  • Using video for lead generation, increased engagement, and all inbound marketing efforts 
  • A/B testing and lead scoring based on behavior

A traditional tech stack might include a marketing automation system, CMS, CRM, email system, various social channels, advertising/attribution and a number of other tools that marketers use for their campaigns. 

HubSpot’s Scott Brinker recently tweeted that “No SaaS is an island.” While this can be interpreted a number of different ways (partnerships), it can also mean that all companies need help to build their brand, customers, and users in other ways. Including a robust tech stack for not just SaaS companies, but all organizations.

In this blog we’ll break down where marketers can bring video into the main tools in their tech stack and why it matters in 2018.

Marketing Automation

Arguably to most important of all the technologies that should be integrated with video, marketing automation softwares allow marketers to lead score prospects based on video engagement data, automate activities around behavior, and nurture users down the funnel.

For example, HubSpot (plus Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Mailchimp, etc) can both be integrated into a video marketing platform to pass along valuable attribution data and allows marketers to build workflows around their video data. Here’s how it works for HubSpot + TwentyThree:

With pre-built integrations into marketing automation systems, it’s only a few clicks to start sending data back and forth to a video marketing platform, making for a seamless setup to immediately start measuring success.

Integrating video into a marketing automation system is the first step to using video for full-funnel marketing; across the entire marketing technology stack. It will set up marketing departments to start tracking the 50% of all website data that comes from video.

CMS

Including video in your CMS goes hand-in-hand with integrating video into a marketing automation system, as these embeds on any blog, landing page, or website page will need to be properly tracked for engagement and conversions. By embedding video codes into these various pages - whether that’s WordPress, Drupal, HubSpot or the many others - marketers can improve SEO (through hard-coded captions and transcripts) and engagement.

We found that video centric blogs have 300% more engagement than blogs that don’t feature videos prominently. And including a video on a landing page can increase conversions by 86%.

Specifically, Investopedia looks to have 80% of their videos to have a 95% completion rate. Here’s their CEO David Siegel talking about how their video strategy and how they embed videos on their academy hub:

By building video hubs and embedding videos across your CMS, marketers will get full-funnel attribution data about their video marketing campaigns.

Data

As mentioned before, half of all website data now comes from video, and Cisco projects that by 2019 that number will rise to 80%. This data is invaluable for sales teams looking to engage prospects based on their behavior. It also allows for marketing departments to attribute their video campaigns to revenue. By integrating through a marketing automation system, this data can be sent to CRM’s like Salesforce.

Branch - the leading mobile linking infrastructure company - measures their video marketing campaigns through Marketo and Salesforce:

Email

Email has been a reliable channel for marketers for decades. It allows marketers to directly tell their story to customers, without the noise of other channels like social media or search. And adding a video or animated thumbnail to a video can improve click-through-rates by 63% according to our State of Online Video 2017 report.

This can be done by embedding a customized code for each email provider (Mailchimp, Marketo, HubSpot, CampaignMonitor, Sharpspring), or by integrating directly to send personalized video: “Clicking Send video presents you with a video picker, allowing you pick any video that has been uploaded to your site before writing a personal message to the recipient.”

By including video into your email tech stack, marketers can expect to see higher CTR’s - which ultimately leads to more website engagement.

Social Management

Just like a CMS, marketing automation system, CRM, or email, social video must now be properly managed and measured. According to Buffer, “a Facebook video receives, on average, 135% more organic reach than a Facebook photo.” This trend of higher reach is why brands are focusing on social video in 2018. Facebook, Instagram YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all seeing increased video engagement year after year. This presents an opportunity for marketers to run video everywhere, across all social networks to the maximize the reach of their video content.

Bringing social video into the tech stack through a video marketing platform will centralize all metrics in one place, along with the ability to distribute video across all these channels with a few clicks. Direct integrations with the Facebook Pixel and Twitter Website tag will ensure the most accurate data for marketers:

Advertising & Attribution

Tools such as Mixpanel, AdRoll, Adobe Analytics, Segment, and Google Analytics are all invaluable for marketers measuring their sources. These can all be integrated into your video data through pre-built integrations with a few clicks. As mentioned, measuring video can improve your data by up to 50% to test and optimize.

As video continues to grow, it’s essential for companies to include video across their entire marketing technology stack. Whether that’s a CMS, CRM, email system, marketing automation, social management, or advertising/attribution, video will play a larger and larger role in 2018 for any marketer looking to fully harness the power of visual storytelling.

Want to convince your organization it’s time to stop manually tracking video? Download our 2018 Video Marketing Strategy Checklist here.



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