Riding the Multi-Platform Video Wave

Using video to boost your online presence isn’t new, but making it work across devices is a challenge for even the most committed of digital marketers.

Video marketing is often the most likely to be shared, so knowing the basics of video solutions is key.

Here are my tips to utilise its value in a marketing campaign.

Picking a Platform

• Use a video platform that can map the video content to each specific device automatically (e.g. set top boxes, connected TVs, laptops, tablets and smartphones) and then adapt the encoding, navigation and playback experience accordingly. 
• A five-minute HD video incorporating lots of fancy graphics will not deliver the desired effect on a smartphone, for example.

Social Shares

• Ensure there are SEO, content discovery and social sharing tools available to help viewers find your video content.
• Providing flexible metadata in HTML, easy click-paths to media files and H1 titles can help here, as can the ability to share the media, as social sharing drives distribution.
• Look for syndication and distribution functionality, which allows you to feed your content to third-party platforms and enable increases views. This process is very exacting, because other applications require specific media and metadata formats. 
• To properly serve branding, marketing and traffic goals, your platform must support different formats to ensure that your media package is delivered to other sites with all necessary components intact.

Advertising and Analytics

•  Look for a system that allows you to track analytics in real-time and make changes to video campaigns based on this data.
• A range of monetisation options should also be available, such as advertising, premium and freemium models. 
• This will ease the burden on your sales and marketing teams and will help you make the most of your content.

User Generated Content

•  Support for user-generated content is important if you would like to rely on new and exciting stories being posted by users. 
• Your video platform should allow users to upload their own media in a secure, moderated and governed environment.

The Power of Preformance

• High-level performance is a must. Unresponsive sites and endless buffering video players are often passed over in favour of fast, functioning players. 
• Make sure that your platform retrieves data efficiently, loads quickly on any device and doesn’t lag when transcoding new files.
• A future-proof system that can integrate with technologies that haven’t been introduced to the market yet is also important. 
• Choose a platform that contains extensive APIs, a partner ecosystem, and a plug-in architecture that can extend the platform with new features.
• Scalability and stability are critical because, as your traffic grows, your system must be able to scale without crashing. 
• Deploy a system with high-availability architectures with complete failover and redundancy for all infrastructure components.

Security Shouldn't be a Turn Off

• A platform that strikes the right balance between high-quality security controls and minimal user inconvenience is ideal. 
• Apps can have many authentication/authorisation mechanisms, including: custom databases with user information, user restrictions, varying levels of access control and complete digital rights management.

Video content has proven to be more engaging and viral than text, but there are many technicalities and details to tend to if you want to deliver video to any device seamlessly.

Ultimately, you want to focus on marketing and not technology. Your viewers simply want to click play and instantly enjoy your video content, regardless of their device or internet connection.

To that end, you should deploy a video solution that can provide you and your audience with the optimal experience, while investing minimal effort.

Photo (cc) Racum.