How Avanade's Video Performance Skyrocketed
Established in 2000, Avanade is the leading provider of innovative digital and cloud-based services, business solutions, and customer experiences, all delivered through the Microsoft ecosystem. The company has 80 office locations in 20 countries across the globe, generating $2 billion annual revenues, and employs more than 30,000 employees. To date, Avanade has delivered over 10,000 projects to approximately 4,000 clients worldwide, 43 percent of which are Fortune Global 500 companies.
Page views double, viewers engagement increase fourfold with martech integration
While Avanade was using video as a digital marketing tool, the company’s digital strategy wasn’t primarily focused on or tied to any sales objectives. Instead, Avanade concentrated solely on content. “Video was giving us bare-bones metrics, like how many people watched or played our videos,” says Matt Stegen, Senior Director of Digital Marketing. Unfortunately, this same data couldn’t show how videos were impacting sales goals, or how they might be affecting conversion and retention.
After recognizing how limited Avanade’s content-centric marketing approach really was, Stegen and his team reformulated the company’s digital plan, creating a user-focused video marketing strategy capable of targeting all parts of the customer journey. They decided to look at video in a new way, focusing less on impressions and views, and more on how videos convert and impact sales. The company also changed its approach to evaluating video content. Instead of measuring performance, Stegen and his team would now study which distribution channels see the most engagement, which videos reach the most target clients, and which videos have the most impact on the sales life cycle.
With a new video strategy, martech data stack, and content evaluation process in place, the company is now able to keep an accurate measure of video’s impact on sales and deliver personalized video experiences to viewers. Since implementing the new system, Avanade has seen its page views double, and viewers now engage with Avanade’s content four times more than before. And as audiences remain on site to consume video content, they also lend to Avanade’s decreasing bounce rate.
“They click, they’re downloading, they’re engaging with more content,” says Stegen. “They stay with us longer—four times longer, in fact. And they’re taking the next click action with us.”
Brightcove integration, audience module help propel digital framework
To complement Avanade’s newly refined video strategy, the company also developed a comprehensive digital ecosystem to track and consolidate video-based data across the entire customer journey. Within this ecosystem, consolidated data provides Avanade a more thorough analysis of where prospects are within the sales cycle. By integrating Brightcove Video Cloud with Avanade’s web delivery and asset management solution (Sitecore), marketing automation platform (Marketo), CRM (Microsoft Dynamics), and its company website, and then combining data from social media and paid display ads, Stegen could now show the correlated impact of video on conversion.
He then developed a strategic scorecard system to track video data captured through Avanade’s new marketing tech stack. These scorecards identified which specific elements of video resonated most among viewers, including style, length, format, page location, and distribution channel. From this information, Stegen and his digital team would be able to pinpoint ideal types of video content and distribution channels for attracting prospects and closing sales.
“It’s not a matter of how many KPIs populate your scorecard,” says Stegen. “It’s about how much meaning they carry.”
Stegen attributes Brightcove’s Audience module as one of the driving forces behind Avanade’s new marketing tech ecosystem. By plugging the Audience module into the Brightcove platform, Stegen and his digital team are able to see detailed viewership data across all video distribution channels, which is then transferred and attributed to contacts within the company’s sales database. Avanade’s sales team can then craft tailored messages to qualified prospects and begin the lead nurturing phase of the customer journey.
“Having those three systems [Brightcove, Sitecore, and Marketo] speak to one another and having a vascular system in between them—specifically with the help of the Brightcove Audience module talking to our marketing automation solution—we’re able to see more, understand more, and be able to deliver more power with data through the video we’re providing to a client,” he says.