Integrating Video With Your Tech Stack

Today’s marketers and communicators are focusing holistically on the viewer experience. Companies of all kinds are realizing they have to build architectures that marry content with data and deliver experiences that compel and delight their audience.

“Platforms that knit together to help form this unified customer experience. And those are platforms that should be used in every organization, all the way through the organization, to deliver that wonderful customer experience. So those are the purchases that should be centralized. Everybody should be using the same CRM, the same marketing automation platform, the same video platform, so you're able to knit these things together and create that great experience.” - Anita Brearton, Founder/CEO CabinetM

When you integrate your online video platform (OVP) with your existing tech stack, like your CMS, MAP, and CRM, it ensures your company can make the most of your video investment. Workflows are streamlined, experiences are heightened, and marketers can now focus on building long-term personal relationships with customers and prospects.

Furthermore, when cross-enterprise video platforms are integrated with eCDNs and single sign on (SSO), it allows for IT, HR and other internal communications to utilize these same system pathways.

Below, we’ll discuss the various ways in which video can be integrated into your company’s technical ecosystem.

Connecting Your CMS and OVP

Managing a content strategy can be overwhelming, as can putting all that content in one place. Video communicators and strategists at all levels of a company spend much of their day pulling assets from numerous systems and working with many internal collaborators.

Creating an efficient content workflow and maintaining an asset library that works across various systems is absolutely vital. So what do you have to gain by integrating your OVP into your CMS? When video flows freely to web publishers via connectors and/or media management APIs from your OVP to your CMS, video becomes accessible to every person in your organization who publishes content.

The OVP and CMS connection also opens the door to dynamic publishing based on tags, and adding video results to search on your website. Video is now an integral part of your digital marketing and internal communication workflows and not isolated from it. Now let’s look at how video can perform in your marketing campaigns.

Integrating Video Data into Your Marketing Automation Platform

Marketing automation gives marketers a complete picture of an individual prospect or customer, leveraging the digital interactions monitored through your CMS, and now, OVP. Marketing automation allows you to utilize the analytics from both platforms to send content based on individual interests, delivering the right content to the right person at the right time. Strategically placed video increases email opens, CTRs, and landing page conversion, boosting your lead generation.

You can also gather leads via MAP-specific and/or progressive profiling forms placed before, during, or after a video viewing. Again, the video data pushed into your MAP helps you qualify, segment, and nurture those leads. By integrating video and marketing automation platforms, you can take much greater control of your marketing efforts and increase ROI.

Pulling Video Analytics and Content Preferences into Your CRM

CRMs empower conversations, bridging the gap between marketing and sales with information. CRMs are powered by the rich data provided by your OVP, CMS, and marketing automation. By integrating your OVP with your marketing automation and CRM platforms, you create customer interactions with the sales team that are more targeted, efficient, and effective for all. Sales reps love a complete profile.

Because of the data flowing between these systems, it will be clear what videos were watched, how much of the content was consumed, what additional content was sent via marketing automation, and lastly, when in these marketing efforts the individual was qualified as a sales-ready lead. All this information personalizes sales follow-up, creating a better experience for your prospect and leading to more conversions and upsells for your sales team.

Streamlining Security with SSO and eCDN

Internal communicators may not have the broad tech stack needs of marketers aligning their video marketing across multiple channels and campaigns, but internal comms can present it’s own set of unique challenges. An important partner in your tech stack ecosystem, IT, needs to make sure that internal-only communications stay that way—secure and accessible only to an internal audience (employees, franchise owners, partners, and more).

A single sign-on (SSO) integration enables select groups of employees to view video seamlessly without having to go to a new site and enter a special password. This all takes place behind the firewall. SSO also integrates video with your existing user management solution, giving IT, HR and anyone else who manages company communications, centralized control over who has access to what video content.

By integrating your video platform with an eCDN (enterprise content delivery network) you ensure internal video viewers can simultaneously watch live or VOD streams without plugging up the company network. eCDNs let you minimize your bandwidth usage, latency, and buffering, which means your content is delivered in highest resolution and plays to the highest standards, without clogging up the intranet.

When you have a company of 10,000 employees, you can imagine the network strain of everyone watching the CEO’s live town hall. eCDN and OVP integration means you can concentrate on the content you’re delivering, without worrying about bringing down the corporate network.

Reporting on Video Analytics and Campaign Success

The marriage of content and data comes together with analytics. Marketers and communicators, and sales teams love data, but who doesn’t? Video metrics are one of the most insightful tools for determining the value of campaigns and singular communications.

The analytics that flow through integrated platforms will allow you to understand how video content is performing, which you can share with web development, business intelligence, and sales teams. Tech stack integrations help us to align both external video marketing campaigns and internal communications with business goals and results, demonstrating ROI.

“We're not spending the time as marketers to think thoughtfully about not only the technology that we're going to use, but the integration with all the other pieces of technology out there and what are the other departments that need to leverage that?” - Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

Marketers and internal communicators crave the creativity and business results of video, but also look for efficient workflows. That’s where a little knowledge of tech stacks comes in handy. We don’t need to be fluent in things like RESTful APIs and webhooks—it just needs to work.

With the right integrations, you get to 1) create memorable experiences for employees, prospects, and customers, 2) make IT happy with higher utilization of of existing platforms throughout the digital and marketing stack, and that all leads to 3) the creation of revenue for your company and greater ROI across the board.