Brief Profile of Mr. Greg Armshaw
As Senior Director, Strategy for Brightcove across APAC, Greg consults with enterprises helping them
create strategies to build businesses with video. He has more than 20 years of experience in advertising
and digital marketing and has rich experience in building consumer offerings in the enterprise brands and
media sector in Asia. Greg has been associated with Brightcove since 2017 and has led the company to
achieve a dominant market position in the region with digital-first companies, Free to Air TV, and Pay TV
content owners. He is a Board Director at Asia Video Industry Association and also a regular industry
commentator. Greg is based in Singapore and has been working across Asia since 2006.
Passionate in Marketing caught up with Mr. Greg Armshaw, Senior Director of Strategy, Brightcove
- Brief overview of Brightcove, the company’s mission, and the services offered
Brightcove is a robust cloud-based streaming technology platform enabling individuals and businesses to share, stream and host videos since 2004. By building the most intelligent and cost-effective streaming technology platform, we offer limitless scale, world-class security, and powerful integrations to power live and on-demand video experiences for leading broadcasters, publishers, and brands. Our mission is to provide complete solutions combined with profound expertise to enable businesses to expand their reach, increase sales, build meaningful connections with their audiences, and fully monetise their content.
In India, Brightcove’s operations began in 2017. Since then, we have enabled businesses from traditional broadcasters and publishers, to enterprises including retail, e-commerce, healthcare, edtech, and sports to publish, distribute, measure, and monetise broadcast-quality video. With our streaming technology, we support businesses of all sizes in owning their digital future. With more and more businesses embracing video to navigate the post-pandemic world, at Brightcove we strive to expand our capabilities and redefine what’s possible every day.
- What are the evolving video trends in the Indian market and the factors fueling the growing video views? How has the pandemic strengthened the case for video?
The Indian market has seen explosive growth in digitisation, fueled by both the increasing penetration and adoption of the internet, and by increasing demand for video content. India, like other markets has seen a blurring of lines between content for personal versus professional consumption. With video as the preferred method to consume content, organisations are shifting their focus to provide video content for their audiences that not only engages, but educates, and motivates consumers to action.
According to Brightcove’s Q1 2022 Global Video Index Report, India witnessed a whopping 107% increase in video views between October 2021 and March 2022. Not surprisingly, entertainment, news and sports video saw increasing video views in India across this period, however the most significant change was the impact to Enterprise video—video content across Corporate Communications, Marketing and Sales, and Retail—which saw 174% increase in views and 71% time watched in India alone. These figures suggest that the impact of remote work has driven up adoption of video, and broader-scale adoption across enterprises in the India market for business evolution.
The report also highlights the shifting preferences in content consumption by device, time watched and content length. Whilst not broken out specifically for India, we do see the market following global trends, where the smallest screen—smartphones—dominate not only percentage share of device and time watched. Smartphones are also holding their own when it comes to ultra-short and short-form content often due their availability, but also ease of accessibility to this type of content.
- Shed light on some strategies that can help businesses boost their marketing plans?
Changing consumer preferences, the shifting Marketing mix, and a plethora of choice when it comes to channels and content formats mean the modern Marketing landscape is challenging. Video marketing, however, has firmly cemented itself in the modern Marketer’s arsenal, not only for its ability to reach and engage audiences across a myriad of platforms and channels, but also for its ability as a content medium to deliver ‘fit for purpose’ messaging, and its capability to provide rich analytics and insights that can help form future business decisions and strategies.
Some of the ways that businesses can boost their marketing efforts using video:
- Audit, evaluate and repurpose your video assets
Whether you are just getting started or have a library of video assets at your disposal, you probably have more video content than you think. Excerpts from recent webinars or events (virtual or in-person), content from a recent AGM, subject matter experts across your business, training or sales demos, even outtakes from a recent advertising campaign or social media push, can all be evaluated and repurposed in different ways to bulk out your video content library. One of the most critical things when you have audited and evaluated your video content, is to ensure that you have a robust and accessible centralised repository, so that your internal teams, from the web team, through to digital, social, customer marketing and everyone in between can find and utilise these assets across their initiatives.
- Leverage video across the buyer’s journey
Because of its versatility, and its ability to convey complex messages quickly and compellingly, video is unparalleled in its suitability to engage across every stage of the buyer’s journey. Determine your specific goals and match your video content to that goal. Whether it be generating brand awareness and growing your audience through social media channels, or delivering a livestream product demonstration to drive conversion, both form and function play a part here. But content in the right place is just one part of leveraging the power of video—in order to fully leverage the power of video to its fullest across all your channels, you need a video platform that supports effortless and seamless distribution across your website, emails, social media channels and more.
- Connect everything
Integrating your video content with your Martech stack will help streamline your workflows, but also enable you to make these technologies work harder for you. Whether you are integrating with your Marketing Automation Platform, Google Analytics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or other business intelligence tools, connecting these with your video platform will ensure you have a holistic view of your audience.
- Uncover the possibilities
As you expand your video-first strategy, you will come to see the possibilities with video are endless. Consider introducing livestreaming for your next product launch or shopping experience. Introduce interactivity so audiences can interact or create their own journey with your video content, or create a dedicated, always-on branded streaming channel to help you attract and retain viewers, much in the same way they would engage with any other streaming services.
- How can businesses convert video viewers into marketing leads? How does Brightcove play a role in helping marketers with demand generation and customer retention?
Today’s path to purchase isn’t as linear as it used to be, with customers navigating an endless range of options, platforms and channels, and marketers striving to reach their audiences at the right time and place. The benefit of video is that it isn’t limited by format, can be delivered in a range of lengths, and can reach across a range of devices to meet the audience where they are.
Demand generation marketers can leverage both owned and branded channels to reach their objectives, whether it be creating brand awareness and growing new audiences, educating audiences to move them towards purchase, or creating personalised content to delight and retain existing customers.
Video content has also evolved, so it’s not just a message being distributed, but can offer a range of interactive tools and options to encourage audience engagement and interactivity. Common interactivity tools aim to empower the viewer to engage with the content or help guide them on a particular path or journey. Some common interactive experiences that help engage the viewer include video chapters, to help audiences navigate their own journey, calls-to-action, feedback, or sentiment actions, such as quizzes or polls, whereas those that guide the view can include video branching, questions, progress gates, and personalisation within the video content.
These types of audience experiences are increasingly beneficial for demand generation marketers, as it provides them with essential metrics on engagement, sentiment, and conversion. This is not limited to demand generation video content but can also be used for ongoing engagement to delight and retain existing customers, and more critically assess their sentiment as a measure of stickiness.
