It’s an exciting day here at SundaySky – we’re announcing the next generation of our SmartVideo Lifecycle Marketing Platform! Before I walk you through these platform enhancements, let me explain why we decided to enhance our platform in the first place.
Addressing the “always addressable” consumer
According to Forrester Research, 49% of all online adults in the US are now “always addressable”, meaning they’re always connected, in more places, on more devices, for more time. As a result, CMOs are faced with unprecedented marketing complexity and the need to differentiate their brands with great experiences that are memorable and favorable at every touch point. Video is the most engaging online medium, and here at SundaySky, we know that personalized video is the most engaging and effective way to deliver differentiated experiences to your customers. That said, we recognized that we’d need to evolve our platform to support a more holistic approach to delivering great experiences across the customer lifecycle while measuring and reporting on brand value.
With that in mind, we developed the next generation of our platform, which brings us to today’s announcement…
The SmartVideo Lifecycle Marketing Platform
Our platform empowers marketers to tell engaging and effective stories with personalized video throughout the customer lifecycle. The SmartVideo Console supports story configuration and management, along with result analysis and optimization, providing marketers more flexibility, efficiency, and scale in using SmartVideo across multiple touch points. Some of the key capabilities of our platform include:
- Scene Library for Story Creation and Management: We broke the old mold of having one structured template or videolet per use case in favor of a single, modular repository for all scenes, known as the scene library. Not only can marketers can configure existing SmartVideo stories, but they can also reuse scenes to create new stories for any initiative. The scene library gives marketers greater efficiency in deploying and scaling SmartVideo as a strategic approach across the customer lifecycle.
- Scene and Story Configuration: Under the Creative section of the SmartVideo Library, the look & feel of stories and scenes can be configured to support brand guidelines, creative approach and overall tone of the story. This is essentially a creative studio where logos, images, colors, fonts, narrations, animations, and more are selected and applied. Users can view changes in real-time within the Console, providing an efficient editing and review experience.
- End-to-End Experience Management: We acknowledge that the success of a SmartVideo program isn’t just about the video content – it’s also dependent on the experiences surrounding the video that drive views. We’ve developed design templates based on current best practices to allow marketers to manage their SmartVideo experiences directly from the Console. Templates are available for the landing page, survey, smart image, email, and other elements associated with SmartVideo delivery.
- Value Measurement and Reporting: We’ve enhanced our measurement methodology to support SmartVideo view value from a single point in time, to over time and across touch points based on collective KPIs and associated values. We recognize that some SmartVideo impact is short term, such as billing-related call reduction; however, other more behavioral changes can’t be measured in a period of thirty days, such as churn rate, or uptake and use of value-added services. We want to quantify both short and long-term impact of SmartVideo on your business. Furthermore, we want to see which combinations of stories drive long-lasting changes and provide business impact. It’s no longer about measuring the impact a single onboarding story; it’s about the measuring the impact of the collection of SmartVideo stories across your lifecycle.Marketers now have the ability to access an Analytics dashboard within the Console to monitor their video performance, review survey results, adjust date ranges (and therefore video performance views), and download reports.
- Intelligent Creative Optimization: We’ve enhanced our optimization capabilities to automatically adapt creative based on performance. We create variations for every creative aspect of the video, including the story, structure, key messages, look and feel, narrative style and voice, calls to action, pacing, and more. Our platform selects the best variation for each viewer based on automated machine learning of viewer responses, by determining which viewer characteristics indicate preference for particular video variations. For example, an elderly man might receive a slower-based onboarding SmartVideo with larger text and lower-volume music, while a young college student might receive a more fast-paced onboarding SmartVideo with more exciting music.
In summary
The SmartVideo Lifecycle Marketing Platform is all about giving marketers direct, end-to-end control of their SmartVideo programs, enabling greater creative flexibility to support ongoing refreshes, and providing the ability to manage existing touch points and create new ones.
