We’ve covered 23 and their complete video content management service in the past and been impressed by their simple price plan and with the quality of the analytics that get returned to marketeers. Yesterday they released a new free feature they have added to their service called Actions that they say will make their videos more interactive.
As the name suggests Actions allows a wide range of new actions for marketeers to add to their videos to make them more interactive. Content editors can easily add annotations, hotspots, video pre-rolls or post-rolls, detailed product highlights and ad banners. In a more advanced form, players can even be set to do so dynamically using data. Custom actions can also be created to show product suggestions based not just on the current video but also on the user’s location and purchase history.
Providing new forms of interaction that can appear while a customer, or potential customer is watching a video also allows new analytics to be generated. Marketeers can track which of the interactions they develop gets the most clicks and generates the most leads which will help develop a better and more efficient use of Actions. Iteration and experimentation might be needed to begin with to test what types of interactivity customers best respond to but this will surely be worth the time investment if it drives new growth.
Actions is more than just the adding of text boxes and linking into videos, its ability to connect videos to the rest of a company’s web content also returns more valuable information. 23 claim that by cross-linking to related content, by integrating product catalogues, they are able to track usage from the first video view to the ultimate sale. Useful information to have.
As mentioned previously, Actions is free to existing clients and comes bundled with 23 Video’s CMS which still costs only $675 per month for unlimited users, unlimited videos and 1TB of traffic data. If your company would rather have its own video solution than use YouTube and deal with the mess that is Google+ and YouTube’s wide known, and reviled, commentating community then 23 Video should certainly be on your radar.
