Engagement Strategies: How Emerson Transformed Video Content with Lumen5
We have scaled Lumen5's use across our marketing organization, realizing benefits across many team layers. As company communicators, this agile tool enhances each customer's experience and engagement.
ABOUT
Emerson
Emerson (NYSE: EMR) is a global technology and software company providing innovative solutions for the world’s essential industries. Through
its leading automation portfolio, including its majority stake in AspenTech, Emerson helps hybrid, process and discrete manufacturers optimize operations, protect personnel, reduce emissions and achieve their sustainability goals.
For more information, visit Emerson.com.
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Michelle Montes, Director of Global Integrated Marketing, Emerson
Michelle joined Emerson in 2017 and is currently Director of Global Integrated Marketing for the measurement instrumentation portfolio, leading a talented team of marketers who support various technologies and industries. Prior to joining Emerson, Michelle worked in various industries including oil and gas, commercial real estate, and healthcare, leading their global marketing and advertising campaign efforts.
Michelle holds her MBA from the University of Miami with a concentration in Corporate Finance and is an honor graduate of the University of Houston as well as a graduate of the prestigious Wolff Center for Corporate Entrepreneurship.
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THE CHALLENGE
Too Technical for New Tech
Responding to demands to present Emerson’s technical content in a digestible format, Michelle Montes sought a solution that drove efficiency in content creation without compromising customer’s compelling experience.
As she scrolled through Google News for some light reading, the visual story feed caught her eye. The format and social media story-like feed prompted a core message prior to offering a call to action in a longer form content piece.
This type of experience reflected the change she wanted to bring to Emerson. Was video a possibility? How could Emerson convert collateral such as technical papers and long-form content into more engaging media? By capturing attention with shorter, visual commitment pieces, she and her team could then engage and “convert” viewers in selecting longer form content.
Procedurally, Michelle sought a tool that could:
- provide an easy-to-use interface to create digestible content, highlighting a longer form of collateral which quickly affirms the core message, and
- supply a way to refresh legacy content, aligning to new branding standards.
While discussing multiple vendors, Lumen5’s AI video creator arose as an option. Colleague Matt Holland presented Lumen5 as a tool with AI capabilities that he wanted to explore for his PR team. Converting blog posts or written content into video was exactly what Matt and Michelle were hunting for, but little did they know this would create a successful partnership that would exceed the goals of their individual teams.
This experience aligns with how today’s users want to digest data, capturing the viewer with a meaningful experience prior to further exploration of content.
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THE SOLUTION
Teamwork makes the Creative Team Work
Emerson prides itself on its collaborative spirit that intersects within departments as well as the entire organization. Its success comes from the unity of many great individuals working together. Lumen5 fit right into Emerson’s culture, as well as Michelle’s team.
Lumen5 quickly transcended its role as “tool” to “go-to” for video creation tasks across teams. Why? The platform augments the collaborative and creative culture, manifesting in significant improvements in the engagement strategy.
From the start, Lumen5’s Senior Customer Success Manager, Winky Li, committed to understanding Emerson’s strategy, quickly addressing the teams goals and concerns. Her skills in communicating and collaborating on meeting expectations ultimately won Michelle’s confidence.
By collaborating, Lumen5 was able to fully support the collective goal of the team’s branding initiatives and maintain brand standards across the board on top of allowing teams to increase their video content output and create a more engaging and dynamic customer experience.
“Winky trained our organization with a keen understanding of our use case, our needs, and our future state desires… it’s always been full scale collaboration and responsiveness in the three years we’ve worked together. This has enabled Emerson to expand in the scale and scope of marketing strategies.”
Through her leadership, Michelle and her team continue to support Emerson’s broader strategy, promoting the collaborative spirit both internally and through special events such as “Lumen Day” where marketing teams have organized intentional focus on cross-departmental creative initiatives.
Lumen Day Initiative
Hosted regularly, Lumen Day gathers teams together to create videos while also focusing on their customer communication strategies with an uninterrupted creative lens. The results have been amazing.
“We all block off our schedules for one day and just create and give essential feedback. The output of this creative endeavor is then used in various campaigns. Lumen5 gives us the freedom of creativity while also hitting our customer communication strategy. Our first Lumen Day was so successful we decided to move it to a quarterly event.”
Lumen5’s simple and efficient creation process expanded video use more widely than Emerson could have imagined, from digestible bite-sized content to technical videos, teaser videos for products, and repurposing old content with updated branding - just to name a few!
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Branding, Colours, Scenes - Oh My!
But the core takeaway of it all? Branding and efficiency. Emerson has evolved. Using Lumen5 supports branding and efficiency goals while increasing engagement for our customers across all channels.
From colour palettes to varied fonts, Emerson’s branding has transformed despite its evergreen content. Lumen5 provides Emerson with their own custom branded template, enabling their teams to transform content across channels. For Michelle and her team, giving familiar content new life as well as giving new content its spotlight is working wonders for the team.
Continuing to expand access to Lumen5’s capabilities, Emerson has incorporated over 8 various colour palettes, 10 custom-designed scenes, and a large video template accessible to 60+ global communication and marketing experts.
“Leading a global marketing organization, we strive to maintain our brand equity. Ensuring our communications and customer-facing content is consistently on brand and on spec is critical. Lumen5 with our branded templates gives us the means to do so.”
Instead of spending budget on content creation, they were able to leverage existing videos and visual assets more cost-effectively.
In turn, the entire team was able to reallocate the same budget amount to targeting or promotions, expanding their reach and improving engagement with existing and new audiences.
Our social media program is set and rigorous as we share content for our product, work experiences, and solutions. Like I mentioned, we convert static content like a blog entry, case study, or article into dynamic and engaging media using Lumen5.
THE RESULT
Differentiating through People and Video
During COVID, Emerson differentiated themselves from their competitors by providing face-to-face conversations through human-centric videos. Emerson featured familiar industry faces in online discussions that educated and engaged customers on industry trends.
“Our people are Emerson’s greatest differentiator and we share that spirit of partnership with our customers. We feature our own staff as well as knowledgeable industry experts and leaders who embody this same collaborative mindset.”
Expanding on their human-centric and collaborative spirit, Emerson launched their “Connect with an Expert” initiative that allows customers to chat with an expert in real-time. Michelle’s team created short educational videos highlighting the expert’s experience and thoughts using Lumen5.
"The access to this level of expertise is invaluable and a differentiator to our offering. We've been able to expand this capability by leveraging Lumen5 to feature our subject matter experts and create a short film highlighting their experience and expertise.”
Maximized Usage
Using Lumen5 to break down content, Emerson’s marketing team creates short and digestible educational videos for social media which reach their global audiences. Lumen5 helps streamline Emerson's entire video creation process by providing automatic captions and subtitles, creating localized content to their global audiences in a timely manner without straining business resources. In turn, this supports teams outside of Michelle’s teams, such as Emerson’s World Area Marketing teams: a sub team smaller.
“Being able to support various communication preferences and those digesting preferences is a powerful aspect of Lumen5. The translations feature gives us the opportunity to provide more direct support without the burden of duplicating or reproducing something we’ve already created. We’ve expanded our internal collaboration in meaningful ways by providing a more curated experience, respecting language needs on a global scale.”
Lumen5 has been an important addition to Emerson's marketing strategy, providing a creative and efficient way to create engaging content while maintaining brand equity. With usage across teams from marketing to PR, Lumen5 has improved Emerson’s overall engagement and social presence as well as provided a more personalized experience for customers and audiences, leading to a very visual yet successful and scalable marketing program.
3000+ own media
files uploaded and used daily
1600+ videos
created in one year
160+ videos
produced by one user
60+ users
creating videos weekly
If we have gated content, sometimes we use a video to provide a quick summary of the content, allowing the user to convert to reading the longer format. Using Lumen5, we augment longer form content into more digestible topics. For example, we've converted a three-minute video into five snippets, communicating specific themes or chapters in a video series. The possibilities are endless.