Brightcove is a strong player in a competitive marketplace and their website does a great job on many levels so let’s explore it and see what we can learn from them.
Let’s start from the top:
1. Clear Branding
Their branding is distinct and clearly displayed.
2. Language Options
The top left section of the header allows the reader to self-sort themselves: non-english reader, existing customer needing help, developer or customer looking to login.
3. Navigation with Drop-down Menus
Continuing on the clear navigation trend, Brightcove’s main navigation focuses on achiving their core objectives of their marketing. Since they are dealing with a relatively new marketplace and are offering an innovative solution, Brightcove needs to educate their prospects about what they bring to the marketplace.
4. Link to Pricing
I love the idea that they are making it easy to reach the pricing information on their website. This doesn’t make sense for all businesses. However, since they offer affordable solutions that many of their competitors are not offering, stating their pricing up front helps differentiate them.
Right next to the link for the Pricing page are links to the contact their sales team by filling out a form or calling a toll free phone number. Coincidence? I think not!
5. Link to most likely action
You need to know what the easiest way to engage your website visitors is so you can convert them into a paying customer sooner or later. If they leave without taking an action, chances are they won’t be back so you need to engage them asap. For Brightcove, their central way of engaging users seems to be getting them started on a free trial, which sounds logical since it’s low pressure and likely has little marginal cost for Brightcove.
6. Billboard with Call to Action
My favorite part of the Brightcove website is their page billboard. It grabs your attention immediately after the page loads because of the contrast with the rest of the website. It’s background is dark compared with the light background for the rest of the website. It uses vibrant colors and large blocks of them. It also asks you to take action in a few different ways.
7. Secondary Call to Actions
Beyond the action that the central billboard is trying to get you to take, the section below the billboard to the right offers a few secondary actions you could take. They are the same actions we saw as options in section 4 & 5 above.
8. Fresh Content From Blog
Having fresh content on your website is important to keep having visitors and search engines coming back to your website. Having a running listing of your latest blog posts is a great way to adding freshness to your website home page.
9. Showcase clients to build credibility
Showcasing your clients can be very powerful if you show they are either high profile or just like the visitor reading your website. In this case, Brightcove is showing that they are dealing with some really high profile brands and if they trust Brightcove, it means I can trust Brightcove.
Alternatively, if Brightcove specialized in specific industries, they could have gone the approach of showcasing logos of clients from that specific industry, such as 10 real estate brokages… so that when a real estate broker comes to their website, sees the logos and think “hey, they deal with companies just like mine and if they can help them, they could probably help me.”
10. Lead generation call to action
The last featured content section on the home page has a label of “Free Download” but you have to fill our contact information to be able to download the research they are sharing. This is clearly a lead generation tactic and one that probably results a lot of leads for them.
11. Job postings
Having information about job posts communicates that you’re hiring (to potential employees) and that you’re growing & are likely financially healthy at this point (to potential customers.)
12. Footer navigation
Once someone is looking at the end of your website, they are likely ready to leave. If you can give them something to click, a certain percentage will click and continue browsing your website. Brightcover does exactly that.
13. T&C and Privacy Links
Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy links have not traditionally been important pages but I’ve heard advice from Adwords advertisers that having these two pages can increase your Quality Score, which affects your minimum bid. These are claims that I haven’t found conclusive evidence for so I cannot support or recommend against this advice… however it really doesn’t hurt to have them so why not?
