Video marketing is an increasingly popular way of reaching potential customers on social media and elsewhere online. Businesses use videos which are predominantly focused on their products or services in order to create a buzz about their brand and engage customers and potential contacts.
Videos can be placed on your own website, or uploaded to YouTube or social media platforms for users to share and engage with. A successful video marketing strategy might include just one video, or a series of videos intended to build interest over time. Once you have created your videos and put them online, you can then start to measure how well your marketing strategy is doing, using a variety of metrics at your disposal.
It is how to measure how well your video marketing strategy is doing that we are going to focus on in this article.
Before you can work out how successful your campaign is, you first need to identify what success means to your business. To do this you need to set three main parameters.
Objectives
What is the ultimate goal of your video? Do you want to gain new customers? Make sales? Generate a buzz about your brand? You can choose one or two of these goals and make sure that you are aiming your video marketing strategy towards this at all times. At every step of the process, think about whether or not what you are doing has this end goal in mind.
Audience
The intended audience for your videos does not necessarily have to be your entire target customer base. Each video could target a different demographic, or this specific campaign may only look to interest one area of your target market. Be as specific as you can when deciding on your audience, as this will make it easier for you to create content.
Metrics
Decide on the metrics you are going to use to measure the success of your campaign. This will help you to focus your campaign towards getting these numbers. Perhaps you want to get more clicks, website visits or sales. Decide this and gear your campaign towards getting good numbers on these metrics.
Now it is time to look at how you are going to use these metrics to measure the success of your campaign, as it unfolds. Here are some of the best ways in which to do this successfully.
View Counts
Your view count is a very simple way of measuring how many times your video has been watched, and provides fast, clear data on how well it is doing. You will be able to see your view count easily, as it is usually displayed under the video wherever you have posted it.
Although a high view count is obviously a good representation of overall interest in your video, it is important that you understand what exactly constitutes a view on the channel that it is hosted. YouTube, for example, only counts a view when a user has watched for 30 seconds or more. On Facebook this is counted after just 3 seconds.
Knowing how long your video has been watched for (at least) offers you a good idea of how interested your viewers are. Thus, your YouTube viewers can be considered more interested than your Facebook ones, and this view count is more important to your metrics.
Measure Engagement
Whilst your view count helps you to understand how many people are superficially interested in your video, engagement is a far stronger metric for gauging interest. The engagement metric measures and gives a percentage that demonstrates how long your viewers have actually stayed with your video.
A high percentage means that your video is not only watchable from start to finish, but also that its entire message is being put across to viewers. A lower percentage means that your video is losing viewers at some point during the video, giving you vital information needed to go back and adjust the videos you are putting out in order to hold onto viewers for longer.
Social Media Shares
Another way of measuring engagement is to see how often your video has been shared on social media platforms. This is crucial information for marketers as it shows whether or not your audience is really connecting with your message and wants to share it with their networks.
People simply don’t share content that they are not interested in, and a high share rate indicates that something in your video is connecting with your audience so strongly that they are willing to act as ambassadors for it.
Pay attention to the videos which get the most shares, as this is where you can find the most saleable elements of your brand.
Play Rate
Play rate metrics not only keep track of how many times a video has been viewed, but also how many times the play button has actually been clicked. If you have a video that appears on more than one website, your play rate count helps you to better understand which audiences are connecting better with the material.
You can use the play rate metric to help you to decide which channels are worth pushing forward on, and which do not yield the same interest. Through this, you can slightly alter your marketing strategy for different channels or focus more on one over another.
Click Through Rate
The click through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of viewers who actually click on the call to action (CTA) in your video. Whilst it is important that viewers watch the video in the first place, and stick with it long enough to get the message, the best sign of true engagement is that they wanted to follow through and click onto the next step.
You can use this information to adjust your marketing strategy by looking at how long people stuck with your video before clicking the CTA. If people are watching the entire video but not going through with the final action, then you should adjust how your CTA is phrased, or when it is placed in the video. If users are clicking through at a certain point of your video then this is your main message, and where your focus needs to be in the future.
Get In Touch
To find out how Maxweb can help you with your online video contact us today on 01516524777 or email us at info@maxwebsolutions.co.uk. We offer a range of services catered towards creating a successful online presence for your business.
Posted on Thursday, December 19th, 2019 in Digital Marketing.
