Video marketing is a great idea for any business. Videos are more popular than ever, and more businesses are using them in their marketing campaigns to boost brand awareness, generate buzz and increase sales.
But the one thing you don’t want to do is jump on the bandwagon and start making videos without any way of knowing whether they are successful or not. By measuring the success of your videos, you can use what you learn to improve your future videos and maximise your ROI from video marketing.
So what are some methods of measuring success for your videos? Here we take a look at a few of the most important.
Determine Your Goals
When it comes to measuring success of a business video, before you can decide whether a video is a success, you need to know what you want each video to do. This comes down to having a very specific goal in mind for each video project.
What do you hope to achieve? What is your objective? The more planning you do at this stage, the easier it will be to measure the success of your videos.
Common Video Goals
Videos can have many goals:
- Get more social media shares
- Build buzz about your product
- Get more downloads for your white paper or ebook
- Provide instructions on how to use your product
- Build trust
- Create general awareness of your solutions
It doesn’t matter what the objective is – just make sure you have a specific goal for each video. This will make it much easier to work out how successful the video is.
The Most Important Video Metrics
How to measure the success of a marketing campaign? Video metrics provide specific data about your videos to help you determine whether they are successful. There are lots of different metrics you could measure, but it’s usually best to stick to just a few.
Ideally, you should consider these metrics before you start planning your video. However, if you have already completed your video, you can still start tracking them. There are many metrics to measure success in video marketing, including the following four.
1. View Count
When it comes to how to measure success, perhaps the simplest metric is the view count. This is simply the number of times it has been viewed. If your goal is awareness, this is a good metric to track because it shows you the reach of your content. Use this metric as a starting point to evaluate your campaign.
But it’s important to note that video views are counted in different ways. For example, on YouTube, your video has to be watched for a full 30 seconds to count as a view. On Facebook, however, a view is counted after just 3 seconds.
2. Engagement
Find out how effective your video is by tracking the engagement. This tells you how much of the video the viewers watched as a percentage, which allows you to understand how useful your video is and get an idea about its overall quality.
- Do viewers watch it to the end?
- Do they skip through?
- Do they drop off before they reach the CTA?
With engagement, you are not only concerned with the view, but with the quality of the view.
3. Social Shares
If your goal is to get your video seen by as many people as possible, social shares may well be an important metric.
Tracking the number of shares is very simple, and it’s easy to see how many people have found your video useful, funny or valuable enough to share. Social sharing also generates more views, making it a useful metric if you want to increase brand awareness.
The amount of shares provides a good general idea of how appealing the video is for your target audience. If your goal is to reach a large audience, this is an important metric alongside view count.
4. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is hugely important when you create videos with a specific goal. This metric shows how well your video is performing based on any specific conversions you are targeting.
Conversion rate could relate to client referral numbers or sales. When businesses are figuring out how to increase sales in a competitive market, videos can help to make the difference, and you can use this metric to track how successful your videos are at generating sales.
The conversion could involve:
- Downloading a free report
- Signing up to your list
- Getting viewers into your sales funnel
- Generating enquiry emails
- Getting bookings for product demonstrations
- Making a purchase
This involves a lot of planning, and you will probably need to set it up in Google Analytics or something similar.
Get Feedback from Your Videos
While these are some of the most important metrics, don’t forget about feedback. This is another important way to judge how successful a video has been.
Why Is Customer Feedback Important?
The importance of customer feedback cannot be underestimated because it tells you how a video is being received.
Comments on social posts where you share the video, for example, can give you excellent insight. A large number of positive comments provides you with useful qualitative data – how people react to it rather than how many people react.
How to Get Customer Feedback
So, how can customer feedback be collected and used? Start by tracking your videos online and keep a close eye on what people are saying in their responses.
You could also carry out your own research. Send a survey to people who have watched the video asking them what they thought and whether it provided value.
What can you do with customer feedback? The best thing to do is to keep a record of all the responses you collect. You can then use these to help decide what you could do better in your next videos.
Always Track Video Performance
Never create videos and forget about them without properly determining how successful they have been. Instead, always have an objective for every video, and then use video metrics and feedback to find out how successful it is.
Use metrics to work out what you are doing right and wrong in each video so you can improve your future videos. Constantly learn from your videos to ensure you are always improving your video marketing efforts and increasing your ROI.
