How Do You Measure Success in Video Marketing – Look to the Metrics!

Over 45 percent of consumers online watch at least one video every day on platforms like YouTube, Facebook Video, and others. If you know where to target your video, the rewards can be huge!

In fact, video is such a favored content type among Internet users that 80 percent of traffic is video. In recent years, YouTube’s overall mobile video consumption has increased 100 percent year over year. Needless to say, video marketing is on the rise!

Though more digital marketing campaigns are using video, few brands actually know how to determine whether a video strategy is successful or not. Measuring success is extremely challenging, without analytics. Thankfully, there’s more than a few places to look for info.

What is the ultimate goal of your video marketing campaign?

KPIs are going to tell you a lot about your video marketing. Where viewers are coming from, the length of time they’re watching for, and if they’re clicking through are all key performance indicators readily available.

As a video marketing campaign unfolds, what is the goal of your strategy – this should be clear. Possible goals can be to make a sale, to educate, to increase brand awareness, or to receive website clicks. Once you know what the goal is, you will likely need to monitor a handful of KPIs evaluating how successful your campaign is at arriving there.

How long does a viewer stay tuned to your video?

Look at video engagement metrics like how long a viewer watches your video. This is usually a percentage. Through this you can also calculate average engagement. Now it depends on the type of video you’re publishing but you want viewers to receive as much information and value as there is. Ideally, let’s face it, we all want users who click on the video to watch until the end. This just isn’t possible, unfortunately. No brand has a perfect KPI video marketing here.

What is the most effective video type on YouTube?

The types of YouTube video marketing receiving the most engagement are demonstrations, tutorials, and customer testimonials. ‘Demonstration videos’ are those which focus on showing how a given product or service work. ‘Tutorial videos’ typically provide a step-by-step instruction on how to complete a given task or teaching a skill. ‘Customer testimonials’ have also proven to be very effective in engagement, sharing the experience of current and past customers as they relate to your brand.

How many people can you get to click on your video marketing?

A basic test of how effective a video is relates to how many people actually click on it. In KPI language, this is called ‘rate of play’. If the rate of play is low, you may conclude your video thumbnail isn’t attractive, your video title and description aren’t fully optimized, or what’s discussed in your video is simply not that interesting to your target audience.

To give your video marketing the best chance at getting the most clicks and achieving a high rate of play is to include an impactful thumbnail, to optimize the title and description with keywords, and to publicize it under the right description on social media feeds, email, and your website.

How many views has your video marketing received?

As you may guess, view count on a video is very important. Unfortunately, ‘view count’ is measured a little differently depending on the platform. For example, on Facebook, only 3 seconds of a video is required to be viewed for it to count. On YouTube, a viewer must watch a minimum of 30 seconds before they count under the view count. For this reason, you want to create a compelling video that maximizes every second.

Are you getting click-throughs from your video?

Click-through rate on video marketing campaigns are a critical KPI. Now not every video published may have a clear CTA. This is normal. If you’re launching a campaign however, you want to ensure there’s some sort of clear instruction on what a viewer is expected to do after watching. If the objective of your video marketing is to get customers to click through to your website, this metric counts even more. The higher the click-through rate, the better.

How many social media shares are you getting on video marketing?

In this day and age, a video and content marketing strategy relies heavily on social media shares. If people are sharing your video, that indicates something’s resonating with your audience, exactly what you want. A high rate of social sharing helps with creating brand awareness, increasing your video marketing campaign exposure, and more. For this reason, you want to encourage people to like and share your video with their friends. Let’s say you have 500 social media followers. If each one of those followers has approximately 150 people on their contact lists, assuming every follower were to share your video, that’s a potential 75,000 people your campaign can reach!

How are you measuring conversions with video marketing?

Conversion rate can mean different things i.e. clear leads, prospects, customers, sales, or follows. KPI analysis of conversions can be somewhat tough, for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes conversions go unnoticed and other times, you may get someone partly towards a conversion but due to another reason unbeknownst to you, you’re not getting them all the way there. This measurement isn’t going to tell the full story of where you’re losing video marketing viewers but it will share how many conversations you’ve made.

Consider using live video in your marketing campaign

The average social media user spends three times longer viewing a live video than any pre-recorded content. This means utilizing live video, you are likely to keep your viewers locked in for longer. Needless to say, there’s certainly a time and place for live video in a video marketing campaign. A successful live video component in this sense is going to be one that creates awareness and attention.

Can’t think of what to make a video about? Check your blogs!

If your videos aren’t compelling enough for someone to want to click and watch, that’s a big issue. If you’re not happy with your videos or can’t think of what to make a video about, look to your website blog posts. A lot of brands will upcycle relevant blog posts into video format, alternatively sometimes choosing to adapt a blog to a more emotional storytelling-based video.

Is the message in your video cutting through clear?

Simple videos work best in keeping a user watching and in having the message resonate. Highlighting the sales-friendly benefits of a product or service is easy but it’s not necessarily going to transform a viewer into a customer. A video needs to have more to it than just a sales pitch. Creating purely promotional, aggressive sales videos is a mistake. See it from a member of your audience’s perspective and then, ask yourself the following questions.

 Who is your video for?
 Does the person watching feel like they can relate to your message?
 What problem are you solving in the video?
 What is your CTA?

Identify the ideal length, video type, and filming format

There’s a market out there for a variety of video types. You can film it on your iPhone and have your video generate results. In other cases, something filmed in a high-end studio will resonate. Similarly, there’s an audience out there for 40-second videos, just like there is for videos a full hour in length.

Our best advice in deciding what kind of video marketing you’ll make in length, camera, and more is to do your research. Every brand might be a little different. Depending on what your aim is for your video marketing campaign, you want videos that will suit those goals accordingly. Consider looking at competitors to see what they’re doing and check out what’s already successful in your video category on sites like YouTube. There’s a wealth of ideas out there!