Once you’ve made the decision to pursue video as part of your content marketing strategy, you’ll likely have to answer questions about the potential ROI for this initiative.
Video is resource intensive, usually taking longer to produce than other content and results can sometimes be ephemeral in that the exact nature of the ROI might not be immediately apparent. By setting tangible and realistic goals for your team, it will make it easier to calculate the ROI of your video marketing.
Here’s how we do it.
Know Which Metrics Really Matter for Your Goals
Simply looking at the raw number of views or likes only tells you a small part of the overall story. These metrics, while important, should never be the sole indicator of success. A video with 50,000 views in a day might be impressive at first glance, but when you look deeper into the analytics and see that only 4% of those viewers watched the entire video and only 1% interacted with the call to action, you’ll know that you have an interesting topic but not the compelling content to match it.
This is where a little strategy and goal-setting comes in. Never launch any type of video campaign without having an understanding of your objectives. Your objectives will vary from ours and you should evaluate your goals for every project you undertake.
Using Video Success Metrics to Create Feature Pages That Convert
For example, we wanted to see if including brief videos about our different features on landing pages increased the time spent on page and increased the number of leads generated.
While we were interested in the number of times each video was viewed, time spent on page and lead generation were our most important success metrics. We compared the two metrics for the month before and month after the video was added to the page. We saw a modest increase in both, which meant our experiment was a success!
That said, we wanted more than a modest increase. This experiment lead us to begin work on a new series of videos that were better targeted to our key customer personas.
How Surveys Can Improve Your Video Marketing
Measuring the time spent on page to see if there is a correlation to the number of leads a page or campaign has generated can begin to provide insight into how a video is performing but a larger question still remains: how do you find out what content inside the video drives this engagement?
A-B split tests are always a good place to start, provided you have multiple versions of your content to test. However, not every team has this option because quality video content can take more time and resources to produce.
If you’re trying to keep your content pipeline lean, you’ll want to start with small projects and iterate on your videos to find out what content resonates. That’s where using surveys to test your content comes in!
Getting the Most from the Video Sentiment Question Types
A helpful tool that we use on our team is a video sentiment survey question. This question type collects feedback from a viewer while they are watching a video – in real time!
The viewer interacts with a slider underneath the video to indicate their emotional response (happy/sad, love/hate, etc.) and they can also leave comments about specific moments in the video that are time-stamped at the point in the video when the comment was submitted.
Using a tool like this can begin to give you insights into what parts viewers respond to and, more importantly, what they don’t.
Why Would I Want to Use Surveys? It’s in the Cookie.
I know this might sound a bit out there but stick with me: think of your videos like Oreo cookies. You have the cookies on either side holding the wonderful filling in the middle. Your cookies are the head and tail of the video, where you should hook the viewer initially, quickly getting to the point and then ending with a strong call to action and a reminder of who provided the content they just enjoyed. And the filling should provide something of value, either answering a need or helping them make a better decision that they’ll hopefully find… filling!
Using a tool like a sentiment tracker along with a couple of follow up questions to make sure to gather overall/specific impressions, you can see what parts of your video worked, what the viewer took away from the video and if needed, adjust your content accordingly.
Often the changes can be as simple as a few quick edits to the ‘cookies’ to get to the ‘filling’ sooner or to make the call to action more compelling.
Testing is the Most Important Part of Video Marketing
It’s all about testing and learning what works for your specific audience. That’s really the only way to see a consistent positive ROI with video.
If you’re still on the fence about whether or not to use video to help potential customers decide if your product is right for them, keep in mind that in recent studies, upwards of 90% of users say that a video about a product is helpful in the decision making process and that a researcher with Forrester, Dr. James McQuivey, estimates that just one minute of video is equal to 1.8 million words.
So while it might be true that the pen is mightier than the sword, the lens might be the thing to rule them all!