Too often, marketers and business owners rely on blogs as their sole means of content creation. In actuality, it’s important to create and distribute several forms of content to engage your audience at each stage of the marketing funnel. Video content marketing, SlideShare and other kinds of visuals are among the most effective ways you can enhance your audience’s experience.
Video presents one of the greatest opportunities for content marketers seeking to gain visibility, increase engagement, and generate sales. eMarketer estimates that the number of online-video viewers in the US will increase by 22 million, reaching 204.6 million, by 2017. In addition, in December 2013, 80 percent of the US population viewed video content—accounting for over 50 billion video views. In order to properly incorporate video into your content marketing strategy, it’s essential that your business properly measure its campaigns from the start.
Here are the four video content marketing metrics that matter most:
Most marketers associate video campaigns with driving awareness, as these campaigns generate metrics that are easy to monitor at the beginning of the video-marketing funnel. You can measure awareness by tracking views and calculating the average watch time of each video—the more time a viewer spends watching your company’s videos, the more aware of your message he or she is likely to be.
Growing awareness of your business through video can help establish your company as a thought leader, increase positive brand associations among your customers and drive more in-depth actions across the marketing funnel.
The biggest difference between online videos and TV advertisements is the level of engagement your business is able to generate from your audience. Through video content marketing campaigns, it’s possible to monitor actions that viewers perform as a direct result of watching your videos. So, once you’ve got a handle on your view-related data, analyze engagement metrics such as shares, comments and likes.
Engagement with your video content can be spurred through online promotions and paid advertising—once successful, it can drive earned media around your videos that, in turn, leads to a larger audience and long-term results from viewers. Platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia offer robust analytics that can help better attribute the engagement prompted by your videos.
The term “earned media” describes views and other publicity that your organization earns through (typically organic) promotion. Earned media lift occurs when such views beget further organic views and interactions as a result of your promotional efforts. Because this chain of events increases your videos’ performances, it’s important that your organization measure it to enable you to better understand the impacts of your distribution strategies.
Earned views, subscribers, likes, and shares can help your organization better estimate the performance of your future video efforts when it comes to the earned media your campaigns will garner over time.
Usually the most difficult metrics to quantify, conversions can help your organization better understand if your campaigns have provided more data points about your customers, generated sales, increased registrations, driven traffic to your web properties and more.
Your company can measure conversions sparked by your videos without being solely focused on the direct revenue growth your efforts generate. Conversion measurement enables your organization to gather leads and informative data points from your viewers on a regular basis.
By generating leads from your videos and creating a more complete profile of your viewership, your company will be able to grow its database of potential customers and better understand the preferences and habits of these leads as your team continues to build profiles of them. These comprehensive profiles can help your business tailor future video advertising and other messaging to their specific needs and interests, which, in turn, makes it easier for your videos to drive action from audiences in the future.
Which metrics have most effectively informed the measurement of your video marketing campaigns? Which metrics are your organization most focused on improving?
