Making the complicated simple. Showing what words can’t do justice. Illustrating a point. In many instances video marketing is a highly effective endeavor, whether you’re trying to educate prospects and customers, provide useful tools for your sales and support staff or just build brand awareness. However, the time-intensive nature of both the planning and development stages of video projects often mean they’re among the more costly investments a marketing department can make. With budgets tighter than ever, it becomes critical to be able to justify expenditures when external stakeholders begin questioning these investments.
With that pressure comes desperation on the part of many marketers to establish ROI however possible, even if that means focusing on B2C-minded metrics that aren’t likely to impact the bottom line for most B2B companies.
Below are a couple of the most common examples of unhelpful metrics — and two alternative metrics that may better demonstrate the true fiscal value of video marketing (and help you create better videos moving forward):
Hype: Views
Sure, views is the most easy video metric to track — and it has its place in any video marketing performance report — but this metric is only revealing is how many people clicked the play button and nothing else.
Helpful: Watch Time
A much more helpful metric in terms of establishing ROI is watch time. Instead of measuring who initially clicked play, this metric tells you how long people are actually watching, what sections of content shared are actually being consumed and whether your call to action is even being seen.
Watch time is also helpful for future video projects because of the powerful insights it gives into how useful, interesting or relevant your content is to your audiences.
Hype: Social Shares
While social media shares do indicate basic engagement, in B2B settings, those sharing your videos often aren’t your main target audiences. This metric can be a good indication of novelty of content, however.
Helpful: Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
With videos featuring a clear call to action, there’s no more critical metric for measuring success than CTR. A viewer clicking through indicates how engaging your content was and how effective your call to action was. CTR can be invaluable when weighing the success of a campaign and weighing possible changes for future efforts.
Regardless of the subject matter, establishing clearly-defined goals for your video marketing from the beginning is essential — it lays the groundwork from which you can measure success. For more metrics that can help you establish video ROI, check out this recent, excellent Marketing Profs article.
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