While video content is increasingly important in today’s world, you have to face the simple fact that it’s competing for attention with an ocean of other videos. As marketing blog reelSEO projected, it’s very likely that users upload close to 600 hours of video content on YouTube each minute at this point. That’s right, each minute, 25 days worth of video content gets added.
When you’re competing for eyeballs with an animated business video, you want to know how many people actually view your content. You’re also concerned with whether the message you send out gets across enough for businesses to actually invest in your products and services. How do you measure that? There are several ways to assess the effectiveness of your video campaigns. Here are some that provide great information and give you a sense of your return on investment.
Mind share, or targeted reaction
Probably the most important factor in measuring effectiveness in your video content is not whether your viewers see the video, but whether they actually do something as a result. Many businesses, including marketing firm Instantly, call this “mind share.” This is because it’s talking about what the person thinks of the video.
“Targeted reaction asks whether your audience made the intended response.”
What’s risky about using this assessment is that it’s an abstract. How do you know what your audience thinks, anyway? You can’t read their minds. There’s a better way to measure what you’re looking for here, according to Business 2 Community. It’s called “targeted reaction,” and it makes sense. It asks whether your audience made the intended reaction, which is likely to heed the call to action. Did your customer, after viewing this video, click the link to download the white paper or send his or her information to you? That information you can easily get off through other metrics, such as click-thru rates. Using this information can help assess whether your video is getting the right response, regardless of most other measurements.
Completions
There’s a reason the video view count can be misleading. The view registers when the video plays. That may not seem like much, but when you want to know whether people actually watched the video to the point of seeing and heeding the call to action, that metric suddenly becomes pointless. While you may have a lot of viewers, did they actually watch the whole thing? Or did they stop after the few seconds, with their view already registered?
There are different metrics to consider with video effectiveness.That’s why you want to know the number of completions. This is a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff. The rate will indicate to you how many people actually showed interest in your product or service. They may not immediately respond to the CTA, but there’s a chance they will later. It also gives you an idea on where to improve the quality of your video. For example, if there’s a large disconnect between the number of people who finish and the number who actually hit the CTA button, there may be a problem with the latter.
“Sometimes, your audience wants to control the video content.”
Viewability
There are a lot of different ways to view a video online. How people see your content will impact the impressions they have of you. Consider how viewable the actual material is, especially in correlation in with your audience and the place they view it. Sometimes they’ll want something that plays back instantly the moment they load a page, not unlike a YouTube video. Other times, they want a clip they start and stop on their own terms. They may feel that autoplay combined with sound is a nuisance, impacting their impression of you. The metrics that can identify this vary, though the most common would be how many actually click play or pause.
Another factor to consider in viewability is browser and operating system. If there’s a large discrepancy in a popular browser such as Firefox or Chrome in comparison to other browsers of the same OS, it may be a sign that it’s not functioning properly.
Engagement
As Mashable noted, you can’t expect to shout in a crowded space and get results anymore simply because everyone else is shouting. Similarly, it’s very difficult to reach your audience with all the noise going on around you. Moreover, while the statistics above can be helpful to some degree, there’s no guarantee viewers will behave the way you want them to in order to get an idea on whether they react to the video.
That’s why you should consider engaging your customers through the video itself. Using some level of social media engagement, either in the form of a hashtag or follow link, can help you get an idea on how businesses respond to your video. Moreover, by using a hashtag, you can read the conversations happening among professionals, confirming whether your message is getting across.
Victoria Maxwell-Davis
As much as the economic model desires numbers to measure effectiveness, the ways that video can work best are with emotive communications that help build loyalty or connection to a philosophy or sense of community. Internal communications can often be most effective as video for this very reason. As employees we want to feel a part of something we value, we want to contribute to something we believe in. As communicators and video producers it is our responsibility to see ROI in terms of matrix outside of financials. Diversity, change management, infusing the business DNA, celebrating success, generating empathy with customers – video is great for this. Don’t measure everything. Just do it because it is healthy.