Creating a Marketing Video & How to Measure its Success
Considering the amount of time, resources, and man power it takes to create a marketing video, it’s important to take the time consider the point of your video before you begin. You’ve been told it’s vital to your inbound marketing plan, but it’s only important if it has a true purpose. Every step in the video creation process will circle back to this purpose and the action you want the viewer to take after watching it.
So, don’t waste your time having to reshoot or edit, consider a well-thought out plan and purpose before beginning your video. Here are a few questions we suggest that you ask yourself and your team before you begin the process:
? Who's your target audience? Are you targeting a certain section of your buyer segment?
? Consider the goal of the video? Are you trying to increase brand awareness or launch a new product?
? What do you want your audience to do after viewing the video?
? What platform are you making this form? Where is the video going to live? Choose a primary home for the video before you begin to change it for other channels.
? When should it be finished? Like all projects, you should begin your video project with a timeline.
? What's the budget? Carving out a portion of your marketing budget for your video is essential. Think about how much money you want to put towards this investment so that you can stay on track throughout the process.
? What are the creative requirements? With your budget, skills, and resources in mind, try to visual what you want your end product to be.
? What will constitute success for the video? Choose metrics that correspond with your video goals so that you are able to measure the video for success.
Defining Your Goals and Analyzing Results
Now that you’ve outlined your process and are ready to have your video created, it’s time to step back and define your video goals and key performance metrics.
Before launching your inbound marketing campaign, it's important to determine your primary video goal. This goal could be to increase brand awareness, engagement, or even visits to your site. It's important for your team to choose just one or two goals per video. When you define more than just one or two goals, it is likely that the video can seem unfocused and lose the audience.
When you are thinking about what your goals should be it’s important to keep your target buyer top of mind. Think about their age, demographics and interests. At what stage of the inbound marketing strategy will they be viewing this?
Asking yourself these questions can help determine the type of video you should have created and where it should be posted.
Next thing to focus on is your metrics. Defining and understanding these will help you measure your video success and set your future goals. Don’t obsess over view count — it’s important, but there are other metrics that are just as relevant to your marketing campaign.
Here are a few metrics that we suggest you track after publishing your video:
? View count: As mentioned above, this is an important one. It is the reach of your video, or the number of times your video has been viewed. Track this metric if your goal is to increase brand awareness and reach. However, be sure to remember that each social media channel measures views differently. For example, a view on YouTube is 30 seconds while on Facebook it is just 3 seconds.
? Play rate: Play rate is the percentage of people who played your video divided by the number of impressions it received. This one helps decided how appealing your video is to the viewers. If a ton of people see your video but barely anyone plays it, it’s time to have another look at your content.
? Social sharing and comments: If your primary platform for your video is going to be social, then social shares and comments are good indicators of how relevant your content is with your target audience. This is a good metric if your goal is to reach a lot of people. The more times it is shared the more views and reach it will have.
? Video completions: A video completion is the number of times a video is played in its entirety. When considered next to view count, this metric is probably more reliable when determining video success.
? Completion rate: Completion rate is the number of people who completed your video divided by the number of people who played it. Completion rate is a good way to gauge the audience’s reaction to your video.
? Click-through rate: Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of times your call-to-action (CTA) is clicked divided by the number of times it's viewed. CTR is a great indicator of how effective your video and call to action are at encouraging people to take your action.