It’s important to keep an eye on your key performance indicators (KPIs) when you launch your video marketing campaign, but how do those KPIs relate to your return on investment (ROI)? How do you know if your efforts are actually bringing in the big bucks?
Content marketing is unique in its difficulty to prove its worth. Even if you create the perfect video and it’s watched a million times, it may drive zero sales. Can you count that as a success? That ultimately depends on your goals.
Before you create a video, you should develop a strategy outlining exactly how you’ll measure success. But the key to actually knowing if your video is successful is meticulously tracking your visitors throughout the buyer’s journey, from the minute they discover your brand to the minute they buy your product or service.
However, unless you have a direct call to action in your video with a proper tracking link, tracking conversions from a video can be tough. With other marketing campaigns in play and the changing nature of the marketing funnel, knowing exactly which factor converts a customer is getting more and more muddled.
Luckily, we’ve got some tips that can help you measure your video’s ROI.
What Are Your Video Goals?
If your goal is to…
Attract new customers:
KPIs to measure in this stage include views, impressions, unique users, brand awareness lift, and ad recall lift. These KPIs are top of funnel and the hardest to correlate to cold, hard sales. But it’s also one of the most crucial steps of the marketing funnel—attracting customers through video means introducing your brand to viewers who have (likely) never heard of you and convincing them they have a problem on their hands. Because users in this stage aren’t ready to purchase, tying your views to direct sales can be problematic and usually comes with a certain degree of error.
But there are some methods you can use to estimate your ROI in this stage. If you’re using paid distribution, you can calculate your cost per view using a calculator like this one. Then, you can figure out how many views your video needs before it becomes profitable. Or you can measure your true conversion rate by dividing your total goal completions (a full view of your video, for instance) by the total visits you get from your target market.
These will give you absolute numbers you can use to prove the effectiveness of your video, but in this stage, you’ll want to focus more on relative ROI—or ROI that’s measured by less absolute numbers, like lifts in brand sentiment, brand recognition, return rates, and more.
Engage your audience:
In this stage, you’ll want to focus on KPIs including view-through rate, watch time, and lifts in favorability, consideration, and brand interest. These last three metrics are often gauged based on short questionnaires you can launch on platforms like YouTube and Facebook; at that point, why not go all the way and add in a second question: How likely are you to purchase [product]? Your answer ratios may not be great, but it will give you a good and definitive sense of how likely your viewers are to buy your product—and therefore, your ROI.
Again, however, measuring post-view sales can be very misleading, thanks to unknown variables and the effect of other inbound and outbound marketing efforts. But, measuring the effect of something like view-through rate on your bottom line requires substantial quantitative measures. You must be able to track the journey of these viewers over a long period of time. People might watch your video, then head to your site, then view your product pages, and ultimately convert over a number of weeks, or even months. The number of trackable instances like these are few, but highly impactful.
Nurture your prospects:
In this stage, measuring your ROI is probably the easiest. You should be tracking absolute In this stage, measuring your ROI is probably the easiest. You should be tracking absolute metrics like clicks, calls, signups, and sales. Your video will have a clear call to action (CTA) and likely a direct link to your website or service pages. If your video is effective, it will have a high click-through rate (CTR) and high conversion rate and, at this stage, the number of steps between these actions should be minimal.
Delight Your Customers:
Your customers have already converted at this point. Your metrics for success at this stage should be very unique depending on your goals. Do you want to encourage a repeat purchase? A social media share? The writing of a review? With the right CTA, this should also be relatively easy to accomplish. Track your click-through rate and apply your typical CTR-to-conversion ratio.
Keep an eye on your return visits, social engagement, and favorability lift at this stage. With tried-and-tested tracking, your ROI should be evident, though a major part of the delight stage is just that: delighting. Whether your customer converts again should be the icing on the cake; focus instead on entertaining your viewers, making them laugh, or answering their questions. Provide value and be authentic, then you can say your video is a success.
We Can Help
If you’re contemplating creating your first video, make sure you’ve got a strategy for measuring your results. Investing money, time, and valuable resources into its creation without a plan for calculating your ROI can be detrimental. Set your company up for success from the beginning and you’ll likely have to perform less huge overhauls in strategy as a result.
Need help producing a video that’ll help you accomplish your marketing goals? We’ve made over 16,000 videos since 2014 and can help you get started. Schedule a free call with one of our producers below!
