A successful business video marketing strategy requires a video project with clear aims, creative and engaging video creation, and a method to measure the impact of your business video. This article will give you some tips on measuring impact that work with the commonly used platforms like YouTube as well as with others.
Viewing time and customer loyalty
Depending on the goals of your strategy, there will be different criteria to determine how effective it is. But a factor always remains constant: viewing time. This is in a close relationship with the build up of customer loyalty in your audience.
Costumer loyalty measured relatively to other content allows us to determine the quality of the video, because it shows how capable it is of keeping the audience’s attention during its reproduction, compared to other videos of similar length.
Costumer loyalty measured absolutely, on its own, is useful to understand at which points we have peaks and at which points people tend to leave the video, because it allows us to check the frequency with which every part of it has been watched (in percentage) and compare it to total views.
It also allows us to see what happens at the beginning of the video, and so we measure the percentage of people that leave the video in the first 5-15 seconds.
It is clear then that simple video views are weak indicators. What matters is measuring engagement. Viewing time and interactions will allow us to measure exactly that – the video’s engagement capacity.
Tracking your video’s success
Other ways to measure this is the search for branded terms or for your business’s name. If you’re using Google Analytics, it will often give you the answer “not provided”, which doesn’t allow you to identify surely whether traffic to the site comes from words tied to the video or to the brand. As an alternative, you can use “search query” in a Google instrument for Webmasters. Or again, if you have launched a viral initiative or you’re a big brand, use Google Trends. Otherwise, you can set up an Adwords campaign, and check if the impressions of brand words increase after you have published the video.
To monitor engagement outside the platform where the video has been published, it is useful to use social monitoring tools, like Topsy and Mention. Another method is to set an alert for the video’s title on Google Alert: it will allow you to know who embeds the video.
If you have inserted links in the video description or inside the video itself (i.e. YouTube annotations), you can also track the amount of traffic received on these websites from your video platform. In your video description, try to use shortened links (which you can get with services like bit.ly) so as to make the text friendlier and more approachable.
To track links you have placed inside your video, you can use YouTube analytics if you’re using YouTube. Otherwise, if you’re linking to a web page, you can use a personalised link with a Google Analytics tracking code.
For assistance with your business videos, you might want to seek professional help. You can find this, for example, at Spark Engine.
