George B. ThomasSo you’ve seen the light, and you know that video is where it’s at when it comes to marketing strategy. But you’re not sure about the buy-in from leadership. In this article, I am going to cover 7 metrics that will help you justify a video strategy for your marketing and sales teams to the C-suite of your organization.
Why do we need to have this conversation?
As I look around, too many companies are not adopting a culture of video in their organizations. This is like not adopting great communication for your business and thinking that’s a great idea.
By the way, no-one thinks that's a great idea!
So what is happening? Why is video adoption for your sales and marketing teams moving at a snail's pace?
It comes down to three major issues.
- Lack of understanding your video goals.
- Limited or no tracking or ability to measure results.
- A social engagement over revenue mindset.
I’ll tackle these three issues to help your company understand how to know exactly what your videos should be doing, if they are a success or failure, and how much revenue is tied to the videos you are using in your sales and marketing process. Then you’ll see a bunch of metrics you should be measuring in your sales and marketing video strategy, and the seven metrics to help justify this move for your organization.
Setting and Understanding Your Video Goals
Let's start at the very beginning.
Someone says you should start using video at your company. You totally agree and you bring it up at one of your board meetings on Tuesday.
After bringing it up, it is quickly turned down by your C-suite. Their reasons? It will take too much time and cost too much money!
This mindset runs rampant when it comes to organizations using video for sales and marketing. One of the reasons for this is that the C-suite may not have yet tied video to their actual sales and marketing funnel efforts.
If that is the case, you can check out this full funnel video strategy article we created just for you. You can also dig deeper into video strategy by checking out our video fundamentals course.
When you start to think of video in a full funnel way, you also start to realize the sure amount of goals a video could have.
Sales Video to Qualifying Prospects
If a video is designed to qualify a prospect for you, how do you measure its success? It doesn't necessarily tie right back to revenue... or does it?
If a video helps you quickly communicate and diagnose a good or bad fit prospect, it saves you time. We all know the old saying, time is money. If a sales rep spend 4 to 7 days dancing with a bad fit prospect what did that cost?
If the sales rep send out a 2 to 4-minute canned sales video and the lead immediately understands that they are barking up the wrong tree how much was just saved?
The math for your company is going to be different than others, but that is a metric you should know. I like to call this one video cost-saving.
By the way, you won't find that topic in any other video metric article that I have read. Why? Companies are not starting with revenue as a measurable metric no matter the goal of the video. You will see how this plays out as we keep going.
Marketing Videos to Drive More Traffic
So, it is time to play the awareness game. We need as many eyeballs on the site as possible.
Someone make a viral video, please!
Nope, no need for that. You simply need to think of what is important the folks who you want to get to your site. When I think awareness video content I think of things like:
- How-to videos
- Thought leader videos
- Who or "What is" videos
- List videos
Find the highest traffic topics or keywords that your business is involved in. Create videos around those topics and get them uploaded to channels like YouTube, Vimeo, and other sharing platforms.
Use them where possible to answer questions your potential leads have. This might be places like Reddit, Quora, or more industry-focused blogs, message boards, or other digital water coolers.
Now, make sure you have a couple of things in place for this one.
- A tool that allows you to view traffic by source.
- A tool that allows you to set up specific campaigns for outlier sources.
If you post a video on the national message board for dairy farmers, a platform like Wistia, HubSpot, Vidyard, Marketo, most likely won't have that source by default.
So, make sure you create them.
But, what if your C-suite wants more than traffic and actually want cold hard leads?
No worries, we got your back on that as well, just keep reading.
Video to Convert Leads or Build Contact Lists
Let's say we are a little further down the funnel. In this scenario, it is all about converting more website leads or building contact lists.
More specifically it is about leading prospects to a valuable landing page.
You are using video on social media and guest posts to drive potential leads to your landing pages where they can convert...
Right?
I look at so many accounts that just send people to the home page of their site. It's like dropping the kids off at the entrance of Disneyland and expecting them to find Grandma and Grandpa on the Buzz Lightyear ride at exactly 2:37 pm.
That ain't gonna end well!
With the lack of direction or a path, the potential lead is left to their own free will and in most cases, they have no clue where we want them to go.
Unless we map it out for them.
If we do map it out for them, we can easily report on it from a revenue standpoint. But, how do we build that video revenue map? Yep, a second video metric that you may have never seen in an article about sales and marketing video metrics is a video revenue map.
Steps to a Video Revenue Map
- Use a trackable link in social posts to a landing page.
- Make the landing page hidden to search and sales reps.
- Create a valuable downloadable or series of email offer that entices the prospect to join in on the fun.
- Keep a list in your CRM that is all prospects that converted on that landing page that have also become customers.
- Have a revenue amount tie to each closed customer.
- Customer plus revenue applied to video as a starting point based on landing page conversion and boom, you know exactly how much that social video brought back into the company in revenue.
Pro tip: You want to also look at if any customer that closed watched that video. This means not only does it have a direct revenue value but it has an associated attribution value as well.
My favorite use of video is helping to close customers.
Guess what, we are talking about that next.
Video to Assist Closing Customers
Have you ever had to play the researcher vs thought leader game?
You know, where you as a marketing and sales team spend a ton of time educating the researcher for them to only do a terrible job explaining what you taught them to their thought leader?
When you use video in your proposals and contracts, you can dramatically increase your deal win ratio. Why would the research spend time explaining if they could just hit a play button?
Why wouldn't you want them to hit the play button and get digital face time with their C-suite?
Short answer, you would! And, you should.
Think of the last 4 to 5 actions that take place right before you close all of your sales. Figure out the best way to implement videos at those locations and sit back and measure the deal close rate pre-and-after the change.
Know what I call this one?
The Cha-Ching Metric. Okay, I don't really call it that but, you get my point. Closing the sales becomes way easier if you are using effective videos at the bottom of your sales and, marketing efforts.
Tracking and measure video results
One of the other downfalls is the lack of being able to track your video result through that entire video funnel.
One of the things you should do as a savvy sales and marketing team is picking the right video platform to use for your videos.
The three major players that I have used and love are:
Vidyard is the video platform that helps businesses transform communications and drive more revenue through the strategic use of online video. Going beyond video hosting and management, we help businesses connect with more viewers through interactive and personalized video experiences, learn powerful insights on their viewing audience, turn insights into action with enterprise integrations, and prove the impact of their video programs.
Wistia, Inc. is a video-software company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wistia provides video-hosting solutions for business, helping businesses add videos to the web, track performance, and build and engage with their audiences using online videos.
TwentyThree was founded by Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and Steffen Christensen. They have offices in San Francisco and Copenhagen.
TwentyThree has rethought the online video workflow from the ground up and is passionate about helping businesses to succeed in video marketing.
These tools allow you to measure many of the metrics that you probably found in another article you may have searched to find out about video metrics to measure.
Metrics like:
- Average Video View Duration
- Average Video Completion Rate
- Audience Video Retention
- Video Play Rate
- and more ...
These platforms will also help you do things like customize your player, add video CTAs, conversion forms, and even add meeting links at the end of your videos.
Hey, imagine that... a link to a sales meeting at the end of a video. That way they can watch, click, convert, converse, convert, and yep buy your product or service.
That's an easy revenue map right there.
Speaking of that, let's just say what I have been hinting at this entire article.
Using video to drive revenue always makes sense.
Video as a Revenue Driver for Your Business
There should not be a video created that you are not thinking about how much does it cost to make and how much revenue is it driving or can be associated with.
That way, you can use this little mathematical formula for the C-suite to fall in love with.
ROI = $ Sales from Video Conversions
$ Spent to Create Video
Take into time spent, time saved, revenue spent, revenue earned and then, C-suite will understand exactly why you said you wanted to use video for your sales and marketing efforts.
As you journey down this video culture road, there are many other metrics you will want to pay attention to. I have listed seventeen of them for you here so you can use this article as a guide in the future.
All the Metrics
Which metrics should you really measure when creating your video strategy? You’ll find a lot of numbers in front of you. Here’s a look at a bunch of things you can measure with video as part of your overall business strategy.
1. Video Watch Time
Watch time is the total amount of time viewers have spent watching your video. It measures how long your viewers engage with your video.
2. Average Video View Duration
Average view duration is the total watch time of your video divided by the total number of video plays, including replays. It measures how long your viewers watch your video, on average.
3. Average Video Completion Rate
Average completion rate is the percent of each video your audience watches. This metric measures your video’s ability to hold attention.
4. Audience Video Retention
Audience retention shows you the percentage of your audience that keeps watching a video as it plays from beginning to end.
5. Video Re-watches
Re-watches are the number of times your audience watches your entire video or specific parts of your video again.
6. Video Click-Through-Rate
Click-Through-Rate measures how well your video encourages viewers to take the desired action.
7. Video Engagement
This could be anything from a like, share, or comment. It also could be a CTA click, form fill, or meeting ling usage depending if measured on social platforms or video hosting platform.
8. Video Positive & Negative Feedback
If this is on YouTube, it could be a thumbs up or thumbs down. If it is a video on one of your service knowledge articles, you could be collecting customer feedback on the usefulness of said video.
9. Subscriber and Fan Growth
Again, depending on the social platform like Facebook or YouTube, you will be building an audience.
Or, this could be the building of a contact list or advocate club.
10. Top Location & Audience
The location could be country, state, heck, even mobile or desktop. As for an audience, it could be a simple as male, female, or even based on ethnic origin.
Many of these metrics we have looked at so far can have different meanings dependent upon the social platform, marketing platform or CRM.
11. Video Play Rate
Play rate is how many people play your video divided by the number of people who visit the page that hosts your video. If the page’s play rate is low, your video probably isn’t relevant to the topic of your page.
12. Video & Page Bounce Rate
A web page’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on it, but then leave without going to other pages.
If you have a page that has a higher than desired bounce rate, you might think of adding a short to medium length video in zone one " above the fold" of the page.
On a slightly out of the box method of thinking, you may want to determine what a video bounce is for you.
A video bounce rate is something you might start to think about. On a 1 to 2-minute video, if 15 seconds is watched, that could be considered a video bounce. There is no hard and fast rule around this but, it is something I look at with each video created.
13. Video Conversion Rate
Your video’s conversion rate measures how well your video persuaded viewers to convert into a lead or a customer.
If you have a landing page that has a lower-than-desired conversion rate, you might think of adding a video to add a human element, simplify the complex and create a stronger conversion call to action.
14. Who Watches Your Video
I love this one. All major video hosting platforms have some version of this. In Wistia it is called your audience. But, being able to see how many videos a certain person has watched can tell you a ton about their infinity for the brand.
A couple of other video metrics you can dig into as you journey down the "getting the C-suite to buy-in" to a video culture are:
- Video View count
- Video Social Sharing
- Peak Live Viewers
- Video Reactions
What Does it All Mean?
Which 7 video metrics really matter to your C-suite? What should you be talking about to get that video culture approval you have been seeking?
To be completely honest, the ones that are or can be closest tied to the almighty dollar.
Revenue always wins!
With that said, one should make sure that they are always doing their best to report on these seven video metrics.
- Video Cost-Savings
- Revenue Mapping
- Segmented List Growth
- Customer Close Attribution
- Audience Growth & Watch Metrics
- Video & Page Conversion Rates
- Video & Page Bounce Rates
At the end of the day, knowing what to measure and measuring things that others have not yet thought of measuring is going to help your video creation efforts today and far into the future.
If you have more questions about measuring video results, creating videos for your sales and marketing teams, or even how to produce live videos that get results, you can always check out our video fundamentals course for more video learning.
Video photo by Matthew Kwong on Unsplash
Help photo by Philip Veater on Unsplash
Revenue photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash