When considering the value of creating a marketing video, most small to medium size businesses often ask one common question. What is the ROI video marketing can bring to our business? Trying to identify what the return on your investment is can be a mystery at best and scary at worst. My goal for this blog post is to help you identify the benefit you receive from video and how to calculate a return on your valuable marketing dollars.
Video Analytics Are Crucial To Video ROI
To make the best business decision it’s important to have all the facts. Accurate data puts you in position to make the best marketing choices for your business. This can be applied to video as well. If you plan to produce video for your business and you take nothing else from this post, then please heed this advice. Investing in analytics for your video is a MUST to understand how your videos are performing with your audience. Knowing how many people are watching your video is just a starting point. Below is a list of questions that analytics can answer for each video you produce.
1) How long are people watching each video? This is important because it’s absolutely vital that your audience is engaged. Most (if not all) marketing videos have a call-to-action at the end of the video, and if people are not engaged there won’t be an opportunity to offer a CTA because most likely they won’t finish the video.
2) Are people re-watching your video? This is a huge plus when you find people re-watching your videos. For starters, they are connected to the message. This can mean your audience finds this topic interesting and appealing. There are times when a re-watched video can mean part of the video was confusing but still the viewer is interested enough to care to rewind. Either way this is extremely valuable information.
3) Are people sharing your videos? When people share your video – you are winning! They found the topic interesting and took the time out of their busy lives to share it with their business network, friends and family. As long as you are hosting video on your website the correct way (see below) then get ready for increased traffic.
4) Are people skipping through parts of the video because it’s boring? Our analytics can tell us where viewers are starting and stopping the video. It also tells us when people skip sections of the video. This is bad news. It can mean the video is too long, the information isn’t needed or even worse…It’s BORING!
By looking at our analytics software we can discover all this information. We have graphs that tell us what viewers are doing ever second of the video. Also available are heatmaps (techy industry term), which show us everywhere the mouse moves and clicks on the video. It truly is amazing!
Choose The Right Hosting Platform For Your Videos
If you are going to invest time and money into producing fantastic videos for your company then it’s important you receive the Internet marketing benefits. It’s important to host the video correctly on your website so you receive that increased traffic from people watching and sharing your video. Often people want to host their videos on platforms like YouTube because it’s a popular website. One of the common misconceptions is that since it’s the second largest search engine that means there is an opportunity for millions of eyes to see your video. Below are two thoughts you should consider before making this decision.
1) Is your video the type of video that people would search for on YouTube? Most marketing videos usually aren’t searched for on this platform. The videos that perform the best on YouTube are entertainment videos. So it’s important to consider what your subject matter is to help decide if this video platform is right for you.
2) Receive a 100% of the inbound traffic on your website! When you host video on your website using your hosting platform or the right third party application you will receive 100% of the organic traffic from search engines and social media websites that link to your video.
We can help you setup your hosting correctly so you can reap the rewards from all your hard work. Then we’ll optimize your videos and submit a video sitemap to the search engines to make sure you get noticed!
Calculate Video ROI
Your return on investment is measured in three ways. First, how well does the video convert? A video can convert in many ways including increasing sales or generating leads. The second measurement is less obvious but almost as important. Video can save you and your company TIME by its very existence. For example creating support videos to help your customers figure out a problem can reduce the amount of support team you need to keep on staff. This seems like the right time to insert the old adage “time is money!” The third factor is increased traffic. How many more people are being introduced to your company and visiting your website? This is important because it builds your brand identity and creates an initial touch point that puts you one step closer to a new customer. Below is a simple formula to remember when calculating the return on investment for video.
Conversions + Time Saved + Inbound traffic = Return On Investment
Contact Plush Marketing for more information on ROI for video. One of our video marketing consultants can help you make the right decisions for you next marketing video. Also if you find this post interesting, please share it on your favorite social network!
