Nine video KPI's: using ROI to improve ROI

When you're weighing up video marketing pros and cons, you need stats, proof. A clear sense that video isn't fluffy. This article breaks out nine meaty KPIs for you. But there are two golden rules to follow first.

Golden Rule One - Goals

First, start well. Have you set clear goals? If you're going to invest in video, you'll need to consider its rewards. Commission video without a clear goal in mind, and you might as well ignore ROI. Like all marketing, aiming at a number is a wise, sound and honest approach. For example:

• to drive five times more traffic to our website from LinkedIn than last year
• to increase engagement to 50 per month amongst the UK Asset Management Group on LinkedIn
• to generate 30 new enquiries per month from our service pages
• to generate 100 whitepaper requests from our investment team per month

Golden Rule Two - Video Marketing eats Video Content for breakfast

Second, think about marketing as opposed to content. Marketing's recent renaissance is well document in the 2020 Gartner Buyer Enablement report - not from the sell side, but vitally, from the buy side (if you've not read about buyer enablement, take ten minutes - it may surprise you).

Have you explored the marketing and sales capabilities of video - many underestimate what video can really do, and set the bar too low. For example, done well, video can improve prospecting, sales nurturing, sales convincing, onboarding speed, client support and team training, even prospect training. Among today's digital-first B2B buyers, you need your business to be video enabled, not merely well-articled.

This article aims to explain a variety of ways in which goals can easily be set, the kind of goals you can have, and the strategies that you need to pursue when considering and commissioning video, in order to achieve those goals.

Evaluate the Good You Do

Here are nine key performance indicators that are effective measures of the performance of your video:

1. Engagement

Put simply, this is how long a viewer watches your video. Do they watch right the way to the end, or do they bail halfway through? Or, even worse, do they flee near the beginning? Knowing this KPI is a measure of the fit between your audience and your message.

Your video host will reveal engagement for you, if you've used the silver rule below. Vimeo has a helpful overlay graph - you may be surprised by the falloff in viewing right to the end, to the CTA. It's telling. Make your films too long, or too dull, or simply in low quality, and you'll not get many viewings right through to CTA.

Many research projects show that testimonials, case studies, tutorials and demos, are among the highest ranking in engagement scores (See Curata). These research statistics are by nature broad: in our experience, case builders and convincers tend to have higher rates of engagement, but demos and tutorials often score high amongst client groups too.

2. The rate of play

This is a measure of the number of people who click 'play' once they're aware that there's a video on the page. This is largely a measure of the thumbnail - the chosen image, its size, what its headline says, or what the title proposes, where and on which page it has been embedded, when a client visits your website.

3. Viewings

This depends on how long you regard a play to have counted as a viewing, for instance, 10% of the video, 30%, 50% or 100%. Your viewing count is going to vary, but it will give you a rough and ready sense of user behaviour, and the sheer number of people who have viewed. It's more of a vanity metric than a value metric, but at least it tells you who was interested enough to watch.

4. Response

This is a measure of what people did after viewing your video, and whether they reacted to the CTA (call-to-action) during, or at the end, of the video. So many companies miss a sensible opportunity to direct a viewer to take a next step.

Even if you're asking them to read more, to download or visit a certain page, the important thing with a CTA is to remember that the viewer should be asked to do something particular and specific in this moment, rather than relying on them to remember something or to retain an idea they can use later on, which is far less effective.

5. Sharing on social media

This is, to a certain extent, a measure of the virality of the video. If viewers share your video, it's an expression of their endorsement for the ideas, your brand, the people, or for the humour inside your video.

It's a crude measure, and often too much weight is placed on shares because they don't really produce anything of direct commercial value. It's always going to be CTA and response that counts more. However they do produce a measure of extension of audience reach. And that does count for something.

6. Surveys

There's a growing field of technology which overlays videos with surveys and allows you to capture answers to questions, opinion or sentiment, directly related to points made in the video. This is a convenient and engaging way to gather data. It's much better for the viewer than formal surveys - no-one employed likes to be asked if they mind spending four minutes answering questions to help another business.

The best way to do interactive questioning is to inject a minimum number of two or three brief questions into the video so that viewers can express their views.

Needless to say, this data is highly valuable - you're getting a direct response to your messaging branding and narrative flow. What can be richer? Even branding videos can carry sentiment capture, where you can really get a sense of audience agreement or disagreement, or even misunderstanding of the very message that you're trying to convey. It can be seen as a perfect way of closing the loop between the expression of a message, its receipt and consequent effect.

7. Video conversion rates

Perhaps the most important statistic of all, it's a measure of the number of viewers who eventually became sales leads, prospects or customers. You can find out where they've gone on from viewing a message directly into your sales pipeline.

This is the most valuable outcome from making a video and certain types of video are best suited to this, such as convincers, persuaders and demos.

8. Topic response

Topic response measures the effectiveness of specific topics covered in the range of the videos that you have published. The aim is to observe semantic hotspots across all of your video communications, and to understand the efficacy of each topic. This can guide your planning for your next videos and highlight where to invest your time and money.

9. Format response

A video format is the type of narrative used to tell a story, such as explainers, assurers or convincers. Essentially, format response tracks the conversion rates and efficacy of each video format, which should match the various levels of your marketing and sales pipelines, for example, you may experience 7% conversion rate from assurance videos, and 15% conversion rate from explainer videos.

While there may be no obvious relation between the performance of each format, it's incredibly useful to see how video narratives and CTAs are shaping your customer conversion right across marketing and sales.

Silver rule - Host on a platform that really supports trial and error

Choose your host wisely. Vimeo and Youtube and most other platforms like Wistia, Brightcove, Vidyard will offer you statistics. There's a good list of web hosts at Sharpeye Animation. Video hosts change their analytics frequently, so we're not going to attempt a detailed comparison here, as it'll be obsolete fast. But web host Kinsta has quite a good comparison.

Instead, here's a swift list of video hosts that will support your video analytics, in order of analytics preference:

Already got this covered?

If you already have business videos and they're not generating response, there's much above that will help you improve their performance. But what would be even better than your current business videos?

One-minute Improvers

• Cross-check all your business videos largely follow the above suggestions, or deviate for good reasons
• Ensure you've used on-site CTAs which match your buyer journey moments
• Ensure your social videos, articles and posts have off-site CTA's that match your buyer journey
• Check your business videos match the messaging your audience needs to hear
• Check viewing behaviours - if audiences aren't watching to the end, revise your video


What's at Risk here? A one-minute test

The risk of doing something wrong always hinders us as decision makers. And equally, the risk of doing nothing lurks behind that too. Both carry the risk of failure. So why not delay - deferring looks safer. Like a Whitehall mandarin. Is that the kind of decision maker you want to be? Thought not. So here's a helpful checklist for wise decision maker inside you that's aching to be heard.

The One-minute Decision Checklist

1. Do buyers want to know what you're like?
2. Do buyers want proof of your success?
3. Should you provide buyers with the information they want?
4. Do buyers want a sense of what will happen to them if they buy from you?
5. Do buyers need to find you easily via search and social media?
6. Do you need to be seen as relevant and modern?

If the answer to any three of these is yes, you should almost certainly proceed with this. Or at least be questioning why you have so many no's.



Conclusion

ROI is hugely increased by only a small amount of consideration and planning:

1. Goal setting: attach your aspiration or ambition to your project task
2. Understanding: realise the full potential of videos, and implement into your project
3. Strategy: choose your effective performance measures of your video
4. Implement: choose an agency that can capture sentiment
5. Achieve: use KPIs to track response and increase audience capture

The very process of setting ROI goals will generate more ambitious thinking. This way, your project will have greater attention and conversion.

So, now you've considered ROI success - you've moved closer to your goal. Time for a chat about success with video?

Book a Video Marketing Demo