If you’ve been following our video marketing series from the beginning, then you’re well on your way to becoming a whiz with video marketing basics, video marketing on a budget, video SEO, and video marketing strategy. The last post in our series focuses on the holy grail of video marketing: analytics. If you’re ready to dive into video, but aren’t sure how you’re going to measure your efforts, take some advice from Kristen Craft, Marketing Evangelist at Wistia. See her answers to some common questions below!
Q: How can you measure the impact of your videos?
A: Video is a powerful sales and marketing tool: it’s a highly engaging medium that adds a human touch to your company’s message. But making video is only half of the equation. The other half is measuring the impact of your video and then using these analytics to fine tune your marketing efforts. Now, by “analytics,” we aren’t talking about video views. Video views are important, but there’s so much more you can do with video viewing data! We’ll share some tips on which analytics you should use, and how you can deploy them to bolster sales teams, marketing teams, and your company’s marketing strategy.
First, some useful terminology:
video analytics: data or statistics on how people interact with your video content
loads: the number of times a page containing a video has loaded, (equivalent to the number of pageviews)
plays: the number of times your video has been played by a visitor (assuming you’re not autoplaying the video, in which case plays are equivalent to loads)
playrate: the proportion of people who hit play on your video; this equals the number of plays divided by the number of loads
average engagement rate: the average proportion of your video that has been viewed, (averaged across all viewers)
rewatches: the number of times people re-watched all or part of your video. It’s useful to focus on the rewatches for individual sections of a video and rewatches by individual people.
Q: How do you know that you’ve got the right video strategy?
A: Use video to teach or share useful content, and gate the video with an email address turnstile; this will let you collect the email address of anyone who watches and bring them directly into your marketing automation system or prospect database.
You can also let the analytics guide you. Look at previous videos you’ve made and see which ones have the highest average engagement rate. This is a great indicator of the kind of content your audience wants to see. Keep in mind, though, that engagement rates are usually inversely correlated with the length of a video — i.e. people watch a lower percentage of a longer video. This post offers info on the engagement rates you can expect to see for a video of a given length.
Also take a look at whether certain parts of your video have been rewatched more times than others. Maybe there’s a sub-topic where you can dive deeper and create some more advanced content. If you haven’t made any videos yet, look at the FAQs you hear from customers and prospects. Let the data drive your production strategy.
The next step is getting people to click Play. Choose a compelling title, thumbnail image, and description. After your video has been live for a few weeks, take a look at your playrate. We’ve found that a playrate of 15-20% is about right for Wistia-hosted videos. If people visit your page but don’t hit play, this suggests that the title, thumbnail image, or description need some work.
Q: So what’s the next step?
A: Now that people are watching your video, what do you do? For a salesperson, the engagement rate and rewatching data are extremely powerful. This data lets them use their time efficiently because it lets them target those who are most likely to buy. Furthermore, a salesperson goes into a prospect call knowing exactly where someone needs more information (because they’ve seen the rewatches).
Ultimately, if you’re doing video (which you should be doing!) the strategy should be integrated with everything else you do. And this means leveraging the awesome data you have at your disposal.