Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of any advertising or marketing campaign is the key to discovering what works best for you. But many business owners find it hard to measure the ROI on the marketing videos posted on the Web.
First of all, let’s look at calculating ROI on video. Of course the first thing you must do is decide what your objectives for the video are. Are you looking to increase traffic to your website in a specific amount of time? Are you looking to gather email addresses for your monthly newsletter? Here are some other investment gains video can provide, so you can pick and choose what you would like.
Investment Gains:
- New subscribers
- Sales leads
- New customers
- Brand awareness
- Increase in the monetary value of sales
- Time saved in the sales funnel
But in figuring out ROI, you also need to know the investment costs of video as well:
- Cost of production of content
- Paid distribution costs such as advertising on social media
- Time spent internally both to create content, distribute it, and also to respond to leads
- Outsourced strategic marketing
Obviously the formula for ROI doesn’t really change just because the marketing avenue does. To calculate ROI you divide the earnings you made from an investment by the amount you invested. So it still looks roughly like this:
(Investment gains — Investment cost)
ROI = (investment cost)
Ok, but here’s where it gets a bit tricky, because with both social media campaigns and various Web analytics, there are a number of ways to calculate video metrics, and tracking your results is the key to creating better and better marketing videos. Here are just a few things you want to make sure you measure:
- Average engagement: this is the average of how much of your video gets watched in total. If it’s a 2-minute video, do viewers watch the whole 2-minutes, or just the first 30 seconds? The higher your engagement, the longer your intended audience is watching your video and the more likely they are to respond to your call to action.
- Play rate: This is similar to engagement, but this actually measures the placement of your video, more so than the content of the video. When choosing where to place your video online, you want the content of your video to match what that channel’s main audience wants to see. So this measure whether or not people actually watch the video once it’s loaded, do people click play or not? For example, if your product is skin cream and your target market is 65-year-old women, placing your video on LinkedIn may not yield the play rate you are looking for.
- Click-through rate: This is the percentage of viewers that actually clicked on your call-to action. This tells you not just how engaging your video is, but also how engaging your offer is to the viewers, because the higher your click-through-rate, the more viewers are taking the action you want them to after watching the video.
By measuring these metrics, you can continually improve the video content you are using to market your company. And, of course, if you don’t want to spend the time producing the videos, managing the online marketing of them or measuring the ROI, then you should give us a call at Visitivity Inc. 239-878-4641.
