How to Ensure Your Video Marketing Delivers Measurable ROI

Vidyard Founder and CEO, Michael Litt, explains how you can utilize and track video marketing performance

According to findings by The Fournaise Marketing Group, last year 70% of global marketers failed to deliver quantifiable business results based on their efforts. It seems too many experimented with new initiatives, but very few focused on testing repeatable, data-driven tactics.

While it’s great to see marketers experimenting with new content types – including video assets – it’s important to understand how each asset affects the bottom line, and many people simply don’t know how to connect their videos to measurable ROI.

Fortunately there are many ways to track your performance, and you can even tie your videos directly to the pipeline they generate. Let’s take a look at the easiest ways to start deriving more value from your video marketing assets:

Create a video content journey

The first thing you’ll want to do when creating purposeful videos tied to ROI is align your video content with your customer’s buying cycle. In other words, you will need videos addressing the initial discovery phase, the justification phase, and videos for purchase and post-sale.

Because today’s empowered customer delays interaction with sales until they are almost 60% of the way through the buying process, a series of videos explaining your product suite is the next best thing to being with prospects in person leading them through your offering step by step.

I always advise that companies use their videos in a content journey to draw potential customers down the rabbit hole, so to speak. Start with an explainer video and use that video’s call to action to prompt viewers to watch another product video, then a detailed case study, and so on and so forth. This video journey, advanced by calls to action, actively guides prospects through the sales funnel as they research and shortlist solutions.

By tracking the amount of videos your prospects consume, and in what particular order, you’ll be able to see how many videos it typically takes to close a deal and each video you create for your website will serve as a sales rep that never sleeps.

Use a video and CRM combo

The most direct way to see measurable results with your video content is to connect your leads’ video viewing data to your CRM. With a video marketing platform you’re able to push video viewing history into Salesforce and use simple reporting to see exactly which videos perform the best with your leads, how much content they watch, and whether they watch to completion.

This kind of data on an individual lead level is particularly important for marketing and sales teams alike. You can segment, nurture, and score leads based on the topics or products they have expressed interest in, and you can follow up with the leads who have consumed enough content to qualify as sales ready.

Here’s what the data looks like in your CRM:

Custom reports available in Salesforce are even able to show you how much revenue each video asset has influenced; outlining which videos perform especially well. With these reports, you can filter data by opportunity value and see the content that’s actually moving the needle versus the videos that simply attract traffic.

On a whole, connecting your video data to your CRM is the most direct and leading-edge way to see the revenue your videos influence.

Use analytics to become data-driven

While many marketers release videos and then refer to a total view count to determine whether content is working, the marketers who will rule the video space are those that review analytics to continuously spot trends and improve their content efforts based on quantifiable results.

For example, after releasing your video content journey, it’s important to review the campaign’s performance data (available within a video marketing platform) to see whether it’s actually converting viewers into customers.

Upon reviewing the video data, you’ll likely notice trends or even gaps in your content strategy. If people drop off very early into the second video in your tour, for example, you need to review the sequence and determine what’s stopping conversion. Maybe the videos are too long, or the actor in the second video was off-putting somehow. With the data available, you’ll be able to see where drop off rates are affecting conversion, and adjust your content going forward based on what you learn your audience responds to.

The Bottom Line

Overall, whether it’s building a content journey to persuade, combining video data with a CRM for incredible insight, or analyzing how customers interact with your content, your video marketing is something you can control. You’ll find that as you actively optimize and track your videos, you’ll end up making a lot more of them based on how effective they can be.

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Michael Litt is the founder and CEO of Vidyard.