What are the key factors for the success of video marketing strategy? You may list a great storyline that is a part of visually attractive content distributed on the popular social media channels or placed on the website that is ranked high by the search engines. Yup, it’s a core of video marketing but it is not enough. The truth is that the good strategy doesn’t work without a solid planning process and regular analyzing its effects. There is no need to fool ourselves on that point.

Probably our first try with video marketing or any different form of digital marketing won’t bring as satisfying results as it really can! Setting business goals, drawing priceless conclusions from the received feedback and monitoring the metrics help the company get the whole view on its effectiveness and the particular matters that should be improved.

There are sample goals that can be essential for the brand:

• increasing conversion

• lead generation

• building brand awareness

• boosting customer retention

• driving traffic to the website

• engaging the audience

Be specific and choose the right ones that are important for your business, easy to measure and possible to achieve.

Already selected the objectives and identified the target audience? Find out what metrics you can use to measure your video marketing efficiency!

View Count

The simplest metric that you shouldn’t overrated. Of course, it gives an overall look at how great your reach is. But there is no information that shows you how many of the people that saw your video stopped it before the end or followed your call-to-action intention.

Moreover, the number of views is counted in various ways depending on the website preferences so keep in mind that platforms use different criteria. So let’s take some popular websites into consideration. On the one hand, we have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter where the video is recognized as a viewed after at least 3 seconds. And on the other hand, on YouTube that amount of time can be ten times higher.

Play Rate

As the name goes, it is just percentage of people who have visited a website and click the play button. We can provide very substantive or gripping content and all the efforts actually will be for nothing, if the audience is not even interested in watching the video. So what can be a reason for the low play rate value? Almost everything connected with video location on the site and its visual attributes such as a thumbnail or a size.

Protips:

• Video size between 401- 600 pixels is recommended for the landing page, it is optimal to be noticed but not disruptive for the whole page construction

• Thumbnails with people are generally more appealing

• Add a short text encouraging vistors to watch your video

Conversion Rate

Conversion is about taking a desired action by the visitors. The type of action depends on your website and your business goals. It can be joining a newsletter, becoming a subscriber or simply making a purchase.

To improve the conversion rate well-constructed call-to-action is needed. Check the hints that help you provide appropriate CTA for your video:

• Make sure if the language that you use is dynamic and persuasive

• Use clariyfing verbs such as learn, make, stop, click

• Don’t make the statement too extensive.

Engagement

We take care of the quality of the content, we put the viewer’s in the first place and we expect the whole video to be watched. It is a perfect situation but the reality can turn out to be slightly different from our predictions. That’s why we shouldn’t ignore measuring the engagement. The engagement is the average time spend on watching your video.

That free statements let you increase the level of engagement:

• First things first – don’t wait too long, just convey the key message in the beginning of the video

• Consider making your video shorter, omit the most static parts with the poor value for the audience

• Provide tailored content, be specific, stick to the topic and give relevant information

• Adjust the character of the video to the purpose of the page.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is a metric that shows a percentage value of your call-to-actions effectiveness. In other words, check it to see how many people click on CTA that you have provided for the video.

There are a few things that you can do to increase the click-through rate level:

• Make sure, if your call-to-action is understandable, visible and uncomplicated

• There is no chance to follow your CTA whatever it is if people tend to skip the video before it appears so try to boost the engagement if it’s needed.

Social Sharing

As you can assume, it is a number of times when somebody shared your video on social media channels. Have you ever thought about the points that makes a video more shareable than the others? There s a couple of matters that are worth considering:

• Check if the video is adjusted to be shared and the share button is located in a visible place

• Pay attention to the types of videos that people are more willing to share. That kind of content usually has a specific value for the audience. It can be also pretty entertaining or emotionally engaging, storytelling works well with that.

• Don’t be shy and ask for sharing.

The social sharing number somehow illustrate the viewers attitude towards your video, but don’t ignore the importance of feedback that you can find in the comments.

Number of subscriptions

Undoubtedly, the general reach is an important indicator but let’s be more specific and look at the subscribers. They give you a great insight into your audience’s profile that helps assume what people are more likely to enjoy your content.

You can encourage more people to subscribe by:

• being regular in publishing

• taking care of the catchy titles for your content

• finding a topic relevant for the target audience

Comments

That kind of measures needs a bit alternative approach. Its power lays in the quality and value, not exactly in the bare numbers. Comments below your video prove that you offer the content engaging for the viewers and, what is crucial, they are just a fabulous source of knowledge about people’s attitude and the matters that are the most essentials for them.

Remember that feedback is a gift. Try to learn as many as you really can. Make use of the opinion that you get to master your strategy and be more human-centric.

Increase the number of comments by:

• providing engaging, emotional or provocative content

• encouraging people to give their opinion

• preparing related hashtag to use and follow on social media channels

• continuing the discussion, responding to the comments

Bounce rate

Pretty important metric when it comes to the video located on the landing page. Bounce rate is a number of times when somebody enters the website and then leaves without checking any other pages. There can be many explanations of this situation:

• long time of page loading

• badly-constructed navigation

• page design

• no clear explanation of the landing page purpose

• no strong call-to-action

• redirecting people from the different website or social media channels by the unclear or wrong link description when the page doesn’t include the proper info that they really look for

Focusing on the video, the most important matters that you can optimize are:

• size of the video

• quality of the audio

• visibility of the video – a proper location

Implementing video into the companies content marketing strategies was a real breakthrough that offers the large number of benefits that we can get faster than ever before. It is a new standard of conveying information for the audience in the way that is time-saving and easy to remember. However, the content itself is not enough to gain all possible advantages of your video marketing. Monitoring the chosen metrics to catch the crisis points as well as feedback help you master the strategy and provide the solutions that are perfectly adjusted to the target group needs and preferences.

Which of the metrics do you use? Are there any other that weren’t mentioned above that you can recommend?