< Back to all posts
So, Was Your Corporate Video a Success? Here’s How to Tell
Creating a great corporate video is quite an involved project. You need to take the time to plan it, which means strategizing who your target audience is, what they care about, and how you can solve their problems and convey this to them. You need to write a script and plan an entire video shoot. After that, it’s time to actually shoot the video, possibly in several different locations. At the end, you need to spend time editing and polishing the video, then devising a plan to get it front of the right people.
The bottom-line is that a great corporate video takes a lot of time and, especially if you want high-quality, a chunk of your budget. So in order to justify making more great videos, you need to determine how successful the first one was.
Unfortunately, tracking success for video marketing isn’t always as neat and easy as tracking success for other types of media. Email marketing and direct mailers, for example, have very clear open or response rates, and you can track them without much hassle. Videos, however, have many different measures of success. Below, we’re going to discuss some tips on accurately measuring and improving your success rate, and some of the various methods you can use to track success.
Start From the Beginning
Because there are so many different measures for success when it comes to video marketing, you really need to incorporate it into the planning and strategizing portion of the process. What we mean by this is that you need to know what you’re aiming to do with your corporate video before you even try to make it. Is your goal to directly increase sales for a particular product, or is it to simply increase the awareness of your brand to a particular target audience? Once you figure out what you’re aiming for, you’ll have a strong idea of the metrics you’ll want to track and what constitutes success.
Clearly Define Your Video’s Total Costs
This seems fairly obvious, but many companies fail to accurately track a video’s costs, especially if much of the work is done in-house. Even if you’re simply pulling out a phone and creating a live Facebook stream for an hour or so, somebody (and often more than one person) is spending their valuable time that could otherwise be spent on something else. Make sure to include and track these costs alongside any physical costs for consulting, shooting, editing, or marketing. If you are planning your budget prior to shooting, it’s a good idea to include a buffer of about 20% so that you have room to handle any unexpected costs.
Common and Important Video Marketing Success Metrics
Ultimately, the most effective way to judge any marketing campaign’s success is by looking at the numbers. For video marketing, there are a variety of metrics that can prove quite valuable, depending on how you share your video and what you’re aiming for:
- Return on Investment – ROI is a classic metric, and actually fairly easy to track. You can track the number of sales a video campaign generates by tracking targets who watch a video and then immediately make a purchase. This isn’t always completely accurate since you might lose people who watch a video and return later to make a purchase.
- Traffic. If you post your video on a platform like YouTube or Facebook, you can see exactly how many people have watched your video. It can’t tell you the full picture, but strong view numbers are a good indication of increased awareness.
- Social Media Engagement. Videos that are getting shares, likes, and comments in abundance are doing something right. Not only are they taking the time to watch your video, but they’re taking the time to engage with it after the fact.
- Viewing Percentage. One metric you need to pay careful attention to is how much of your video your audience watches on average. If you’re not getting strong numbers, you know that you’re grabbing people’s attention but not holding it. If most people are watching your entire video, however, you’d do well to copy your successful formula again in the future.
Can a Video Be Successful Without Strong Numbers?
With so many metrics available to you, it’s important to just select a few that are key to your goals–avoid everything else.
If your video isn’t generating the numbers you had hoped, it still could be classified as a success. First, take a look at some of your other metrics. If you place video on a product page, for example, have you seen an uptick in sales for that product or an improved conversion rate? Sometimes, a video might not have great numbers by itself but will have a strong positive impact on some of your other marketing metrics.
Keep in mind that even a video that wasn’t a success on paper has a lot of positive benefits for your company. You’ll be able to measure and study what went wrong, improving your future video projects. Pay attention to what worked well, what didn’t work well, and use that to move forward. In the end, a video is only a failure if you allow it to be.
One of the best ways to boost the return on your next corporate video project is leveraging a seasoned crew that can help you make a high-quality video without wasting any time. That’s where Crews Control comes in. We’ll help you find a great video crew for any video project, in any location you want. All you have to do to get the ball rolling is click here and we’ll start by sending you a completely free quote.
Leave a Reply