7 Metrics You Should Be Using to Measure the Effectiveness of Your B2B Video Marketing

Maybe you haven’t read some of the head-turning statistics about the effectiveness of video marketing.  Did you know for example that more than half of consumers want to see more video from businesses, or that 52% of marketers around the globe say that video is the content with the best return on investment (ROI)?

It’s Not Just for B2C Companies

That’s the power of video marketing—but maybe you thought the video was just for B2C companies.  Well, think again.  A well-crafted video posted on social media sites like Facebook and YouTube can be among the strongest marketing weapons in the arsenal of B2B businesses.  According to Vidyard, for example:

“72% of B2B buyers and researchers are watching videos to help them make their buying decisions. And not just a few snippets and clips of video here and there: nearly half of them watch at least 30 minutes of content, according to Google research.”

To Be Successful, You Need to Measure Results

You wouldn’t launch an email marketing campaign without a solid plan to gather analytics data—if you don’t measure results, in other words, you won’t know which subject lines and content are working, and which aren’t.  The same applies to video marketing.  The question, of course, is what aspects of your video marketing campaigns you should be measuring.

Every business and every marketing campaign are different.  That said, there are several key metrics which are critically important to measure the effectiveness of your B2B video marketing, including the following 7:

1. How much did they watch?  It’s not enough to know how many people watched your video.  After all, if you have a strong call-to-action, you could get tons of people to download your video, only to abandon it after the first few seconds.  You also need to know how much of your video they watched, and how many watched it to the end.  The important metrics here are an average duration (which is total watch time for all viewers divided by the number of viewers) and completion rate (the percentage of viewers who watched your video all the way through).
2. How many watched it more than once?  When consumers like a video a lot, they watch it again and again—or they watch particular parts of a video more than once.  Measuring re-watches will tell you how strongly your video resonates with your audience.  Knowing that they watch particular parts of your video multiple times could tell you that they’re interested in a product or service that’s featured in that segment.
3. How many people clicked on your call-to-action (CTA)?  Video campaigns have many goals, like increasing brand awareness, building consumer trust and driving web traffic.  One goal, however, is moving viewers to take the desired action.  That action, like going to a page on your website, is accomplished through your call-to-action (CTA).  To measure the effectiveness of a video, you need to know how many viewers took the action you wanted them to take.
4. What are viewers saying about your video?  It’s one thing to know that x number of people watched your video, or that y% of x watched it from beginning to end.  It’s another to read comments like, “You really need to see this!  It’s one of the best treatments of CRM I’ve seen.”  When lots of people share your video, it tells you just how much they liked it (that is, how engaged they were with it).  When they leave comments, you need to read them.  These qualitative data can be a marketing windfall, guiding you to make nuanced improvements or to double down on especially winning strategies.
5. Who’s watching?  It’s important to see the demographics of the people watching your video.  These data tell you which viewers constitute your target audience, the market segment at which you’ll want to target future videos.
6. How many (and which) people hated your video?  When someone actively dislikes the video you post, they can hide it, leave negative comments, or even report it as containing inappropriate material.  Knowing that your video, or some part of it, didn’t gel with some of your viewers (or even offended them) will help you steer away from similar content in the future.
7. How many leads did your video generate?  According to HubSpot, generating quality leads is the top challenges marketers face.  As noted above, videos have many goals for your B2B business, but generating new leads is almost certainly among them.  You need to know the percentage of viewers who converted into leads (for example, by completing an online form).  You also need to compare this with the conversion rates of other kinds of content.

If you own a B2B business and have been toying with the idea of getting into video marketing, now might be a good time to take the plunge.  A smart video marketing strategy can increase lead generation, boost conversions and drive sales arguably better than any other kind of content.

To learn more about the ways our content marketing, digital, social, inbound and video marketing services will help you grow your B2B business, contact us today.