(203) 936-7761 Find our Address contact@miceliproductions.com

ROI

Home / Posts tagged "ROI"
14
Dec
2018
How to Measure the ROI of Your Marketing Videos
Posted On December 14, 2018  By Jennifer Blessing Miceli  And has No Comment

Video Metrics and ROI. The basics. Measure the ROI.

Across the web, you will find studies and statistics that show the importance of video in digital marketing today. Across industries, marketers are using the format to educate their audience, highlight their products and services, and include social proof in their messaging.

But all of that is general. How can you make sure that the revenue generated through your own videos actually justifies its costs? In other words, how can you determine the return on investment for the videos you create? How can you measure the ROI on video? Follow these 5 steps to achieve measurement success.

1) Set Your Goal

First things first: you don’t know how successful your video will be if you don’t know what actually constitutes success. As a result, any video has to be set up with a particular goal in mind. The exact nature of that goal, of course, can vary widely:

  • Lead Conversions on a Landing Page
  • Engagement on Social Media
  • Shopping Cart Adds on Product Pages
  • and much more.

Each of these require a slightly different measurement strategy. But ultimately, they all follow the same principle: find a core metric, and use it as your benchmark for success. Having a manager measure the ROI for you? Be aware of the goal and expectation. And ask for clarification.

2) Determine Your Metrics

The general goal of your video helps not just in focusing its creation, but also in determining the metric you will use to track its success. Here, it’s best to focus on a single, primary metric that is directly related to the goal itself.

For instance, you can track a video’s impact on lead conversions by the conversion rate of the landing page on which it lands. Engagement on social media is measured through the likes, comments, and link clicks on the video post. Explainer videos are best tracked through total views, and views that cover at least 50 percent of the video.

3) Set up a Control Group

Now that you know what metric to track, it’s time to make sure you will know the difference a video actually makes as it relates to that metric. A simple way to measure the ROI and accomplish that feat is to set up two identical scenarios, one with the video and one without.

Depending on your channel, you can run the test simultaneously. A landing page, for example, can be easily duplicated to include a video on one version but no video on the other. Other channels, like social media, might require subsequent testing periods.

4) Build a Time Frame

Speaking of which: your next step should be to set up the exact time period through which you measure the success of your video. Don’t limit yourself in terms of the total lifetime of the medium; instead, set a relatively limited time period (such as one week) that still gives you enough data to avoid sample error.

5) Evaluate Results

After the time you have given yourself, it’s time for the big reveal: understanding exactly what results your video actually brought about. Based on your core metric and overall goal for the video, it should be easily to evaluate what return on your investment has actually brought.

If the results are inconclusive, extend the time frame. You can also take the metric further; if an explainer video on a product page resulted in a 20% increase in shopping cart adds, and you know that 60 percent of your customers usually check out their shopping cart, you can easily estimate how much your video actually provided in terms of additional revenue.

Determining the ROI of your video can seem difficult, because the metrics are not typically directly related to your conversion goals. But through the above steps, you can approximate the results, and improve your video marketing strategy over time. To learn more about creating videos with a positive ROI, contact us.

Read More

12
Jan
2018
Video Metrics and ROI Statistics Point to the Future
Posted On January 12, 2018  By Jennifer Blessing Miceli  And has No Comment

Video Metrics and ROI Statistics Point to the Future of Internet Marketing

Are more and more of your competitors launching video projects? What do these companies know? More importantly, how can you leverage related video metrics and ROI to YOUR advantage?

Increase Email Click-Through Rates and Make the Leap to Online Video Marketing

28% of adult internet users use Instagram. (Pew Research Center, 2015)Forrester Research did the number crunching a few years ago. In the process, the experts discovered that videos embedded in emails during marketing campaigns yielded an increase in click-through rates. Typically, marketers saw two to three times as many click-throughs as they did without clickable videos.

Fast forward to today, and it is clear that this marketing phenomenon is not going away. Marketing statistics prove that Instagram, for example, is visited by 28 percent of adults on the internet.This site shares an estimated 95 million photos as well as videos on a daily basis. While a few years ago the use of videos in email marketing sounded like innovation, today the use of the medium is firmly embedded in corporate culture and consumer expectations.

Video Metrics and ROI Prove that Your Customers are More Likely to Do Business with You if You Market with Videos

BROKER REPORT Important Statistics from NAR®The use of marketing videos is not just industry driven. In many instances, consumer behavior shows that the individual buyer will prefer to do business with a company that uses the medium. Case in point is the real estate market. In its Broker Report, the National Association of Realtors reveals that 89 percent of home buyers used the internet to find a property.

As a result, a professional in the field is 44 times more likely to sell a home by featuring it online. Consumers are aware of these metrics. Seventy-three percent explain that they will do business with a real estate agent if the professional includes video listings in the firm’s menu of services.

Of course, in some situations, advertising with videos may be the only way for your target demographic to find you. Think about the 18 to 34 demographic. This segment of the population does not watch cable TV. According to YouTube, it pays attention to the videos on the site. The platform recognizes that this fact puts it in direct competition with cable networks.

Elements of a Powerful Online Video Ad that Gets Results

Commercial video production is not something you can achieve in a garage. Everyone has seen those late-night cable TV commercials that have a distinctly homemade feel. What they lack in professionalism makes the difference between being taken seriously by the shopper and being made fun of by the same demographic.

So, what does it take to create a good-quality video?

  • Script writing expertise. Even a brief two to three-minute video calls for a script. It should focus on search engine optimization as well as word usage that appeals to the targeted demographic.
  • Casting. The majority of people in advertising videos are actors. They are professionals who know how to act in front of a camera to elicit specific responses. Although amateur videos can be endearing, they may not have the quality your customers are looking for.
  • Filming. High-quality equipment use results in superior video quality. Because more and more consumers access online videos with mobile devices, quality is a must.
  • Post-production editing. Paying attention to the intricacies of editing is another crucial aspect of video creation. Professionals work with the content to ensure that it is in keeping with best online practices. Moreover, they will work with your management team to provide for the perfect encapsulation of your brand message.

It’s time to add video marketing to your toolbox. Contact us today to find out more!

Read More

06
Dec
2016
What the Sequent Partners Study Tells Us about Video Metrics and ROI
Posted On December 6, 2016  By Jennifer Blessing Miceli  And has No Comment

What the Sequent Partners Study Tells Us about Video Metrics and ROI

You could almost hear the eyes rolling in small, dedicated video shops like ours when the media metrics experts at Sequent Partners announced their survey results on video as a sales tool. Marketers for major brands are enthusiastic about the future of digital video for driving sales — including later offline sales — but right now many of them are stuck on the idea of video ads as good for branding alone.ad-screen-on-street

The report, titled Digital Video at the Inflection Point presents evidence that many marketers are blinded by attitudes from the past.  As they said in their summary, “marketers today are more likely to view digital video as a branding tool with more than half seeing it as a superior tool for building brand awareness and favorability, telling their brand’s story and connecting with consumers emotionally.”

Yet 87% of these same 200 top marketing professionals surveyed reported positive ROI results from their own digital advertising. They seem to be unmoved by tangible trends in their own organizations, too. A majority — 65% — described digital as having an increasing role in sales, but merely 42% indicated that digital is better at driving sales than other media in general. This is a portrait of professionals who don’t believe their own eyes.

And the report speculates, this is all about to shift, dramatically.  An inflection point is nigh, and everyone will soon appreciate the value of digital video for advertising.  The report asserts that within a few years, when this gap in understanding closes, digital video will be widely accepted for addressing sales objectives.  The changes will lean on two features that are currently evolving — better digital ad targeting and better personalization systems for digital video ad content. This prediction should make the sponsor of the report — Eyeview, an ad tech company that specializes in the personalization of ads — quite pleased about future opportunities for providing better video metrics.

The comments in the report itself underscore the disconnect around these issues, marveling that significant numbers of professional marketers have failed to grasp the potential of digital video they have seen in their own operations. The report even used the term “complacency” to describe the attitudes found among marketers.

“The majority of marketers see digital video as a way to connect emotionally with consumers and tell the brand’s story in an engaging way. However, a large portion of marketers can see that limiting the role of digital video to branding efforts is a temporary stage in the medium’s evolution,” said the report. “They recognize the potential it will have in other roles as well, particularly in driving sales.”

advertisingWhat will bring these viewpoints into alignment? Better data should provide answers for those skeptical marketers. Improvements in determining video ROI are in the works, according to the report. As we all begin to see beyond site traffic, the value of video — and of specific videos —  to Internet viewers should come into sharper focus.

We’re watching with interest, and with a little touch of skepticism. Because we’ve been doing what we do for years, we have a deep understanding of the evolution of online branding, marketing & advertising. We’re hands on, and our small team prioritizes making a meaningful impression on real people, driving specific actions and learning what we can from all the data that can be gleaned. We know video is already a powerful tactic in more than one segment of our clients’ strategies. We have made videos work to drive actions as well as to create a warm halo effect.  Of course, we’re with the rest of the video world in wanting even better evidence to pinpoint ROI.

Our clients tell us we’re fun to work with because we draw on past experience and take an interest in the rosy promises of the future.  We take in the enthusiasm of this industry with a grain of salt. We haven’t forgotten the core mission of telling compelling — even edgy — stories. We’re figuring it out every day. Contact us and we’ll figure it out specifically for your company.

Read More

06
Oct
2016
Does your video strategy need a metrics and ROI review?
Posted On October 6, 2016  By Jennifer Blessing Miceli  And has No Comment

Does your video strategy need a metrics and ROI review?Woman business owner reviews video metric for her content marketing plan.

Companies that are following the video landscape this year know that Facebook is now giving considerable priority to video content. If you are paying attention, you know that this has not made YouTube irrelevant.  These two channels anchor your video strategy — if not your whole content strategy — for most video outreach content. Now more than ever, companies should be reaching their clients and customers with video and learning from the metrics they track.

Knowing what you want to do with video is a solid start. Are you creating content that captures potential customers searching for how-to videos on your product, services or area of expertise?  Then pat yourself on the back for having vision and goals, my friend. But know that for many companies, maintaining video production output goals and evolving useful metrics into actionable feedback present more of a challenge. Use this self-assessment checklist to determine whether your approach is working for you.

Have you updated the way you calculate ROI for your video outreach this year?

Return-on-investment is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” metric. The change of emphasis at Facebook should make video production more valuable in general, but the efficacy of visual storytelling will vary depending on the quality of your videos as well as the intrinsic visual appeal of your business sector. There is NO substitute for paying attention to specific videos and poring over the analytics to estimate revenue generated by each one. If you make changes to your pricing or revenue streams, updating ROI calculations promptly will be key to understanding the costs of your video content program.

Do you repurpose strong video content effectively?

If you are producing longer-form video content and not pulling out short segments for use in new contexts, look into the opportunities repurposing can bring.  If you add a video platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Vine, consider excerpting some of your best previously produced work for presentation as tight little clips. Short clips can be a little bit challenging. Vine videos can’t exceed 6 seconds in running time. Twitter videos can be around 15 to 20 seconds. Embracing these tight video lengths pulls your marketing outreach into a focus that only brevity can compel. You may find that the process of editing down excerpts helps you create shorter “long” videos, too. Shorter, tighter video means less abandonment by your watchers.

Designers in a meeting crafting the best plan for business video strategy.Transcribing those segments gives you even more flexibility in upcycling strong moments from your video library to some platforms.

Are you paying attention to the correct metrics?

The simple metrics built into the major platforms are the first place to look, of course. YouTube and its parent company, Google, have been leaders in analytics for decades now. By all means, check weekly or more often to see whether your video posts show up listed in your Top Tweets.  On Facebook, start by sorting “Insights by Post Type” to compare the reach and engagement of your videos with the other types of content you post. Simple indications of interest come first. There are a variety of ways to measure the success of a specific video. You’ll gain useful insights by tracking view counts, watch-time, shares, and comments.

Noticing engagement — what interests your followers — provides crucial insights, but you will need more insights to understand the ROI of your video marketing. Track intermediate steps such as lead generation as well as revenue.  You must follow the money on a granular level to determine whether your video initiatives are worth the investment.  Make sure to include calls to action in your videos, drawing watchers to your website for more information. Well-crafted calls to action can be tracked and carefully honed over time to improve ROI. Link tags called UTM parameters allow links you provide near your videos to be tracked specifically in Google Analytics. Some video platforms provide the ability to incorporate the act of email capture into launching a video player, and may improve the granularity of feedback you see.

Do you know what actually works for video virality these days? 

Video that went viral two years ago might not take off today. Keeping aware of what’s hot can inform your aesthetic, if your own video content tends to be trendy. Even if your video content is paced to be educational or is markedly niche in subject matter, watching top trends can provide inspiration. In addition, the methods for tying viral videos to revenue streams are evolving, too. This piece about a viral video master on Facebook may inspire you to align your video program with an email subscription signup, for example. Build Facebook trends into your video strategy. Watch for trends among your followers. Take the newest meme and post a Facebook video that plays with the concept. Include trending hashtags to attract views from those who are watching the relevant trends.

 

We’re a Photo and Video boutique creating commercial images for branding. We have been working with video strategy for 14 years. We used to be just edgy. Now we’re edgy and wise. When you contact us, we’ll discuss your current strategy with you to see whether we can improve your video ROI.

Read More