Video Marketing will be more important than ever in 2018. If you don’t want to be left behind your competitors you should pay attention to these 5 basic metrics to optimize your video marketing efforts.
To produce and upload video content to your social media profiles is the first step for a successful video marketing strategy. But actually producing the content is just one part of a circular strategy that will require you to constantly monitor, evaluate and adjust your strategy to maximize the impact of your video content.
The Right Strategy For Your Video Marketing
To identify and pursue quality leads and increase your video marketing success reaching the right audience is absolutely crucial. To accomplish that you will need to find reliable answers to a couple of basic but important questions. Who is actually watching your videos and for how long? Where do they come from and how do they interact with my video content? Which other special indicators can help me optimize my video strategy (for instance audio, closed captions or live video)?
Demographics
The first indicator you should care about is demographics. Male, female, age, location…all these metrics are important to understand who is actually watching your content and to make decisions based on that information. Before you get to look at other metrics, demographics will determine how you actually outline your content strategy. It’s straightforward: if you don’t know who you are talking to (or rather should be talking to) all your efforts might be useless. The better you understand your target audience, the stronger the base will be to build your other content strategy tiers on. A good starting point is to find out if your core audience is mainly male or female and in which age group you can find them.
Watchtime & Audience Retention
For most video platform algorithms, the most important metric is watch time. Note that it says “algorithm”, not viewer! In an effort to find out which videos should be ranking high in search results to keep the users watching, platforms like Youtube found that watchtime is the best indicator for compelling content.
The more watch time your content can gather, the better your videos will be ranked by the system which will yield even more views (and again more watch time). While engagement seems to be the most obvious choice when it comes to utilizing an amplification strategy in sense of boosting videos with paid promotions, watch time can be another great indicator to decide which content you want to promote.
What’s the lesson here? Well the mistake was to show something unrelated, which was the trailer to the bodybuilding documentary I created. Although I thought it made sense (I was talking about color matching shots of action cameras and bigger cameras), the viewer saw something unrelated. The effect was a significant decrease in audience retention. So the video could have performed even better than the 10k views on this brand new channel. Lesson learned! This will help you optimize your content creation process and understand at what point something is happening that makes your audience retention drop below average. You’ll want to stay above average as long as possible.
I’ve seen many clients try to ‘brute force’ the views on their channel with paid promotions. While that will gather reasonable numbers in sense of views, it’s useless when the viewers bounce very early in the video.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Another great indicator is interaction and the most obvious metric here is the click-through rate (CTR).
Unless you are solely aiming for brand awareness it’s very likely your video strategy is part of a marketing funnel, so you’d expect some sort of outcome. If you have a high click-through rate (CTR) that’s a sign that the concept of your video works well and you are getting the desired interaction. Whether your video is a pre-roll ad on Youtube or a teaser video for a landing page. Ultimately this metric in addition to shares, likes and comments means that the user is interested and wants to explore what you had to offer. Of course, video platforms do value that as well and a good CTR in combination with a good watch-time are probably the 2 most important metrics for most social media network algorithms nowadays.
Aquisition
A metric that is being overlooked many times is acquisition. Where are your viewers coming from? Can you identify sources that you have not been expecting to send traffic your way? There are expensive tools out there for search engine optimization professionals that will tell you where your website traffic is actually coming from (such as SEMRush or Ahrefs). Youtube is actually giving you this information for free. You should use that to your advantage. Either to adjust your content strategy or to reach out to that source and find out if you can produce more similar content or even collaborate with them.
A pretty common scenario for this is when you are getting a lot of traffic from another country. This could be a good indicator to a) adjust your upload schedule to catch more views from that specific timezone or b) to translate your captions to the specific language to increase views from that country. In my case my second biggest traffic source was Germany! That could be an indicator to adjust my closed captions strategy to increase the views from that country. Sort your 3 biggest traffic sources by country (in my case “suggested videos”, “external” and “youtube search”) and sorty by geography. This will give you invaluable information about the top countries your views are coming from. Popular transcription services for are rev.com and gotranscript.com.
Quick Tip: You can ask your viewers on youtube to help you translate your videos in the infocards. Some followers do want to contribute something to the creator’s channel and you might have somebody who is willing to do the translation for free
Keep in mind that monitoring these metrics will help you create better content. It’s not about optimizing your channel or even hacking the algorithm or anything. It’s all about identifying chances to create better content and thus increase the watchtime. Remember watch time is your best bet when you want your videos to be successful online.
Sound-On Plays
This metric is very important for muted playback, for instance on Facebook. Before Facebook changed the muted auto playback this was called “muted plays”, which would give you the exact time where the viewer had unmuted the video. But now it will only tell you the number of views with audio turned on and off. The viewer can still choose to mute all auto-plays in the settings.
Here is a video I had shot in Brazil during Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Arnold Classic Competition (see screenshot). Although nobody speaks in that video a significant number of people watched the video with sound turned on.
Remember how I mentioned closed captions above? They are not only important for different languages but also very handy for muted videos. It’s not always possible to watch a video with sound because of a loud environment. Or maybe the viewers just doesn’t want to distract the people nearby. With closed captions you might be able to still get that view and even increase the watch time.
Quick Tip: If you don’t have the time or resources to create closed captions, you can tweak the auto-generated captions on Youtube. Youtube will consider that “manual captions”, which will have a positive impact on your Video-SEO. On top, you can download that as a .srt file and use it for Facebook!
Conclusion
Analyzing metrics can be a very complex process. There are many indicators that can skyrocket your video marketing strategy (for instance concurrent viewers for Live Video on Facebook).
But if you want to develop a solid strategy you should be doing well in most cases with these 5 video metrics to begin with.
As social media is constantly evolving and new content types such as AR / VR / 360-Video are on the rise and the distribution channels are changing as well (think Amazon Alexa and Google Home) you should constantly adapt your strategy to these progressions. Square / Vertical Video, Live Video, Live Podcasts…all these content types will require a deep understanding of your audience and their consumer behavior when it comes to optimizing your audiovisual content.
Which platform and video concept are you planning to work with or maybe already utilizing for your video marketing strategy?
