Measurement Is Key To Video Marketing Success

You can and should go beyond “views” to these more impor­tant brand­ing met­rics to mea­sure the suc­cess of your video mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy.

Greg Jarboe By Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR. Join the discussion » 0 comments

YouTube can effec­tive­ly shift a num­ber of your most impor­tant brand­ing met­rics. The key is to decide what suc­cess looks like and then trans­late that into met­rics that are rel­e­vant for your brand. Now, there are a num­ber of met­rics that might work for your busi­ness. Whichev­er ones you end up focus­ing on, you should look beyond “views.”


For the past sev­en weeks, we’ve been look­ing at dif­fer­ent ways to improve your video mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. In the final part of this series, we’ll look at mea­sure­ment, which is the key to defin­ing suc­cess and then opti­miz­ing toward it.

There was a time when the only met­ric that mat­tered to senior mar­keters was see­ing the YouTube view count tick­ing up. But those days are long gone. Mar­keters are increas­ing­ly chal­leng­ing the val­ue of a view and instead are focus­ing on cre­at­ing con­tent and dis­tri­b­u­tion strate­gies which dri­ve deep­er lev­els of engage­ment, such as video shar­ing, lead gen­er­a­tion, or online pur­chas­es.

The Power Of Recommended Videos

For exam­ple, recent research has found that social video rec­om­men­da­tions sig­nif­i­cant­ly impact tra­di­tion­al brand met­rics.

A study con­duct­ed by Deci­pher Research sur­veyed online video view­ers aged 18–34 across four social video cam­paigns from Guin­ness, Coca-Cola, Unilever’s Cor­net­to, and Ener­giz­er Bat­ter­ies. It sought to deter­mine the impact of peer rec­om­men­da­tions. And this social ad effec­tive­ness study found that rec­om­men­da­tions dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased ad per­for­mance.

View­ers enjoyed rec­om­mend­ed videos more than non-rec­om­mend­ed videos: there was a 14 per­cent increase in the num­ber of peo­ple who enjoyed the video fol­low­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion ver­sus those who had dis­cov­ered it by brows­ing. More­over, a rec­om­men­da­tion reduced the num­ber of peo­ple who did­n’t enjoy the video by 41 per­cent.

Video Enjoyment vs Social Video Discovery Mechanic

View­er enjoy­ment of brand­ed video was impor­tant because it had a direct impact on key brand met­rics. View­ers who enjoyed the video they watched demon­strat­ed 139 per­cent high­er brand asso­ci­a­tion, 97 per­cent high­er pur­chase intent, 35 per­cent high­er brand favor­a­bil­i­ty, and 14 per­cent high­er brand recall than their coun­ter­parts who did­n’t enjoy the video.

Key brand metrics for viewers who enjoy a video

Six­ty-eight per­cent of view­ers who had browsed to the video cor­rect­ly recalled the brand when prompt­ed, com­pared to 73 per­cent of view­ers who had arrived at the video fol­low­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion. This 7 per­cent uplift sug­gests that video view­ers are in a more recep­tive and atten­tive frame of mind fol­low­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion, allow­ing brands that pro­duce and dis­trib­ute social con­tent to ben­e­fit from clos­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their audi­ences.

Prompted brand recall vs social video discovery mechanic

Rec­om­men­da­tions caused a 7 per­cent increase in brand asso­ci­a­tion: agree­ment with key brand state­ments increased from 41 per­cent among view­ers who had browsed to the video to 44 per­cent among view­ers who seen the video fol­low­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion. This result rein­forces the above sug­ges­tion that rec­om­men­da­tions make view­ers more recep­tive to brand mes­sag­ing.

There was also a drop of more than one-fifth in the num­ber of respon­dents that dis­agreed with key brand state­ments. Rec­om­men­da­tions have a large role to play for brands in chang­ing off-mes­sage per­cep­tions amongst their audi­ences as well as in active­ly cul­ti­vat­ing on-mes­sage per­cep­tions.

Reaction to key brand statements vs social video discovery mechanic

View­ers of the social videos test­ed went on to per­form a mul­ti­tude of brand or video relat­ed actions, notably 49 per­cent of view­ers pur­chased the adver­tised prod­uct with­in three days of the view. Thir­ty-eight per­cent of view­ers spoke to some­one in per­son about the video, show­ing a social video view to stim­u­late real life con­ver­sa­tion: what starts online becomes inter­change­able with real life in the minds of today’s con­sumers. User behavior within three days of video viewing

Inter­est­ing­ly, online shar­ing and email­ing of the link are imme­di­ate reac­tions, high­light­ing the need for shar­ing func­tion­al­i­ty with­in a video play­er – users don’t come back and share a video lat­er, it is a spon­ta­neous exer­cise. Nine per­cent of users searched for the brand, and 4 per­cent of users searched for prod­ucts of that type: social video view­ing is hav­ing an effect across all aspects of the pur­chase fun­nel.

Social Video Significantly Increases Brand Attention

This research demon­strates that the pow­er of social video lies in the rec­om­men­da­tion to view con­tent. This rec­om­men­da­tion comes not only from peers in social media envi­ron­ments, but also from author­i­ta­tive blogs and news sources cov­er­ing adver­tis­er con­tent edi­to­ri­al­ly. The impact of the rec­om­men­da­tion on con­sumers is con­sid­er­able:

  • View­ers are more like­ly to enjoy a video when it has been rec­om­mend­ed than when encoun­tered through brows­ing (14 per­cent high­er enjoy­ment).
  • View­ers are more like­ly to recall a brand name when the social video has been rec­om­mend­ed than when encoun­tered through brows­ing (7 per­cent high­er recall).
  • View­ers are more like­ly to engage with an ad’s mes­sages when the social has been rec­om­mend­ed than when encoun­tered through brows­ing (10 per­cent high­er brand asso­ci­a­tion).

Ulti­mate­ly, enjoy­ment of the video cor­re­lat­ed pos­i­tive­ly with all test­ed brand met­rics in the sales fun­nel, includ­ing brand favor­a­bil­i­ty and final pur­chase intent.

Go Beyond ‘Views’ To Measure Video Marketing Strategy Success

Nev­er­the­less, some mar­keters will want to look beyond video shar­ing and mea­sure results using met­rics like lead gen­er­a­tion or online pur­chas­es. That means they will also want to look at cus­tom video play­ers which enhance the native play­er of YouTube or oth­er video hosts.

For exam­ple, Vin­ja Video recent­ly released the pub­lic beta of its cloud-based soft­ware. Using Vin­ja makes online videos easy for vis­i­tors to browse (i.e., quick­ly scan and ran­dom­ly access the most inter­est­ing parts – just like any web page), share deep-links to spe­cif­ic chapters/clips and for busi­ness­es to track those actions so that they can opti­mize their video pre­sen­ta­tion to max­i­mize their busi­ness objec­tives (e.g., dri­ve more prod­uct sales).

The­CUBE, the lead­ing live inter­view show cov­er­ing enter­prise tech­nol­o­gy and inno­va­tion, is using Vin­ja in B2B Tech. Vin­ja is a sim­ple, but pow­er­ful, mech­a­nism to expose the con­tent with­in rel­a­tive­ly long-form videos, but ulti­mate­ly the exposed con­tent needs to rel­e­vant and valu­able, or better/deeper expo­sure is moot.

Vinja TheCUBE

ULTA Beau­ty, the largest beau­ty retail­er of pres­tige, mass, and salon prod­ucts in the Unit­ed States, is using Vin­ja to brand and enhance exist­ing “haul videos.” These videos fea­ture a series of prod­ucts in 5–12 minute videos which Vin­ja enables ULTA to seg­ment and link to respec­tive prod­uct pur­chase pages.

Vinja ULTA beauty

In short, mar­keters can and should go beyond “views” to mea­sure the suc­cess of their video mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy.

Greg Jarboe

Written by Greg Jarboe

President, SEO-PR

Greg Jarboe is President and co-founder of SEO-PR, an award-winning content marketing agency that was founded in 2003. He’s the author of YouTube and Video Marketing and also a contributor to The Art of SEO, Strategic Digital Marketing, Complete B2B Online Marketing, and Enchantment. He’s profiled in the book Online Marketing Heroes, a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and writes for Tubular Insights and The SEM Post. He’s an executive education instructor at the Rutgers Business School and the Video and Content Marketing faculty chair at Simplilearn.

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