by Jamie West
If you’re serious about marketing your brand on the web, and you want to take full advantage of the viral potential of social networks, you would be foolish to ignore video marketing.
Video content is an increasingly vital component of any self-respecting brand’s online presence, and is becoming an ever-more dominant feature of the way we all consume information online.
If you’re not convinced, just take a minute to digest the figures…
Over 1 billion videos are viewed on YouTube every day, and the average web user watches 182 videos online each month.
From December 2008 to December 2010, the number of videos people watched online increased by 75%, and rate is still increasing. By 2014, online video ad spending will reach $5.71 billion.
The message is clear: business video production is something few brands can afford to overlook.
Online video is a huge opportunity for retailers, with shoppers around 150% more likely to add a product to their cart after watching a relevant video.
If you’re running an e-commerce site, the impact of video marketing should be quite easy to quantify. Whatever you invest in your video strategy needs to deliver an even greater increase in revenue.
But if you’re not in the retail sector, measuring the success of your video marketing campaign can be more complex. Ethereal goals like ‘increased brand awareness’ are fine, but you need to be able to produce some numbers to justify your outlay.
Other more concrete goals might involve the number of visits referred to your site from the domain where your video is hosted, and perhaps the number of leads generated as a result of those visits.
If your video is hosted on YouTube, you can access a tonne of data through their integrated analytics tool – Insight. This enables you to track views, traffic sources, demographics, relative popularity and more. This should be the starting point of your analysis.
You should also be using Google Analytics or another web analytics system to track the number of visits the video has referred to your site, and track any conversions that result from this traffic.
Ultimately, the precise goals and metrics you use to measure the success of your video marketing campaign will depend on the nature of your brand and what you are looking to achieve through your online marketing activities, but the important thing is that you can and should measure the impact of what you’re doing in the video realm.
Jamie West works for a video production agency in Manchester.
Photo by blhphotography