Determining Video Marketing Value Part One – Seven Metrics

Spork Marketing has launched a new product called Running Stills – a low-cost online video marketing production service. Because our Running Stills videos are produced from still photos, they can be purchased for a fraction of the cost of traditional video production. Despite this low cost, Running Stills are powerful online video marketing tools. Every video we create is uploaded to multiple video sharing sites, and we’re careful to use popular keywords in the title and description of each video. Our own internal testing has shown this service to be quite valuable, and we’re very proud of it.

For my next few blog posts, I’m going to walk you through the process we used internally to determine the value of our Running Stills video product.

There are a lot of measurements (or metrics) that can be used to determine the value of online video marketing. After reviewing several resources, we arrived at list of seven.

• Viewers. This is the easiest and most obvious metric, but it’s not without nuance. How long people watched a video (Did they leave early or stay to the end?) is a key aspect of this metric.

• Direct results a.k.a. “action.” This is the holy-grail of marketing – someone watches a video and then takes a desired action. This metric can be further broken down between on-site viewers and off-site viewers.

• Website engagement. When you place a video on a page of your website, do people spend more time on that page? Do they click more links? That’s called “engagement.”

• Site traffic. Are people making their way to your website because they watched your video off-site (say on YouTube)? Is your site receiving more visitors since your video was placed online?

• Contacts/leads. Are more people calling, emailing, or otherwise contacting your company as a result of your video?

• Revenue. Can you tie an increase in overall revenue to the creation of an online marketing video?

• Branding and awareness. Almost impossible to measure and/or attribute accurately, branding and awareness are nonetheless an important consideration when determining the value of an online video.

Combined, these metrics encompass the total potential value that can be attributed to creating an online video.

For the next, few blog posts, we’ll evaluate our Running Stills online marketing videos against each of these metrics.