What’s that Online Video’s ROI?

Compared to print, digital media offers a plethora of opportunities to gage the Return on Investment (ROI) on a marketing initiative.  There are so many different opportunities to “slice and dice” the metrics of a digital marketing campaign.  Analyzing performance is often easier than print marketing efforts and usually far more robust.

However, many marketers either don’t evaluate their digital marketing efforts . . . and sometimes they can’t evaluate all digital endeavors.  A stat I mentioned last week regarding the inability of marketers to analyze the performance of online video content was again touched upon by eMarketer today:  only 30 percent of all post-video conversions can be measured.  That means for 70 percent of all web video marketing campaigns, people have no idea if the video content helped to move a viewer to an engagement.

The reason online video is a powerful marketing tool is because audiovisual content elicits a reaction from viewers.  When video is on its own, it can be hard to ascertain what a viewer’s next step was.  If the video is part of a video landing page, such as a flimp, then the audiovisual content is part of a piece of intelligent digital collateral:  video, branding, messaging, and calls to action.

Most importantly:  flimps automatically generate reporting ranging from total minutes of video content viewed to the specific links a viewer may have clicked.  Analyzing a campaign is easy to do.

Beyond a viewer’s reaction to specific content, I think there is a missed opportunity in not determining the ROI of online video content.  If you aren’t measuring results, how do you know if your viewers even saw the video?  This is a question that is particular important to B2B marketers.  Did you know that 54 percent of organizations block employee access to sites including YouTube?  If your B2B web video marketing campaign consists of videos hosted by YouTube, you may not be reaching your target audience at work when they are most apt to think of your product or service.  If you don’t know your online video’s ROI, you may not realize this.

It can be irresponsible on a marketer’s part to not evaluate the performance of different tactics and campaigns.  In the past, it was often difficult to quantify how a particular brochure or direct mail contributed to the ROI in terms of qualified leads and conversions to sales.  Digital marketing efforts make it easier to correlate the effectiveness of an initiative – if you choose to analyze the data.  Plus there is the added benefit of applying past results when creating new content.

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