Let me know if these questions sound familiar:
- “Which marketing channels are most effective for gaining new leads?”
- “Was that trade show profitable?”
- “How effective was that CEO video?”
- “How should we spend our marketing budget next year?”
This incessant stream of questions (from your boss, your marketing director and various stakeholders on different teams) has become the new norm among marketers. What do all these questions have in common? These frequent questions focus on the origin of performance and ROI. You can group them into one supercategory: attribution.
In simple terms, attribution allows you to visualize the sums spent and the return on investment obtained. Let’s take a very simple example: if you spend $100,000 on search engine marketing (SEM) and you can relate this sum to total sales of $150,000, then your return on SEM is 50%. However, attribution is much more complex than that. If you need a refresher, here’s a useful article from Bizible on the basics of attribution.
As head of demand generation at Brightcove, I can attest that my team generates thousands of leads per quarter. But as the sales team will tell you, not all of these leads convert into buyers. Relying solely on the number of leads generated is a false indicator and doesn’t really reflect sales. The number of leads has its place among indicators, but is too abstract and lacking in context to determine the real effectiveness of a marketing program. The same principle applies to videos. Measuring the performance of a video based solely on the number of views only repeats this error.
The number of video views is not enough. Sure, it’s tempting to tell your boss that the requested video has garnered over 1,000 views, but what does that really mean? Instead of simply counting the number of views, here are some common attribution questions specific to video content:
- How many views are attributable to one person?
- Do you know who watched the video?
- How long did they watch it?
- How many times did they watch it?
- When did they watch it?
- What prompted them to watch it?
- Did they perform the desired action after looking at it?
To measure the real effectiveness of a video, you need to go beyond the simple number of views. Here’s the story of a Brightcove video that garnered a relatively low number of views, but generated an exponential return on investment in relation to its production cost, and became an undeniable asset in the face of the competition.
A potential customer from a Midwestern financial services company watched a product video describing how Brightcove is integrated with Oracle Eloqua. Once that video was finished, he watched two more videos. This potential customer watched all three videos in their entirety. We know this because we integrated Brightcove into our marketing automation system and were able to identify the actual person watching the video. So we immediately collected a range of information:
- This person’s name, title and e-mail address, as well as the name of the company they work for.
- She probably uses Oracle Eloqua
- She probably has several videos in her media library
- She’s seriously considering different video platform options, having watched all three videos in their entirety
If your current video solution only provides you with data on the number of views, you’re missing out on all this contextual information and its intrinsic richness.
However, this information is totally useless if you don’t act quickly. As B2B marketing professionals know, potential customers don’t stay that way for long. And that’s when the magic happens. By integrating Salesforce, Brightcove and Oracle Eloqua to alert our sales team to a customer’s video consumption, we can initiate a rapid follow-up and response.
To sum up: Brightcove was able to win an average five-figure contract over a competitor because our platform’s statistical system provides us with more information than just the number of views of our videos, and above all because we take this information into account. Don’t forget, the video at the origin of all this doesn’t garner a large number of views. If we had simply measured its success by the number of views, we would have completely underestimated its value, whereas on the contrary, we can attribute a large part of the transaction’s success to it, and therefore conclude that the number of views doesn’t tell the whole story.
Conclusion? Don’t underestimate the value of your videos and their ROI by relying on the number of views alone.
