Practicing B2B video, like time or a well-worn hula hoop, is a flat circle. There is no end, and as you move through the seven phases, you’ll find the final step — analysis — serves as a bridge to a new beginning.
So, if analysis is the final phase of practicing video while also serving as the foundation for the phases that are to come again, how can you ensure that your analysis is, well, good? That is, how do you turn the data you measure into insights that will help to improve your content strategy going forward? To do that, you need to know what return you’re looking to measure, what metrics best measure them, and what video hosting platforms enable you to gain meaningful insights.
How Can B2B Video Analytics Help Boost Your Marketing ROI?
Everyone wants to feel like a success, but unless you’re the legacy child of a generationally wealthy family, that feeling only comes from knowing whether you’ve hit a measurable goal. And video analytics do more than simply measure the return on your content marketing investment; they also give you a quantifiable goal to strive towards. Without these metrics, you’ll be in the complete dark as to whether your content strategy is succeeding (yay!) or failing (I’m so sorry!).
While you likely use various types of content as part of your marketing strategy, a benefit of employing video is that the metrics can help you measure things like intent. Blog posts, newsletters, and podcasts often offer only the most fundamental metrics: views, clicks, and downloads.
Video analytics, though, also gives you that information and intent data. This data helps you refine your strategy to ensure you set the right goals, hit them, and help drive growth.
What Are the Essential B2B Video Analytics to Measure?
The most important metrics are the ones that best speak to the outcomes you’re looking to measure. Of course, that’s a non-answer answer, but it should still help whittle away some of the most fundamental metrics that tend not to have much importance on your overall content strategy.
Take views, for instance. Yes, it feels good to discover you’ve produced a viral hit. However, who cares if your video has a billion views if none of the people watching are likely to convert into leads?
On the other hand, your may produce a video that only 200 people watch. But if they are all buyers at businesses to which you’re trying to sell, that’s a fantastic accomplishment.
So, instead of looking at the basic metrics that you can find on any publicly facing YouTube video, here are some analytics that can lead you to important insights:
- Click-through rate: CTR measures how many people see a video served up to them and how many of them click play. Link CTR is a similar metric for links in your video. If your CTR is low, changing the video’s title or thumbnail image could be a minor change that yields significant dividends.
- Device metadata: If you want to meet your audience where they are, you need to know what devices they’re watching on. Mobile phone viewers may prefer Instagram-like vertical video instead of other aspect ratios.
- Engagement charts: These charts give you a second-by-second view of audience engagement, such as when they stop watching or what parts people tend to skip over. If you’re finding that your hour-long educational video tends to have zero viewers after the three-minute mark, it’s a sign that you’re promoting to the wrong audience or not creating compelling content.
- Traffic sources: If you’re hosting your video in multiple places or have partners sharing out your content, you’ll want to know what sources are best at getting people to watch your videos so you can push more content where people are seeing it.
The above metrics are relatively easy to find and help you curate or promote your content. The insights gained here can help you adjust what types of videos you produce, where you distribute them, and whether the viewer intends to take the next steps.
Where Can You Upload Videos to Collect the Most Data?
To move beyond the metrics listed in the previous section to see if your video content is moving watchers into and through the sales pipeline, you need a hosting platform that can integrate into your customer relationship management software. When you do that, you’ll be able to dig deeper into the metrics to determine which videos are driving traffic, building contact lists, and generating leads.
This speaks to the importance of the distribution phase of practicing video. Distributing your content to the right places can be the difference between measuring outcomes and taking a wild stab at them.
With that in mind, there are several platforms out there that should help you collect better data:
Each of these platforms has various hosting tiers that allow you to choose the package that best works for your needs. However, we should note, a paid subscription is often required to gain access to advanced metrics on your entire content library.
Who Can Be Your Partner in Analyzing Your Content?
Even with these tools and knowledge at your disposal, you may still have a library of high-quality content that, for some reason, just isn’t connecting with your intended audience. At Storyboard Media, we can conduct our Mr. Catalyst video content audit to help you understand the analytics of your B2B videos, boost their reach, and identify content gaps in your library. Reach out today to find out more!