There is a saying...if a picture is worth a thoursand words, then a video is worth a million. This notion is pretty hard to argue against considering that year on year, video is becoming the 'go to' tool for marketers across the globe. Not only has it taken over social media, but websites are increasingly using video as the main tool to connect with their customers and present their product, service or overall message.

Consider these statistics:

• YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of total internet users.
• 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week.
• More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day.
• More video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years.
• 87% of online marketers use video content in one form or another.

These are just some of the mountain of statistics that support video as the best form to present content to consumers. But what does it take to make a good video? Where do you start? How do you measure your ROI? This blog aims to touch on those subjects and highlight the importance of including a video in your website.

When planning out your video, consider the following:

• Aim/goal: What is the video campaign's main goal? Is it to increase sales, create exposure for your business, or both? This will determine the direction of the video.
• Message: What message/feel do you want the video to put across? A video that will able to generate the ‘right’ emotions from a viewer will be a successful one.
• Relevance: make sure the content in your video is relevant to your target market.
• Insight: Have you identified any insights into your target market that your competitors have yet to use and can give your marketing a competitive advantage.
• CTA: Make sure that your call to action is loud and clear and your customers will know exactly how to seek out your service or product.

Creating the video:

Creating a video is not just a matter of pointing the camera at something. There is a whole industry built around producing and designing videos in a professional way that will help generate the best return on investment..

Consider this ingenious strategy applied to this Old Spice campaign. Although the product is designed and made exclusively for men, quite subtly, the marketers in charge decided to target the video at women. Although it is possible to break the video down and talk about the psychology of it all, what it really boils down to is the fact that it is not only men that buy men's deodorant, more often than not it is their partner walking down the supermarket aisle. The video quickly created a huge buzz through the internet and increased sales by 106% in the weeks following the campaign.

Tracking the video:

There are a lot of different analytics tools out there that provide ample information to help analyse a video. Although websites are a bit more limited in the sense that they do not record the gender of the viewer unless it is provided through log-in information, analytics tools can still record how many people watched the video, where they watched it, what they watched it on, and whether they watched the video in its entirety. Not only can these statistics assist in making any necessary adjustments to the video throughout the campaign (e.g. where the video is displayed in your website), they can also determine the success at its conclusion.

Return on investment:

The relatively easy part of calculating your ROI is knowing how much money has been spent on the campaign. It is quite an established problem that measuring marketing ROI can be quite difficult if there is no good planning done beforehand. Simply measuring how much product is sold before and after the campaign is not enough. Luckily for marketers today, the digitization of advertising has made it increasingly easier to keep track of sales against their respective campaigns.

Most, if not all campaigns, will have a CTA that enables the marketer to keep track of sales directly related to the campaign. If a company has decided to launch a new product, having a coupon/discount offer in the video could give it a fairly accurate measure of how many people viewed the video and purchased the product as a result.

In the case of of wanting to increase brand awareness, it could be as simple as creating a link to one of your social media platforms and tracking the number of clicks, likes and shares directly from your website.

If you're thinking about embarking on a video campaign for your site, the team at Expert will be happy to guide you along the way.