As you start your journey to find the perfect video marketing technology for your business you will want to keep in mind these 5 points, which will most definitely help you along the way. With the concept of video marketing being somewhat new (mainly for small businesses), its good to know what a good starting point looks like and that is what this article will give you. We love presenting articles like this in the form of questions, it gets you thinking and makes these exercises more engaging.
1. What type of analytics do you need reported to prove that video is helping you achieve your end goal?
This might seem like a weird first question to ask, but its a really important one. In all reporting scenarios, knowing what you want from a report will tell you the type of information that needs to be collected on the other end. Since we are assuming have already thought through the details of your video strategy, this question is tied directly to reporting as it relates to the goals set forth in your strategy.
For example, you may be using video for content marketing and need to show that a specific video is embedded on a landing page that has generated X number of leads, with X number of opportunities created, and X number of deals closed. Or in a similar scenario, you may have a video that has an in-video form that you have shared across the web, social and all. You want to report the number of new contacts as they relate to the number of plays or even play completes.
Regardless, knowing your goals and what analytics map to those goals is super important.
2. What’s the size of your video library and the frequency of production — in other words, how many videos?
The size of your video library in both the number of video assets and the amount of storage they consume is extremely important when speaking with premium video vendors. Most vendors price their application fees on usage, meaning bandwidth, storage, and potentially streams. Some providers may also charge a flat license fee.
Given that most scenarios you will be signing a 12-month agreement with a video vendor, so knowing in advance how many video files you will be looking to host in that period will make it easy to determine the resources needed. To learn more about how to calculate bandwidth and storage amounts based on your current video library, read our previous article.
3. What does your video strategy plan from production to distribution look like?
Picking the right video platform for your business may not only include video playback and analytics, but possibly serve as a tool in the production and approval process. Before talking with vendors have a good understanding of where the production work stops and the video platform comes.
For example, some companies may work with a 3rd party production team and during the creative process files or versions of the video in focus will be shared back and forth but does not need to be published to the web for everyone to see. Today this is typically a very disjointed process that some video vendors streamlining the details.
Being educated on your video strategy beyond just “what you think you may want” from a video vendor will help save you a ton of money and heartache — you will end up picking the right solution.
4. How large is your audience and how many video plays will you expect in a given period?
If you are a small business then you most definitely have a handle on the size of your audience, you can probably provide figures off the cuff. Larger enterprises will most likely work with large ballpark figures. It’s all fine, but knowing or projecting what video viewership looks like in the first 12 months with your new video platform is important for calculating bandwidth.
Hint for both small businesses and enterprises, unless you are running national television campaigns with this video content, or have a ton of paid ads pointed at the video, the video viewership will be much lower than you think. Work with a number, somewhere around 5% of the audience will end up watching videos.
To learn more about calculating bandwidth and audience, you can read this article which goes into more detail.
5. What business systems does video need to be connect to?
One of the biggest benefits of online video is that it is one of the only content types/formats that gives marketers deep insight to the level of engagement a contact has at any given time. For example, with static written content share to contacts, the only analytic data you get is an event that they visited a blog post, downloaded a white paper, etc. With video you can know not only what videos a contact watched, but specifically which part of the video was re-watched. This is extremely valuable for sales and marketing teams, and even more valuable presented in front of their faces.
Integrations with CRM, ERP, and MAP systems are very common with video platforms today. The ability to relate a specific contact identity (via unique email address) to video engagement data makes it very easy for contact specific actions to be passed to business systems without much translation on the other side.
Knowing what business systems you have in place and what data might need to be passed to them will greatly help qualify your prospective buyers. A great example of this is, placing marketing video content on your website and your sales reps knowing in Salesforce (CRM system) which videos their contact has watched. All this can be done automatically with the right video provider.
There are definitely much more than 5 things to consider, but figured we would start here and in a later post we can go more into detail. If you can answer these questions then you are one step closer to implementing a video solution that will hit on all your goals and objectives.
If you enjoyed this article, we suggest you read our previous post: Best Video Hosting Platforms For Small Businesses.