Power of diversity
Video Engagement Industry Report is primarily a collection of interesting case studies. Brands and agencies use videos in many different ways. On the one hand, there is the fascinating story of TCO agency about the use of recognizable bloggers in helping to sell the advantages of visiting a country – in this case Canada – to Millennials obsessed with traveling. On the other hand, we have the story of French agency Citizen Press about how a video worked in the case ofthe French College of Physicians, which used webzines with short animations to update their strategy of communicating with the new generation of physicians.

Cost and gain
According to the report, it is a problem for companies and agencies to allocate the right amount of money for video production and the return on investment (43% of the responding companies answered “ROI” to the question about the biggest obstacle in the development of this sector). You can read about the expenditures on video in a different article.

The choice of video publication channels should be determined by the customer path designed in the campaign.

Albert Hupa

Channels of promotion
According to experts quoted in the report, a company/agency should not rely on temporary popularity of given media but consider which distribution platform best suits their needs – whether it’s owned, paid or earned media, like social media channels of opinion leaders, digital PR and partnership channels. Very often it turns out the mix of all those channels is the best solution. But there is more to think about: “Popularizing content via social media is an obvious choice to maximize engagement, but the ‘one size fits all’ attitude is not going to work – each piece of content should be adjusted to the needs of each social channel,” the report concludes.

“The choice of video publication channels should be determined by the customer path designed in the campaign. Obviously, different channels will determine different reception of videos – on video websites it’s a short commercial in a TV format, YouTube is more focused on videos, allows to interact with content and is social, and Facebook is a great platform for live streaming,” explains Albert Hupa. “Integrated campaigns can use many different platforms, but they should remember about creating content dedicated specifically for each of them” he adds.

SEO language
The choice of platforms is largely related to visibility. You can find useful advice on SEO in the part of the report entitled “Introduction to video SEO” by Steven Kenwright of the agency Branded3. “Search engines are not able to understand visual content such as video in the same way they understand text content, so providing the right data to search engines in a language they understand is of fundamental meaning for SEO in the case of videos. Each website (whether it contains video content or not) should contain meta data, information for search engines about the content of the website. Visitors can see that information in bookmarks at the top of their search engine or as a title in the search results, so it should be descriptive enough to simplify navigation,” says Kenwright and then pays attention to SEO in the case of video hosting on YouTube or Vimeo, explains the notion of long and short click and talks about the meaning of video for search engines when it comes to the value for customer inquiries: “A 30-second video is as useful for SEO as one that is 30 minutes long, if only it answers the question asked and the search engine does not have to look any further.”

Measure of success
All right, the film is published, the SEO has made it hard to miss it on the Internet, but how do you know if your mission was successful? Most companies asked in the research (over 60%) claims the most important key they use to find out if the video was successful is the number of views. The next most often mentioned factor is social sharing, and the least often mentioned one (2%) is the length of engagement and the factor called view completions.

At the same time the authors of the report emphasize that companies are moving further from the old criteria and are searching for measures based more on engagement. Nevertheless, Albert Hupa claims that when it comes to videos, the most important factor today is performance – that is the result such as the purchase of a product. “The video is one of the rich media – so much and so little at the same time – and its effectiveness should be measured with conversion, just like in the case of other advertising activities,” says Albert Hupa. “The viewing time surely is an indicator of quality, but at the end of the day advertising should bring reach or engagement.

The first indicator is more expensive and less controllable. Today the key is becoming performance. Video effectiveness should be measured in its surrounding and with regard to the role it plays in leading customers towards making a purchase. Soon a video that doesn’t take direct conversion into account will be the same as a regular banner campaign. On the other hand, programmatic video is now becoming a standard (use of software for purchasing digital video advert. An advantage in comparison to a traditionally purchased video advertisement is that it uses data in real time, to show the video advert to the right customer at the right time – Ed.), and as a result the effectiveness is going to be calculated in the context of budget savings”.

Click the image to read the whole report