Video content marketing is one of the most important channels in modern digital marketing, since it allows you to reach a wide audience and use a versatile range of techniques to persuade those audience members. Your strategy will be dictated by the goals you set, so how can you set the best possible goals for your video production and distribution?
The Value of Goals
Why should we care about setting goals for a video content marketing strategy?
- Direction. Good goals provide direction for a campaign. Once you know exactly what you’re working for, you can gradually optimize your video production and your distribution strategies to align with those goals.
- Motivation. For most people, goals also serve as powerful motivators. If you’re trying to reach a specific view count and you end up just shy, it will motivate you to try even harder with the next video.
- Analysis. Goals also work well as a basis for analysis. Determining whether or not a video was effective is simply a matter of determining whether or not it helped you achieve your stated goals.
The Power of Video Content
Video content marketing has grown considerably over the years, becoming more popular amongst marketers as its strengths have been increasingly acknowledged. It’s one of the most promising areas of marketing and advertising growth, and one of the most valuable channels for promoting your brand and its core products and services.
If you can establish a strong video content marketing strategy, directed and motivated by sufficiently developed goals, you can help your brand reach more people and sell more products.
Choosing the Right Metrics
Much of the success of your goal setting will depend on your ability to choose the right metrics. There are many metrics that can help you determine the effectiveness of a video, but some are going to matter to your brand more than others.
- Views. One of the most obvious metrics to track is view count. In other words, how many people are watching your videos? You can reach more people and establish a bigger viewership by making more compelling, relevant videos and making those videos more visible.
- Engagements. Views might tell you how many people are watching your video, but they don’t tell you much about how people are watching your video. Engagements are arguably a better indication of how many people are truly watching and appreciating your content. Engagements include things such as likes, reactions, and comments.
- Click through rates. Depending on the nature of your video and how people are encountering it, your click through rates probably range from 0-10 percent. In other words, somewhere between 0 percent and 10 percent of your viewers end up clicking links that lead to your product pages (or your website). You can increase click through rates by making your links more obvious and more attractive.
- Conversion rates. Similarly, you can consider conversion rates. How many people purchase a product or sign up for more information after watching your videos? It’s an indication of how persuasive your videos are.
- Follower/subscriber growth. Many brands are tempted to track follower and subscriber growth as a primary metric. While these types of metrics can be informative, they also straddle the line between valuable metrics and vanity metrics. Having more followers and subscribers is certainly a good thing, but it doesn’t tell you much about how those followers and subscribers are behaving.
- Total ROI. A better metric to target for your goals is ROI: your overall return on investment. To track this, you’ll need to know how much revenue your video is generating as well as how much you spent to produce it.
Constructing Better Goals
So how do you create better goals within these metric categories?
SMART criteria have long been held as ideal for guiding goal creation, and they’re still highly relevant today. Good goals are:
- Specific. Your goals should be as specific as possible. For example, don’t set a goal of “earning more views.” Instead, set a goal of “increasing average views from 5,000 to 7,000.”
- Measurable. Your goals should also be measurable. Try to set an objective number, rather than targeting an abstract concept.
- Achievable. Good goals are challenging, yet achievable. They should be slightly beyond your current capabilities or historical results, but still within the realm of reasonable achievement.
- Relevant. Effective goals are relevant to your broader purpose. In this context, that means your video marketing goals should be tied to the broader goals of your marketing and sales strategies.
- Time-bound. Finally, goals should be time-bound. In other words, they should come with a deadline.
Choosing better metrics and applying SMART criteria can help you set far better goals for your video marketing strategy. With better goals in place, you’ll have better direction for video production, more motivation to produce better videos, and ultimately, a system of analysis by which you can grade your success.