How to measure your social media marketing video ROI for your manager

Social media has an important role to play in the world of digital marketing. Video is growing so rapidly that it is predicted to comprise 80% of internet traffic by 2021. That’s why most businesses are focussing more of their marketing spend on video production and strategy, and social media is the perfect place to share it.

Trying to get your boss on board with the latest social trends can often be met with, let’s just say, some skepticism. Measuring the ROI of marketing has always been challenging, but when it comes to social media and video marketing, it’s even more difficult.

So, what’s the best way to show the value of your hard work on these platforms, in a language that your boss can understand?

Here are some ways that you can show that these videos are not just worth the marketing spend, but something that your business cannot afford to overlook.

Let the numbers do the talking!

Social media and video marketing is a match made in heaven. It’s the perfect medium to consume content, and videos provide the highest engagement rates across the board. That’s why videos are now considered an essential component of any business’ marketing strategy.

In a recent study, 93% of marketers said they could attribute a new customer to one of their videos, and 46% of consumers indicated that videos are responsible for first introducing them to a brand or product that they’ve gone on to purchase.

It also comes as no surprise to see that 73% of consumers said they were impacted by a brand’s social media presence before they make a purchasing decision, and that almost 50% of Google web users look for a video before visiting a store.

These are statistics that your business cannot afford to ignore, and it’s important to lay them out in black and white for your boss. The evidence speaks for itself.

Set clear campaign objectives and KPIs

Before you can measure the ROI, you need to decide what success looks like for this campaign. What do you want people to do when they see your video on their social feeds? How many people do you want to take this action?

This can be as simple as focusing your campaign on building leads, increasing foot traffic or generating sales. Videos may have different goals, so it’s important to break it down and clearly show your boss how each video will be adding value. Then you can work backwards from previous website conversions and enquiry rates to set realistic targets, and don’t forget to check out your industry’s benchmark for conversion success, clicks, and engagement rates.

When you have a clear goal to strive towards, it makes it easy to show how your social media video marketing campaigns are tracking and make sure that you’re generating results that actually contribute to your business.

Decide how you’re going to measure

While your videos may have a specific goal that supports the greater business strategy, actually measuring the success of your campaign is a different story. To make life easier when your boss inevitably asks you to demonstrate ROI, it’s worth determining how you’re going to measure your success from the beginning.

For example, consider the goal of generating 5 phone call enquiries a day. Your video will need to engage viewers to make the call, provide a phone number and allow you to attribute these calls to this specific video. One way to achieve this would be to update your procedures so that when customers call they are asked what prompted the call, and then ask your sales team to provide you with a total at the end of each day.

This would provide you with a measurable, trackable way of tracing the success of this video. For any goals that are focused in the digital environment, there are a variety of ways that you can leverage technology (tracking codes, cookies, remarketing, etc) to directly link a new prospect or customer to a specific video marketing campaign.

Remove the guesswork with an attribution model

If your running multiple marketing campaigns, it can be challenging to determine exactly which one of your videos had the greatest impact. This is where an attribution model can help.

An attribution model is essentially the set of rules that you use to determine how you credit sales and conversions. While there may be several steps along the path to conversion, what you’re wanting to know is whether your video played a role in that path, and, ideally, how important that role was. There are a few different types of attribution models that you can try.

An example of a fairly straight-forward attribution model is the first-touch attribution model. This is where websites use cookies to attribute the final sale to the source of their first interaction. This basically means that it will track whether website visitors first come across your brand on your website, a blog, social media, or any other source. On the other hand, the last-touch attribution model gives credits the last engagement that was viewed before the viewer was converted to a lead. Both of these models provide important information about the success of your marketing strategies, but they don’t provide a full picture of your customer journey.

For a more in-depth analysis, you can try a multi-touch attribution model. This is a more sophisticated way of tracking the whole journey of a viewer to the point where they convert into a lead. No attribution model is perfect, but this approach will give your business a better idea of how your lead moved from a brand new website visitor to an engaged prospect.

Whichever attribution model you use, you will likely need to invest in the appropriate software to gather the data, or partner with an agency who is experienced in this area. This data will shape the future of your marketing strategy, and will remove any guesswork about the actual ROI generated for your business.

Break down the results

To measure the true ROI of your campaigns and make informed strategic decisions about your budget, you may want to breakdown per result - whether it’s cost per subscriber gained, new purchase, or content download.

Then you can start to compare your video marketing investment against campaigns on other mediums or platforms, and show your boss comparative ROI for your key metrics. Having all this data available will help you to understand the best way to reach your audience, and where to increase spend for future campaigns.

The important thing is to measure the true impact of your videos across all the channels that you use, and at every stage of the customer journey. Pulling together multiple data sources and cost calculations can be complicated, so you may want to work with a strategic video marketing agency who can put the right tools and systems in place from the beginning, and make your life much easier when it comes time to create the reports.

Your boss will be looking for these numbers - but if you spend all your time reporting on the past, how will you have enough time to innovate and improve in the future? It’s time to outsource the process to the professionals.

Analyse and re-strategise

So, you’ve got all your data ready to present to your boss, but the results are not as amazing as you’d hoped.

Don’t be disheartened, this is a normal part of the strategic marketing process. You need to know what is not working before you can make changes. In your reports, be really clear about weak spots in the current campaign structure, and how you intend to improve them. It could be a small tweak, or a huge shift in your strategy - but it all comes back to setting your boss’ expectations.

It will take a few months to find the right balance and approach for your social media video marketing campaign, but if you have the right reporting in place, it allows you to make quick decisions and ultimately maximise your ROI.

Make the most out of your agency

Unless you’ve got all the skills required to produce videos and create appropriate video marketing strategies in-house, you’ll likely be working with a strategic video marketing agency. They can help you with all the steps listed above, and will have the tools and experience on hand to make the process (and your life) easier.

If that’s the case, your key aim is to keep your agency accountable. Here are some tips to make the most out of this resource:

1. Ensure that they understand your business objectives.
2. Clearly define the amount of leads or foot traffic that is required to drive conversions.
3. Ensure the agency will be accountable for traffic results.
4. Set mid-campaign WIP meetings to convey current feedback.
5. Ensure the agency understands exactly which metrics your boss wants to see.
6. Ensure they understand which content pieces already convert, so they can replicate these results.
7. Ask them to provide updates of your marketing spend and ROI results.

Then it’s as simple as sharing their reports with your boss, and you have the expertise and support on-hand to answer any tricky questions.

If you’ve implemented an informed social video marketing strategy, then you’ve got the potential to demonstrate exceptional marketing ROI. Like anything, it takes careful planning to implement and organise the systems needed, but by knowing your goals and being clear on what you want to measure, you’ve got a strong starting base.

At 500 Digital, we focus on generating real, measurable results - which is exactly what you need. We know how to create content that converts, and how to use measurable business analytics to optimise your campaign. Best of all, you get to show your manager how effective your efforts have been, without spending hours in front of a spreadsheet. To find out how we’ve helped customers like you to maximise their video marketing ROI, read our Grafico case study.

500 Digital Media is a Melbourne-based production studio with a national focus. Fluent in every stage of production – from concept and creation to social media strategy – we provide a full-scale and integrated end-to-end service delivered by our team of in-house experts.

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