Video Content Means Business With Advanced Metrics And Integration

Last updated on July 13th, 2015 at 04:09 pm

If content is king, it seems video content is ascending the throne.

The Content Marketing Institute reports 73 percent of B2B marketers use video, and according to a survey by Demand Metric this year, 82 percent of B2B organizations report some level of success with video marketing. In a separate Demand Metric survey from August, 95 percent of study participants said video is becoming more important as a form of marketing and sales content.

Marketers have more tools and platforms than ever to deliver B2B audiences informative and entertaining videos. At the same time, the budgets and time required to create this content continue to shrink.

But like everything in a marketing budget, the performance and value of video content must be carefully measured. Facing increased pressure to demonstrate and improve ROI, marketers are turning to advanced analytics.

Mining analytics with video content

Clearly it’s not enough anymore to just track how many times a video has been watched. Today, marketers want to understand at the level of individual viewers who is watching, for how long, and how well it successfully drives viewers to take action.

One leading company at the intersection of video marketing and analytics is Vidyard. The Ontario-based startup reflects a growing sophistication among B2B marketing professionals when it comes to video content.

Demand Metric considers Vidyard a “cutting-edge” player in video marketing, with Massachusetts-based Brightcove a key competitor. Both companies, like others in the field, host customers’ marketing and sales videos, and manage their distribution across devices and sites, including YouTube.

But in B2B video content, success needs to be about more than just reach.

Big piece of a larger puzzle

Marketing organizations increasingly expect demand close integration with their existing automation platforms and CRM tools.

In the case of Vidyard, its platform integrates viewer data into the likes of Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot, which allows marketers to push more targeted video content to their most engaged leads. Similarly, this video data integrates with Salesforce.com, so sales teams can understand what individual customers and prospects are viewing. Vidyard even feeds into the new Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud, linking video performance with leads and revenue.

Vidyard also provides apps that streamline video content for email campaigns (ExactTarget and MailChimp) and social media management (HootSuite).

Power of video analytics

Understanding how viewers engage with video content in both the aggregate and, perhaps most importantly, at an individual customer level will change the value proposition for video content. Yes, creating video takes more time and money than other types of content. But by integrating analytics, marketers can closely track attention span and viewing history, geographic location and click-through and sharing behaviour, which could ultimately paint a much clearer picture of how video content works and contributes to larger business goals. In fact, according to a recent survey by Demand Metric (sponsored by Vidyard), video converts better.

So long as that trend continues, video content will have a long and glorious reign.

Photo via Flickr user m01129