How to Use Video Data to Strengthen Your Marketing Efforts

To measure and improve your video content’s ROI, I firmly believe that you must integrate it into the rest of your marketing efforts. One easy way to do that is to start combining your video data with the rest of your marketing data. Regardless of how you’re tracking marketing results and which tools you’re using, there’s a way to incorporate video insights into that workflow.

That sounds good in theory, but how do you actually do it? Below, I’ll outline 3 examples of what this looks like in practice.

1. Track video events as part of your website analytics

One basic question we ask ourselves frequently is, “how are visitors interacting with our site?” And more specifically, which interactions are helping to drive conversions? To answer these questions, we spend a lot of time in Google Analytics analyzing our website traffic.

Since Wistia automatically passes all video events into GA, we can now report how individual videos influence our funnel and conversion rates. GA’s "audience segments" feature makes this simple to do.

At Wistia, we create audience segments for the videos most closely tied to conversion. In this example, we are filtering visitors who’ve viewed our “Why Pay for Pro Video Hosting” video.

“We create audience segments for the videos most closely tied to conversion.”

With this audience segment defined, we can compare the behavior of those who’ve watched this video with those who haven’t.

For that comparison, the variables we tend to focus on are: visit duration, repeat visits, and conversion rates. The power of audience segments is that you can define and combine them as you see fit — you can look at visitors who watched video A, didn’t watch video B, and visited your pricing page. Like any other analytics approach, I recommend starting simple and layering on complexity as you go.

In addition to creating segments based on video viewing, you can also create segments for viewers who enter their information via Turnstile or click on your annotations and calls to action.

2. Compare leads from different sources

With Turnstile, you can start to incorporate lead capture as part of your video efforts. Ideally, “video leads” are only a portion of your lead generation activities. Here at Wistia, we collect leads through a free trial of our product, resource downloads (like free music or email templates), webinars with partners, and more.

Instead of analyzing our video leads in isolation, we look at video as one channel among many.

In practice, we integrate this data in our marketing automation platform, but the same can be done in Google Analytics, your email service provider, or even just in Excel. The goal is simply to understand where leads are coming from, and the quality of those leads by channel.

I would definitely recommend starting broad in your definition of channels and moving toward a more granular approach as required. For example, I suggest grouping your videos into meaningful categories, rather than evaluating each video individually. In the example below, we’ve used very broad categories to define channels, leaving us the option to dig in deeper while also offering a high level look at performance.

“I suggest grouping your videos into meaningful categories, rather than evaluating each video individually.”

With all this information in one place, we can see how our videos are contributing to our overall lead generation strategy. We can also compare the videos in our production library with our webinars to see which source is producing the most qualified leads.

3. Score leads and notify your sales team

Incorporating lead scoring into your workflow is a great way to increase the efficiency of your marketing and bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Most commonly, lead scoring is driven by webpage visits, with more points assigned to high value pages, like your pricing page, resource downloads, and product demos.

Adding video events to your lead scoring algorithm gives you another key trigger to measure prospect interest. If you’re using marketing automation, this is now incredibly easy to do.

“Adding video events to your lead scoring algorithm gives you another key trigger to measure prospect interest.”

In the example below, we assign 10 points to each lead who watches 100% of our “Why pay for pro video hosting?” video.

I’d recommend starting simple, by just adding a couple of your high value videos to your scoring algorithm. Once you have that up and running, you can add a ton more complexity by scoring leads based on where they are in the buying cycle.

Taking this one step further, you can also set up real-time alerts for your sales team when one of their assigned prospects is watching a key video. This alert, combined with Wistia’s video heatmap, showing which sections of the video a prospect engaged with, gives your sales team a great opportunity to connect at exactly the right moment.

There are a lot of ways to incorporate video into your marketing automation, but we hope these examples help some of you get started with maximum video ROI impact!