A question that crops up from time to time when speaking to business owners and marketers about incorporating video into their strategies is ‘how do I know if my video efforts are delivering a return on my investment?’.
Dealing with ROI, in general, can often feel extremely daunting and it’s even worse when trying to work out the worth of something as unique and complex as Content marketing.
But, it’s actually easier than you think to calculate the ROI of a video campaign and get a great return on your investment. Below I’m going to show you how.
How to calculate your video ROI
Here's the basic formula used to calculate ROI:
When working out the ROI of video, you need to total up all the gains and costs of that content and then run it through the equation. Though for the most accurate results, you should count the 'gain' of your video content as whatever your objectives were for that piece of content.
Even if you create the perfect video and it’s watched a million times, it may drive zero sales. Can you count that as a success?
That ultimately depends on your video goals. Before you create a video, you should develop a video strategy outlining exactly how you’ll measure success. But the key to actually knowing if your video is successful is meticulously tracking your visitors throughout the customer’s journey, from the minute they discover your brand, to the minute they buy your product or service.
For example, if you created an educational video to generate leads on your site then the gain for that video would be the number of leads you managed to generate in a set period of time.
What are the gains from video?
Those ‘gains’ of your video content can be almost anything. Here's a list of some of the most common when it comes to videos:
Subscribers
Leads
Customers
Brand awareness
Value of sales
Employee's time saved
Now that you know how to measure the ROI of your future video content, to ensure you are successful, you need to begin with this basic starting point. What do you want from your content? What does success look like to you?
Set your goals, and make them SMART. From here you've got a solid basis from which to build effective video content — and measure that effectiveness and get a great return on your investment.