What if you will be given an accurate forecast about digital video marketing? Can this help you in your business? It can definitely help you in a lot of ways. For instance, you can allocate more funds to video marketing. You can find effective ways on how to make your video marketing successful or experiment with new ideas.
According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast for 2015 to 2020, the number of internet users will increase by one billion in 2020. From three billion in 2015, it is predicted that it will rose to 4.1 billion in 2020. Cisco VNI also predicted that by 2020, the global traffic for internet videos will increase, from 63% in 2015 to 79% by 2020. This means that approximately three trillion minutes of internet video will be played each month by 2020. If this will be calculated, then it is equivalent to five million years of internet videos played per month or more or less one million minutes of videos played for every second. Likewise, by 2020 at least 82% of internet video traffic will come from HD and Ultra HD videos. This is a huge increase from 53% in 2015.
The Cisco VNI forecast also shows an increase in consumer internet video traffic, from 68% in 2015 to 82% in 2020. There is also an increase in business internet video traffic by 2020, from 44% in 2015 to 66% in 2020. During the previous years, virtual reality traffic was quadrupled and it is predicted that it will expand to 61-fold by 2020.
This report is a result of extensive data collection, analysis, and comparison with relevant and affiliated data sources.
Although, these are just forecasts, yet it looks very remarkable. Cisco also explains that it is not about the amount of video content that the internet users are watching, but the type of video. In fact, nowadays, more and more people are watching ultra-HD videos on their Smart TVs.
Cisco also predicts that by the end of 2018, approximately 20% of TVs will have the capability of supporting 4K video. When it comes to the global capability for video, Cisco’s Vice President of Global Technology Policy, Robert Pepper, stated that “In the future, at some point, every month is going to look like the World Cup month because the consumption just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”
Why Should You Increase Your Video Marketing Budget
Regardless if you have a precise prediction about the future of digital video marketing business and you have spent some time learning more about the latest trends and concepts for video marketing, there are still chances that you won’t be able to convince the executive members of your organization, most especially the baby boomers. Well, perhaps because they think of themselves as smart and experienced executives. The online world 20 years ago is not the same as today.
Way back in 1997, people were relying on the dial-in modem which provides a speed between 14.4 kbps and 28.8 kbps. It seems that the World Wide Web is still a great mystery to everyone. Streaming media is not yet available. The only way that you can play online games is to download the games to your desktop. Television was using an analog signal. The major application being used on cellphones is Voice while the most well-known browser is Netscape.
Internet service providers (ISPs) are offering a monthly flat rate to their customers instead of charging them per hour. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore but e-books are not yet available during that time. Google was still a research project. YouTube, which is considered as the traditional online video platform of today, was still nonexistent.
Hence, even if there are a few members of your top senior executives who are adventurous, most probably there are still many who will feel doubtful while others choose to remain traditional. This means that even if designating more budget to video marketing is a good idea, sometimes it’s just hard to convince the entire management. Perhaps the best way to convince these cynical and traditional senior executives is to create your own business case. In order to succeed, you must learn how to think and speak like them. So, your business case must be able to showcase the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) that are valuable to them including sales, engagement, brand awareness, and lead generation.
Brand Awareness
According to some video marketers, the best way to measure brand awareness is through “impressions” otherwise known as “views.” But this is quite doubtful. What if you will be asked how many impressions are needed so you can increase your brand awareness by 17%? If you won’t be able to answer this question, then maybe you should not use these metrics as one of your KPIs. If you will claim that your new video marketing can generate more “views”, then a skeptical senior executive will probably ask you this question.
But don’t worry, there is always another alternative. Google and Facebook have a better set of metrics. You also need to realize that the budget for the ads is entirely different from your video marketing budget if you have a bigger business. Also, as a video marketer, you can learn some lessons from advertisers.
For instance, you can make use of Google Surveys so you can obtain the quickest and the most reputable opinions from consumers all over the world who are using the internet on PC or on their mobile devices. This can help you formulate a well-informed decision, understand the influence of your content marketing, and monitor the status of your brand.
How does it work?
First, you have to determine your target audience, then ask your questions. Afterward, you can see the results coming in. For a single question answered, the price is 30¢ and $3.00 for 2 or more questions completed. All the questions in the survey must be answered by all the respondents. When choosing your target audience, you have several options. You can either choose Android smartphone users who have Google Opinion Rewards app on their phones. Or you could also target men and women who are between 25 and 34 years old.
Next, you will create up to 10 questions. There are several question formats that you can use such as a question with a single answer, two choices, or multiple answers. The choices could also include images. Aside from this, you could also choose a rating scale format, side-by-side images, menu with images, etc.
Finally, your questions will go live in different networks of news, articles, entertainment sites, etc. They can also be seen within Google’s mobile app. When people answer these questions, they will be given a reward such as Google Play credits and other types of rewards. Now, you can assure that these answers are genuine since they come from real people.
Based on the respondent’s IP address and browsing history, Google Surveys can specifically identify the age, gender, as well as the location of every online respondent. However, mobile users will be required to to answer demographic questions. This means that you will have a variety of respondents from different parts of the world.
Before launching your new video marketing campaign, it would be wise to conduct Google Surveys. Then, later on, you can do these Google Surveys quarterly.
How To Measure Video Engagement Effectively?
So, what is the best way of measuring your video engagement? Engagement can be measured by its intensification, communication, and praise rates. These are even much better compared to social media sharing. The Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google, Avinash Kaushik, suggests that these metrics should be used as KPIs since this is the audience which shows intent. This is the best way of measuring users engagement when it comes to video marketing.
How can you measure lead generation? An excellent method of measuring micro conversions is through Google Analytics. Micro conversions refer to the variety of activities which can motivate users in making a purchase. These activities can be seen on most websites. Hence, it would be great if you can install at least two or three of these activities.
Email Signup
Create a “Thank you for signing up” page and treat this as your goal page. Compute a value for this particular goal. For instance, if 10% of the users who signed up have made a purchase and you’ve made an average sales of $50, then if we compute 10% of $50 the result would be $5. Hence, this amount will become your email sign up goal.
Extensive Browsing
Set the number of pages that customers will likely browse extensively before making a purchase. The standard number of pages will likely depend on your site. What would you regard as extensive browsing? You need to find out how many pages your potential customers will likely view before making a purchase.
PDF Download
Every download must be properly monitored by considering it as a Google Analytics event. To do this, an onClick event must be embedded to the download link. Every time users will make a download, it will be monitored by the Google Analytics event.
Another way of improving your performance quickly is to give credit where it is due. By using the Campaign URL Builder tool you can add your ad campaign to your URL. In this way, your Custom Campaigns can be monitored by Google Analytics. It’s very easy to use, all you have to do is input the name of your URL plus your ad campaign then it will instantly generate a URL. You could also use the Google URL Shortener so it will be easier to share the link to social media.
Campaign URL Builder is very helpful in measuring the performance of each channel as well as the strategies that you are using as part of your video marketing. You can compute its efficiency based on website traffic, micro-conversions, as well as the time users spent on the website.
The best way to measure sales is through completed purchases. But most often, the job of the marketers is not to generate sales. What they do is generate leads and the sales department will be responsible for closing the deal. This is why the recognition of sales is most often given to the sales department. On the other hand, marketers will concentrate more on generating sales leads and higher conversion rates. Most marketers are now finding themselves in a lose-lose situation. If the sales lead that they have generated will result in sales, then the sales department will be recognized for this accomplishment. However, if the sales lead won’t convert to sales, then the marketing department will be blamed for it.
How Are Sales and Marketing Related?
The association between sales and marketing varies in every organization. Most often, it involves politics. The fact is, the return on investment in marketing (ROMI) is more relevant than sales. This is not similar to the return-on-investment (ROI) metrics.
Marketing expenses are usually spent in the prevailing period, hence it is considered as an operational expenditure or OPEX. This is contrary to capital expenditure or CAPEX, wherein the money was used on plants and inventories. Moreover, you can justify your marketing spending if you can get a positive result after computing the ROMI.
For instance, the money that you spent on your new video marketing is $48,000 and it was able to generate an income of $240,000 with a contribution margin of 60%. If you compute ROMI , ($240,000 * 60% – $48,000 / $48,000), you will obtain a positive result of 2.0. Therefore, for every dollar spent on your new video marketing, your organization can gain an additional profit of $2.
However, is this possible to achieve? Based on a case study, Piper Aircraft spent less than $50,000 for their campaign done by DigiNovations. Their slogan was PiperSport for Piper Aircraft. The budget was spent on making a Facebook page, Twitter feed, and a YouTube channel. After launching their social media marketing campaign, they were able to gather 15 orders of a product which costs $140,000 each, with a total sales of $2.1 million. These orders were generated during the first 90 days of the campaign. If we are going to calculate the ROMI ($2,100,000 * 30% – $50,000 / $50,000), the result would be 11.6. Hence, for every dollar spent on the campaign, Piper Aircraft was able to generate a profit of $11.60. This is a more efficient way of calculating sales compared to completed purchases.
If you really want the members of your executives who are already baby boomers to believe in your vision, then you should study their way of thinking and imitate the way they speak. This can help you improve your career, at the same time improve your chances of getting more allocation for your video marketing.