3 Easy Video Tips for small business marketing and for better sales

This embedded YouTube video on the Zimana site is an example of how to merge images together to form a video that explains your business

Analytics solutions vary from free solutions to more comprehensive offerings that cost from $99 to $500 per month. The solution price typically depends on the number of videos being monitored and reporting complexity needed for a video campaign.

When starting to incorporate video, a business just beginning to incorporate video can consider a few steps that can save time and allow online presence to measured for trial, error, and learning.

1. Gather images for a video

This step is a brainstorming activity and assumes you’ve made a video (within a budget, of course!).  You may have a whole video ready, but in many cases, you may want to augment images with additional clips.  The main function is to gather images and video, even if the video in snippets, then review to determine images that convey the key message. A video editor like Camtasia can mix and match images and add narration or music, creating a number of upload image options.

Service-based businesses have a particularly difficult time with this step because the source of value -- the service enacted -- has value in the moment of delivery.   A customer may allow a small amount of video showing service delivery, but if this is not possible, service-oriented businesses can address video needs through creating an amalgamation of images in a Powerpoint -- PDFs of documents, jpg images, charts -- and put together into a video.  The key is having images which reflect the value that customers will receive from your work.

2. Once a video is created, select platforms with analytics tools that reflect where the video will be placed.

If you want to know where you want the video is being viewed, you should evaluate platforms that provide measurements that indicate where the video is being viewed. Tube Mogul offers this, for example, listing blogs and sites that are linking to a tagged video as well as demographic and geographic information. YouTube includes an analytics tool called Insights.  But the tool gives an idea of where the video is played relative to the YouTube “universe” -- you would not be able to see how the plays have an impact on your website.  Other distribution video sites include ReelSnap and Vimeo.

If your intended focus is on a video embedded in a website, you can use event tracking to measure the interaction with the site.  It is a javascript call used in conjunction with an analytics solution such as Google Analytics or Yahoo! Web Analytics.  It calls for an action (called an event) that can be used to see how many replays occurs or even whenever a visitor pause a play.
An event tracking code looks like this:

onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Videos', 'Play', 'Our Montage')”

The code is added in the player code in the HTML. Within the parenthesis is a description of the event (“Video” in this case), the action to be taken (“Play”), and a label (Our Montage).
If you are comparing visitor response to video online, you may be able to use an A/B test or multivariate to determine the impact on a given page.
Not all platforms provide an analytics solution that tracks how and where the sharing occurs, so check its capability against your deployment plan.

Consider a few simple metrics to see how well the video performed

Three metrics can be a starting point for understanding the effectiveness of a video: reach, sentiment, and engagement.

Reach
Reach involves how far a video “travels.” via viewers’ sharing with friends through social media, e-mail, and mobile devices..

Sentiment
Sentiment is how viewers feel about a video. To capture this, consider video systems that use a qualitative rating, like a simple “thumb’s up” or rating scale.

Engagement
Engagement is how viewers interact with the video. Did they play it? If so, how many times? Were there pauses? Replays? Repeat plays? Measuring the counts from these actions can help determine audience engagement.

The main idea is to gain some idea of how the video is providing some value for the effort used to create it.   Remember that analytics typically answer what happen as opposed to why, but such as approach can help you determine what kinds of why to survey or ask about to make your next video even better at driving sales, boosting registrations, or whatever your online goal may be.

Event Tracking code