Measuring Brand Impact on YouTube

As mentioned in a previous KNB blog (Boost Your Lead Generation Efforts with Video, 2/2/16), video is a great medium to put a face on a brand and build more personal relationships with potential buyers.

Online video has gained considerable favor. According to Forrester Research, spending on desktop online video alone is projected to grow 21 percent each year until 2019.

In the healthcare IT industry, video content can be extremely effective in showcasing new technology, providing educational or instructional content to patients or customers, and highlighting clinical thought leaders.

Posting videos on online video platforms such as YouTube is a great way to build a subscriber base. YouTube provides companies with the potential to reach a global audience. It also provides an effective way to connect with an audience. And, since spend on videos can be more costly than other marketing tactics, YouTube provides “impact measurability” to help justify its cost to management.

So – how do you know if your YouTube video is having an impact on intended viewers? Metrics such as views, shares, likes, comments and watch time can provide marketers with a basic barometer that indicates how an audience is responding to your video content. These metrics in turn, can help inform strategy as well as the content of subsequent video ads. Ultimately though, measuring a video’s impact on YouTube will help drive the development of additional quality content that audiences find useful, entertaining and sharable in addition to providing justification for budget spend.

Perhaps it is the overwhelming success of YouTube that has led to the site’s major downside – content clutter. Videos run the risk of getting lost in the clutter, which can minimize their impact.

Following are some suggestions on how best to measure the impact of your YouTube video:

• Is your audience watching your video all the way through from beginning to end? If not, where did they drop-off? Or drop-off and resume?
• Are viewers sharing your video? Was it shared and interacted with?
• Check viewer demographics – who is watching the video? What else are they interested in? Are your viewers converting to subscribers?
• Compare analytics from one video format with another – which format do your viewers prefer?
• Check the traffic source report – where are viewers coming from? Are they being referred by other viewers? By Google? Another site?
• Include device and playback location reports in your overall analysis to determine how viewers are accessing your content on YouTube. You can learn a lot about your audience by knowing how they are viewing your videos.

Channel demographics are particularly important for understanding your audience. If they don’t match your intended audience, ask yourself how you can change your programming to attract more viewers in your target demographic. Other considerations include:

• Is viewership on an overall upward or downward trend?
• Do tweaks to the upload schedule increase overall monthly viewership?

Video can be a costly content tactic however, it also can be extremely cost-effective when you can accurately evaluate its impact on current and prospective audiences.