Though marketing trends come and go, content marketing is still an effective strategy to connect with audiences, build trust, and drive business results. Today’s audiences are showing a preference for video content to learn about a product or service. According to research from Wyzowl, 69% of consumers say they prefer to watch a video instead of an article. As more and more SaaS brands get on board with B2B video marketing, however, it can be more challenging to set yourself apart and capture the attention of viewers.
Data is your secret weapon. You can use data insights to customize your videos for your target audience – or audience segments – and answer your customers’ most-pressing questions. You can also track your video progress to evaluate return on investment (ROI) and develop more impactful future campaigns.
Why Does Data Matter?
“Data” has become a bit of a buzzword, but it’s anything but a passing trend. Data includes the stores of information that your business can analyze to learn more about your market, current trends, competitors, and customers.
Instead of relying solely on assumptions and intuition, brands can learn more about their audiences and improve their targeting. Data allows for better SaaS market segmentation and personalization for focused messaging, cultivates effective retargeting campaigns, and makes more informed decisions.
Best of all, data can help you track your progress, make improvements to your campaigns, and maximize your marketing spend.
B2B Video Marketing Metrics
Tracking your video marketing metrics is an important part of understanding how your videos perform and how you can tailor them to your audience. You may be familiar with metrics as part of any other marketing campaign, but B2B video marketing can differ.
Here are some key SaaS marketing metrics to track when you launch your next video campaign:
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR measures how many times a user clicked on the video vs. the number of times it was viewed. So, if your video was shown 100 times and it received 10 clicks, the CTR is 10%.
- Completion Rate: Completion rate is the average percentage of the video that was watched. Data-driven videos can help you zero in on what your audience is looking for, encouraging full watch through.
- Times Watched: This is how many times a user watched your video. People often watch videos multiple times, especially if they’re entertaining or contain a lot of information that the user wants to revisit.
- Downloads and Shares: This measures how often a user downloaded or shared a video. For example, personalized videos often have more social shares than generic videos.
- Clicks in Videos: This is an overview of the links the users clicked within the video, assuming you’ve embedded links.
- Call-to-Action (CTA) Conversions: CTA conversions measure how many times the CTA is clicked, which is similar to conversion rate based on the total number of viewers.
How to Leverage Data in Your Video Marketing
Do you want to use data for your B2B video marketing campaigns, but you’re not sure how to get started? Here are some helpful tips:
Rely on Customer Data
With big data becoming ubiquitous in business, most businesses have a staggering amount of customer data in their customer relationship management solution (CRM) to use for video marketing.
Using customer data is more than a first name or a birthday, however. Leverage your data to understand their needs and pain points, why they are your customer, how long they’ve been a customer, and their most common purchases to make your videos more relevant, engaging, and personal.
For example, you can use your customer data to create videos that target customers if they abandon their cart. Depending on your product or service, you could send a video with a product demonstration or a customer testimonial to help with the purchasing decision. Abandoned cart campaigns are nothing new, but videos are more likely to be watched.
Use Data for Context
Though data is incredibly valuable, it needs to be contextualized to use it effectively. Your customer’s location, the device they’re using, the time of day, the time of year, their buyer persona, and other details can influence the content that’s most relevant to them.
For example, sending a video with a link to download your app to users on a mobile device, or offer videos of warm tropical getaways to users in the middle of a cold northern winter. Remember, context isn’t just the customer and your brand, but the world around you. For instance, you can update videos if you’re having a flash sale to capture more attention.
Don’t be afraid to include your marketing and sales data in the mix. For example, if you know that customers tend to book tropical resort stays during the winter season, you can use real-time weather data to determine when it’s best to show that resort to travel customers.
Track Analytics
Data is crucial to all marketing initiatives. You’ve likely relied on data for your social or Google ads, adjusting your campaigns based on the engagement, CTR, and conversions they got or the results of split tests.
You should do the same with B2B video marketing. Rely on your analytics to record how long customers watch your video, what they click on, and how your campaign performs across audiences and channels. Are viewers dropping off at a certain point in the video? Are your completion rates low? Is anyone watching your videos at all? These insights can tell you what’s working – and what isn’t – for your campaigns.
Your data needs to be analyzed in real time as well, giving you an opportunity to make changes quickly. For example, you may send a personalized video to your website visitors highlighting the products they viewed in hopes of getting a sale. If your analytics reveal that mobile users converted well, but desktop users didn’t, it could indicate that there’s a problem with the desktop version of your video or targeting your audience.
Gather Data from Your Videos
Data isn’t just valuable to create your video campaigns – it can help you learn more about your customers and develop better brand video campaigns in the future. Interactive videos are an excellent way to gather customer data and learn more about what motivates them.
For example, videos with quizzes or polls directly in the video are often more engaging than a boring email survey. Branching storylines are also popular to give users a “choose your own adventure” viewing experience. You can give them a customized quote, product images with their custom design, or recommendations for products based on their decisions. The possibilities are truly endless.
Think of interactive videos as a step up from interactive images that you may find on a retail website. Fashion often uses this technology to change the color or cut of clothing, the size of the model, and more. Now, imagine how effective that can be in a video format.
Incorporate Data into Your Next Video Campaign
Data is an important part of creating videos that help your brand stand out, but it needs to be part of the big picture. You need to consider your existing customer, marketing, and sales data, contextual data, and human intuition to create a message that resonates with your customers.
Get the most out of every B2B video marketing project. Partner with a metric-minded B2B SaaS marketing agency that knows how to leverage data for improved brand awareness, increased lead generation, and quick ROI. Contact Bay Leaf Digital today.
