Boost your Customer Engagement with video!

The centrality of video in digital marketing

• 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
• 96% of marketers see video as an important part of their strategies.
• 92% of marketers say they are satisfied with the ROI of their video content.

The above statistics, taken from a recent survey by HubSpot, require no further comment. Alone, they say all there is to say about the centrality of video within a digital marketing and communication strategy.

Having said that, let’s go deeper and ask ourselves: for marketers, what are the most important and decisive metrics for determining the success of a video marketing campaign? Again, we have a survey to act as our compass (TwicPics):  

• The most important metric is the total number of views (63%).
• Next is the engagement rate, for 61%.
• Further back, we have the number of leads and the click-through rate (56%), brand awareness (43%), customer retention (42%), and bottom line sales (26%).

Customer Engagement Video – what it is, how it is measured 

Customer Engagement Video: what’s it all about? The term is self-explanatory: it’s a set of metrics that measure the average level of engagement of users as they receive and view a video (or series of videos). One thing is clear from this definition: there is no single metric on which to measure it. It’s all about knowing how to set the right metrics, how to take into account the numbers that most accurately describe the results and cross-reference them in an intelligent and functional way. It’s a matter of balances…balances that vary according to different campaigns and their specific objectives.
That being said, here are some of the most valuable metrics for establishing Customer Engagement Video: 

• VTR (View Through Rate): indicates the percentage of people who started viewing the video and watched it to the end.
• Average duration of each view.
• Conversely, the abandonment rate (if it’s too high, it will generate poor engagement).
• The number of shares on social media or other platforms.
• The number of comments left by users.
• The number of reactions.
• Retargeting and remarketing: an important metric when the interest is in a broader video marketing campaign and not for just one video. Monitor whether the video helped reactivate the interest of previously engaged viewers or prompted new viewers to visit your website.
• Finally, also related to Customer Engagement Video are metrics that measure the effectiveness of calls to action. Here, the click-through and conversion rates are some of the most important metrics.

5 tips to boost Customer Engagement Video  

The term “engagement” refers to many things at once: all very decisive, all things that you must monitor.
Now, however, let’s go even further and see how to improve a Customer Engagement Video. While there are many actions that we could suggest, we have condensed the most important points down to this 5-point list. 

There is no engagement without added value

Let’s start with a basic awareness that is an essential precursor for our other suggestions. It’s impossible to engage people if you don’t offer them added value. The reasons are very simple: we are constantly bombarded with stimuli, and if we decide to focus our attention for a longer or shorter time on watching a video, we want something in return. This return can be simply entertainment (and this leads us to the importance of storytelling, which we will focus on in the next point), or knowledge or, again, practical utility. In fact, it’s no coincidence that the most viewed and most engaged videos—both on YouTube and on social networks—are often explainer videos and how-to videos.
Mind you, even when the main objective is informative, don’t underestimate the entertainment aspects: The two sides always support each other!

Storytelling first

Always aim to tell effective stories before selling products or services. This is one of the most important points for your Customer Engagement Video. So: pay the utmost attention to the script and the narrative rhythm.
The first concrete suggestion in this regard is to pay attention to the very first seconds of the video. This is where users decide whether to continue viewing or to abandon the video. Always start with a strong hook that can capture attention and create curiosity for what comes next.
A second tip: Identify the climax, the narrative apex around which the story revolves. It must connect to the promises made in the first seconds, but it can’t come too early (nor too late; otherwise, you risk that viewers abandon the video before the important information is delivered).
Finally, try to establish a functional rhythm. There is no perfect rhythm; it all depends on the channel, the target audience, and your goals. In general, on social networks it is always best to choose a brisk, beating pace. Instead, for videos on YouTube or posted on company sites, you can afford a more relaxed pace that is more suitable for a longer viewing time.

The importance of technical aspects

You can build a video with a perfect script, effective storytelling, and the right pace…but it’s all useless if you don’t pay attention to the technical aspects. The quality of images and audio is one of the first aspects that influence a video’s engagement rate. Viewers will not continue watching a video with grainy images, poor colors, and audio that is hard to follow.
But, beware! It’s not just a matter of resolution, recording quality, or formats. So much depends on the devices and platforms. Translated: creators must always produce and distribute content by adopting an omnichannel perspective. Videos must be able to adapt perfectly and automatically to viewing from smartphones, PCs, or tablets. And they must respect the different limitations, technical rules, and best practices of the different platforms. What works on YouTube does not work for TikTok; a video distributed in an email marketing campaign is not the same as a video published on a company’s home page.
So: adapting productions to different channels is imperative. But, you need to know how to do it without losing the identity and recognizability of your campaigns.

The personalization breakthrough…

How to get the best engagement with your target audience? By knowing the recipient: their characteristics, preferences, and interests, both now and from the past in order to understand potential future desires. It’s something we do all the time in the “real world,” almost without realizing it: we adapt our messages to the people to whom they are addressed in order to be more empathetic, more convincing, more persuasive.
Is it possible to translate all this to the “digital world” as well, and to video marketing in particular? The answer: yes. The starting point is data analysis, to have in-depth knowledge of the characteristics of your audience. Then, divide this generic target into many smaller micro-targets, which are composed of people with homogeneous profiles. Finally, the real frontier is true personalization: that is, matching each micro-target with the individual person.
And how does video production fit into all this? In the most effective way. In fact, today, you can produce videos that, starting from a common matrix, adapt in an automated way to the characteristics and browsing choices of the individual recipient. These are called personalized videos. These videos naturally guarantee the highest performance in terms of engagement.
To make them, you can rely on specialized platforms like Babelee. To learn more about how Babelee’s Video Personalization platform works and the opportunities, see here.

… and that of interactivity

With personalized video, the old paradigm of one-to-many communication is broken, moving to one-to-one communication, which is far more effective and engaging. It’s a revolution that still has much to offer…and the companies who can grasp it before others will gain a huge competitive advantage. Yet, you can go even further and break another barrier from the past: that of one-way communication.
How? With interactive videos, which shape their storytelling, in real time, based on the browsing choices of the individual viewer. In this way, every video marketing campaign is transformed into a fruitful dialogue between company and customer. How does this impact engagement rates? We’ll let two pieces of data tell the story:

• On average, the viewing times for interactive videos are 47% longer than for linear video (source: marketingdive.com)
• Campaigns based on interactive video experience a net doubling of engagement rates, on average, compared to traditional campaigns (source: demandgenraport.com).

So, personalization and interactivity: these are the horizons to aim for when it comes to Customer Engagement Video.

To learn more about Babelee’s Video Interaction tools, see here.

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