Can video help analyze reports from marketing and design teams?

Summary

Marketing reports are a critical way to understand which goals were achieved and which weren’t, what worked and what didn’t, and some clues as to why so that you can recalibrate your strategies.

Today, clear, effective, and smart internal company communication is critically important. This is where video comes into play.

A marketing report in video format translates into an interactive map, useful for the various departments of the company. From a rigid and static document, the video marketing report becomes a powerful means of sharing knowledge, values and corporate objectives with all employees and collaborators.

The key role of Data

Marketing and design teams have different tasks and skills, but they are increasingly working together. For companies in the era of Digital Transformation is a necessity, but also a great opportunity.

The goal of marketers, in fact, is to create interest around the brand and its products (and, above all, to keep it alive over time); the task of designers is to communicate – concretely, visually – the brand and its products.

It is easy to understand, therefore, how these two aspects are intimately related and how they must be increasingly integrated.

The digital revolution has brought a number of significant consequences, both direct and indirect. But at the root of it all is something very simple: a vast availability of information, the so-called “Big Data,” a mine of inestimable value for all aspects of any business today.

And it is on this enormous availability of data that the creation and design of marketing reports is based, which are fundamental for measuring the effectiveness of campaigns, for understand if your strategies are moving in the right direction, at what point you are on the path, what has worked and what hasn’t, if you need to recalibrate or change course, and how and when to do it.

In this post, however, we don’t want to stop there. In fact, we want to investigate the importance of communicating these “measurements,” these results within the company: it’s a question of transparency, but also about circulating ideas, of building a team spirit, of improving company engagement.

And in order to circulate these reports fluidly and efficiently, we can no longer limit ourselves to documents that line up a series of numbers that are often difficult to read and interpret.

The most attentive and innovative companies are beginning to rely on video in this area; we’ll look at the reasons for this choice and all its many possibilities.

The decisive importance of marketing reports

A marketing report is, after all, a collection of data that tracks, analyzes, and interprets the performance of a specific campaign or several coordinated campaigns.

There are many different types of reports. Similarly, reports can be weekly, monthly, semi-annual, or annual: it depends on your needs and objectives.

It’s good to underline one aspect immediately: the first mistake to avoid is forcing your report to adhere to a standard and monolithic model.

In fact, you’ll need to first focus on the most decisive aspects: if a campaign has been designed and built to acquire new customers, it cannot be analyzed and evaluated with the same metrics used to create other campaigns.

So: the first keyword is “tailored” to your business, and this serves as a premise.

The second keyword is “breadth.” By this, we mean that in order to be useful and effective, a report must include data and information collected in the widest possible way, and from the most diverse sources.

Mind you: this work cannot be done “by hand,” because it results in a counterproductive time investment. Everything lies in the company’s ability to put on track high-performance and cutting-edge data collection systems, based on Artificial Intelligence systems, which are then also valuable for the analysis and interpretation phases.

The third keyword is “depth.” There is no point in collecting an endless amount of data if you are not aware that not all data is the equal – it doesn’t all have the same value.

Again, it all depends on the characteristics of your business and your objectives. In short: it’s better to aim at so-called “Deep Data” than at simple “Big Data.”

The last keyword is “synthesis.” This does not concern the input, but the output. An effective report must be exhaustive, but also concise, clear. It must be intuitive and easy to read. It must be able to highlight the central points, what worked and – above all – what didn’t work.

It must do all of this in the most communicative way possible.

And that’s where the decisive role of the very medium through which these reports pass from the marketing and design teams to the rest of the company comes into play.

And there is no medium more effective, concise, communicative, and engaging than video.

The benefits of video marketing

So, we have underlined the importance of communication within a marketing report of any kind. To demonstrate the communicative effectiveness of a video, this data is enough:

Users who watch a video understand and believe 95% of the message it contains. For text-only communications, this percentage drops to 10% (insivia.com).

(To learn more about the effectiveness of video as a means of communication and the benefits of video marketing, we refer you to this post on our blog)

But that’s not all.

Below we want to isolate another aspect that you can implement if you decide to embrace video in your reports. We’re referring to interactivity. This is a feature enableyd by specialized platforms such as Babelee, a company that provides automated and personalized videos built from data-driven dynamics.

An interactive video report is a way of overcoming the static and difficult-to-read document. In this way, the report becomes a sort of map, which can be consulted in depth and which reacts to one’s navigation choices.

All this is perfectly functional for the real objectives of an internal marketing report. For example, different departments may want to be able to focus in on specific aspects of the report, to access in-depth analysis on certain areas, and to be able to integrate marketing reports with other types of data and information.

In short, the report becomes a dynamic document, capable of offering a multi-faceted and complex picture… all while remaining easily readable.

Now, before closing, we want to focus on another aspect that is becoming increasingly central to companies, but on which there is still a long way to go. That of internal communication and Employee Engagement.

Warning. Marketing reports can become an interesting weapon to improve retention and advocacy of your employees and contractors!

A question of corporate engagement…and of B2E

Let’s start by dissolving the acronym: B2E (Business to Employee) is an approach that focuses attention on employees.

This includes all operations that aim to achieve maximum employee satisfaction (at any level) in the workplace, therefore a healthy and not excessive turnover, with the ultimate goal of advocacy and the ability of a company to attract outside talent.

Part of B2E are all on-boarding strategies, team building, training courses, flexible schedules, the possibility of bonuses, and special offers for employees and benefits of various kinds. And these are just a few.

What we’re interested in emphasizing, however, is that B2E is primarily a matter of internal communication.

Why? Because it all starts with engagement. Today we can no longer think of companies as a collection of many employees seen as numbers, as a pure and simple “workforce.”

New employees are not attracted by this kind of mentality, which is seen as old fashioned and out of date. Moreover, the labor market is more open and globalized than ever before: and the challenge for the best human resources, today, is no longer played only on economic aspects.

On the contrary, it is increasingly a question of involvement: employees want to feel an integral part of the company. They are looking for companies that guarantee an excellent quality of working life. They want to feel part of a community. They want to know its values, its short- and long-term objectives.

In short, they want to feel involved in order to make a difference. And this is not just an abstract impression. There are very telling numbers to back up what we’re talking about.

According to Glassdoor, around 70% of the U.S. workforce considers itself “disengaged,” meaning not involved in the spirit and choices of the company.

Of these “uninvolved” employees, 84% would consider changing jobs if offered a position with a company that was more attentive to their needs. The cost of this enormous mass of “disengaged” employees, for the United States alone, is estimated to be between $450 and $550 billion (glassdoor.com).

On the other hand, according to a study by Korn Ferry, companies with high employee engagement rates produce, on average, 2.5 times more revenue than competitors with low levels of employee engagement (kornferry.com).

In short, it’s increasingly important to link the work of your employees to a broader purpose, a global mission and vision.

And marketing reports, in video format, can also play their part. No longer cold documents that are difficult to read, marketing reports can be a real means of knowledge and the internal circulation of ideas, objectives, results, points to improve, and strategies to recalibrate.

One of the most effective ways of putting employees and collaborators at the center of the company.