A Commpro News Update

According to a new survey from Demand Metric, the most effective form of marketing content is video.  However, many marketers are missing out due to the fact that they aren't properly measuring the video performance.

For the third year in a row, Demand Metric and Vidyard produced “The State of Video Marketing Benchmark Study Report” with the goal of understanding how video performs as a content type. The report also investigates new trends, like new trends around video personalization, and the use of video with account-based marketing strategy.  Also studies is video’s spread beyond marketing departments.

Over the past three years, the ROI of video marketing has remained consistent, with nearly half of the respondents reporting ROI is improving.  However, a quarter say they don’t know what the returns are. Clients who use advanced analytics are twice as likely to say their ROI is better and more likely to increase their video budgets year over year. Just 14% of the respondents actually use advanced analytics.

“The use of advanced metrics has become imperative for organizations that produce higher volumes of videos annually, as these metrics enable optimizing performance and understanding the true ROI of their investment,” the report said.

Viewing data is important for ROI because it also gives marketers insights about their audience and where they are in the buying journey. Integrating viewing data with marketing automation and CRM systems leads to deeper understanding of a viewer’s interest in making a purchase, but those integrations continue to lag. Just 13% of respondents reported they have integrated their data and are taking advantage of it.

Other key findings:

• More than 90% of the study’s participants said video marketing content is becoming more important, a consistent three-year trend.
• More than half of participants produce 11 or more videos per year. Large companies produce the most videos.
• The average number of participants saying that conversion performance for video has stayed the same or gotten better is 96%, which is consistent with previous years.
• The use of advanced analytics remains at 14 percent, unchanged from previous years.
• Using video to support account-based marketing is just emerging with fewer than 10% using it.
• Nearly half of respondents said they use internal staff and resources to produce videos, up from 38% a year ago.
• 50% said they plan to use a third-party video hosting or video marketing platform vs. YouTube or Vimeo, up from 38% last year.

“While many brands continue to chase the viral video hype, this report makes it clear that videos don’t need to go viral to be successful,” said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, which sponsored the survey. “In fact, it’s becoming clear that personalized, targeted videos used throughout the sales funnel are more engaging and more effective at turning viewers into customers.”

Video Going Beyond Marketing

The power of video as an influential medium has helped it move beyond the marketing department to nearly every other function in an organization. However, marketing remains the primary user at 86%, followed by internal communications (19%), sales teams (15%), executive teams (11%), support teams (11%), human resources (8%) and others (11%).

This year’s survey was administered online during the period of October 5 through October 28, 2016 and includes responses from 289 people, primarily in marketing and sales departments at B2B companies, but B2C companies were also included.