Hardwood Floors December 2019/January 2020

By Katrina Olson

» Share your video on social media. » Share your video with key customers and industry or market influencers. » Feature key customers in videos, and they’ll share them for you. » Pay to promote your video on social media and other channels where customers already spend time. Don’t obsess about view counts; reach is good for awareness, but it’s only the first step in measuring effectiveness. 2.Social shares — As the name implies, social share is a measure of how much people are sharing your video content, usually measured by numbers of shares across social channels. It also indicates how appealing a video is to the target audience. The more people like your video, the more they’ll share it, and the more views you’ll get. To increase social shares: » Ask viewers to share your content. That may be all it takes. » Create content that is shareable. Videos that are educational, entertaining, emotional, unique, or even controversial are more likely to be shared. » Jump-start social shares by sharing your video with key customers and industry or market influencers. Track shares on each platform and compare them to see which videos and platforms perform best. While you’re at it, look at qualitative data such as likes and comments to see how people feel about your videos. 3.Play rate — This is the percentage of page visitors who clicked play and began watching your video. It indicates how relevant the video is to the location where it’s placed, as well as how enticing it is to watch. Play rate is relevant if you’re particularly concerned that people actually watch the video. For example, you may want to know what percentage of customers watched a video about a new service. To increase play rate: » Increase the size of your video or place it more prominently on the page. » Choose a more interesting or relevant thumbnail for your video. » Add descriptive copy that accurately reflects the video’s content and encourages viewing. » Move the video to a more appropriate page.

WATCH THESE 7 METRICS

To help you evaluate the success of your videos, watch these seven metrics.

1. View count 2. Social shares 3. Play rate 4. Engagement

5. Click-through rate (CTR) 6. Conversion rate 7. Feedback

Note that play rates will vary depending on the video’s attractiveness, intended audience, and breadth of its appeal. 4.Engagement — Expressed as a percentage, engagement measures how much of a video viewers watched, on average. It’s a more advanced measure, and one of the most telling. Engagement graphs visually illustrate how the audience watched, re-watched, or stopped watching the video. This information can help you create better, more engaging videos in the future, and even edit existing videos to keep viewers involved. To improve engagement: » Keep content short, clear, concise, and to the point. Eliminate unnecessary content. » When producing longer videos, keep viewers engaged with new information, interesting graphics, frequent scene changes, an engaging host, and other best practices in video production. » Make sure the production value is sufficient to ensure that viewers aren’t distracted by bad acting, inconsistent sound, or poor video quality. Engagement is the holy grail of video marketing. Only when viewers watch your entire video do you succeed in getting your complete message across. 5.Click-through rate (CTR) — CTR is the percentage of viewers that click on the call to action (CTA) in a video. CTR measures how successful your video is at encouraging viewers to act. The challenge is making sure viewers remain sufficiently engaged to reach the CTA, especially if it’s at the end. If the goal is driving the viewer to take action immediately after watching the video, the CTR is especially important.

the magazine of the national wood flooring association

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