Communicators that practice marketing know that video is becoming pervasive in today’s modern organization. We use it to market and sell our products, to build communities on social media, to train our employees, and to message across our geographically dispersed organizations. No matter how your company currently is using video, it probably measures video performance across three industry-standard metrics: impressions, views, and engagement.

This data alone can be helpful in determining general audience tastes and preferences and for measuring soft targets such as affinity. Where this data proves insufficient is in providing the evidence a marketer needs to measure hard targets such as sales or loyalty. To date, the link between videos watched and products sold has been hazy at best. Perhaps the viewer shared a video link or tweeted their enthusiasm for what they watched. But did they eventually purchase a product or service, and what role did the video play in accelerating that purchase? That data is harder to tease out.

As communicators, we regularly piece together 360° portraits of our customers. However, we are less accustomed to putting together 360° views of our videos. Historically, we haven’t demanded more from our videos than the traditional views and impressions KPIs. Transformations in the technical landscape are changing that. Video management tools are rapidly evolving, and as a result, video analytics are becoming more sophisticated. With the advent of enterprise video platforms (EVPs), a content owner’s ability to stay tethered to each and every video throughout its lifecycle, including the purchase process, is becoming possible. Gone are the days of publishing your video out to the online ether and wondering how many of those “Likes” and “Shares” will actually translate to sales. Now you can not only track where your videos live and who is watching them, but also what your audience buys as a result of having viewed the video.

Here are just a couple of examples of the new ways in which those that lead marketing are requiring more from their video beyond ‘views and engagement.’

Track the revenue generated by video by integrating video with your sales or CRM software
Your organization is probably already running a sales or CRM platform such as Salesforce. While the native analytics in these systems are strong, most are not video-enabled, thus missing an opportunity to associate content viewing with buying behavior. To have the best of both worlds, leading edge organizations have begun integrating the video management power of their EVPs directly into their existing sales and CRM platforms. This creates a “1+1=3” scenario where the best of each system is married up into a sum that is greater than the individual parts. By capturing the video analytics available in your EVP and tying them to the customer data available in your sales or CRM system, you can complete the missing piece of the 360° view of your videos, i.e. their impact on sales.

Create Measurable Commerce Experiences that Travel Anywhere Your Video Does
Communicators that use video are accustomed to thinking of online video as a tool to capture audience attention, build interest and then drive the audience to a specific destination – a website that you own, or a point of sale — where you can convert interest to action. This presupposes that the actual buying has to take place on a website or app designed for e-commerce.

Technical advances have turned this process on its head. Purchasing capabilities can now be embedded directly into a video player, traveling with it wherever it goes because video players are becoming transactional environments that can live anywhere. Rather than focus on creating videos that get a certain number of ‘views’ or ‘shares,’ it will soon be incumbent on the marketer to also package up entire brand or commerce experiences that can travel on a single embed code, easily “popping up” for the viewer, wherever they come across your content.

Again, the video KPIs in this new world order will begin to task videos with generating measurable revenue. What’s more, by aggregating your video analytics in a single place via an EVP, you can also measure which destinations drive higher purchases relative to the number of video views.

Advances in video distribution and publishing are revolutionizing video analytics and our ability to link content viewing to purchase behavior for a clearer 360° view of our videos. To stay on the leading edge, marketing organizations must explore these and other opportunities to push video KPIs beyond the current ‘views and impressions’ paradigm to truly capture more bang for their video buck.

Article contributed by Lisa Stuardi is SVP of Marketing and Business Development for uStudio and CMMA Partner