Know Your ROI With Interactive Video

Calculating return on investment (ROI) has been a vexing challenge for marketers ever since companies began to invest in marketing. Given the complex nature of influencing purchase decisions via content, it’s often very difficult to illustrate a clear 1:1 correlation between marketing touches and sales revenue.

Even with the metrics-rich environment of video marketing, there remains uncertainty around how exactly to demonstrate impact. Which metrics are measured, when they’re gathered, and what weight they are given can vary depending on campaign goals.

Many emerging tools and innovations are helping provide clarity on the path to video marketing ROI, and interactive video is among them.

Connecting the dots with interactive video

Video content is already a metrics goldmine. As marketers learn to think beyond only view counts, they’re discovering how repeat views, view duration, playback scrubbing, and behavior before and after viewing can paint a full picture of where a potential customer is along their buyer journey.

Interactive video takes the experience of viewing video from a passive act and transforms it into an active conversation of sorts. Within this conversation is the opportunity for marketers to glean even deeper metrics by creating opportunities for buyers to take more actions within the video beyond playback.

Making it easy to opt in

In an ideal world, marketers would always know who was interacting with their content so they could track the path to purchase from awareness through conversion.

The reality is that the way marketers gather user data is changing. The phase-out of third-party cookies means customers need to willingly provide data at some point along their journey for marketers to connect online behaviors with a real-world customer.

Consumers won’t simply part with their data because you ask them to—they must receive something of value in exchange. This is why marrying the success of video as a content format with the conversational nature of interactivity is among the easiest ways to create that value exchange. When consumers feel empowered and heard, they are more willing to opt in.

Interactive video offers an easy way to drive opt-ins—and it’s working! You can employ interactive features that allow consumers to bypass traditional steps on the path to purchase or make opting-in feel like the natural conclusion of a good conversation.

Shoppable video

With add-to-cart functionality, shoppable videos take buyers directly from viewing a product video to an online store where the item is already in their cart. This eliminates the friction of several manual steps between point of interest and point of sale. Attributing these sales is simple and straightforward.

Lead generation

Identifying the conversion stage with your video marketing is even easier with interactive video. Adding chapters to a product feature video allows viewers to “skip to the good part” and see the specific information they need to make a decision. Adding a lead gen form to the video experience allows customers to opt in while their interest is at its highest.

Gaining buy-in for interactive video

If interactive video is such a powerful tool, why aren’t more marketers using it?

A lot of what has been holding up interactive video comes down to the need for education.

CMOs probably aren’t interested in the nuts and bolts of how to produce interactive content. However, they will perk up if you explain how interactive video plays to today’s audience and fits into current marketing trends and best practices, such as brand differentiation, personalization, engagement boosting, and more robust metrics.

Powerful brand differentiation

Video is already a great tool for building brand awareness. By adding interactivity to your brand campaign videos, you create an experience for your audience that draws them into that brand moment.

In terms of brand awareness, that message retention is the key to attracting customers who are not yet actively researching a purchase, so they’ll think of your brand first when they’re ready to buy.

It all comes down to the difference between brand recognition and brand recall. Impressions and views can amplify brand recognition—people recognize your brand because they’ve seen it before. But what spurs sales is brand recall (remembering your brand without needing to see it). Engaging with interactive video creates a stronger connection to your brand in the minds of your customers, increasing brand recall and impacting the ROI of brand campaigns.

Personalization opportunities

Personalization is the fastest way to grab your audience’s attention.

Interactive video opens the door to a number of features that walk viewers through their buying decision, such as next video suggestions, questions that determine viewer interest, and interactive product overviews that allow them to skip around and explore the product features that matter most to them.

Engagement boosting

Today’s consumers are more interested in conversations than lectures. We’re in the habit of consuming information in bite-sized pieces, often in settings where we can also offer our feedback.

Recent data shows that 70% of marketers say that in terms of engagement, their interactive video performed well or very well, while only 1% said it performed poorly.

Interactive video can boost your engagement by adding frequent checkpoints to your videos where you ask viewers questions. These questions can be tailored to the experience you’re creating—quizzes in education videos, preferences in product demonstration videos, and so on. This is where your team can get creative about driving engagement.

Deeper measurement

The key to connecting interactive video campaigns to business results lies in integrated analytics, which help you understand this tactic’s impact in the broader context of other marketing activities.

With solutions like Brightcove Interactivity, marketers can track a wide range of metrics including:

• Click-through rate from a video to a landing page
• Submission rate of in-video polls and surveys
• True engagement of individual leads and prospects (including dwell times, skips, and rewatches of specific sections)
• Direct answers to questions (at a user and audience level)
• Viewer navigation rate to specific sections of the video

This is one model for measuring ROI based on internal benchmarks. As mentioned earlier, selection and weighting of interactive video metrics will vary based on the organization and its goals, but clearly this content format provides a great deal of data to fuel your integrated analytics engine.

Start the conversation

Interactive video is unique in its ability to start a two-way conversation between your audience and your brand.

Interactivity empowers your viewers and enhances the personalized experience. They can respond in real-time by navigating in-video menus, taking interactive quizzes, and making purchases with shoppable video features.

Best of all, you can measure and track this journey all the way through.