Remember watching study lectures in school that had a lot of text on the screen which stayed there for two hours straight? With nothing visually engaging on the screen, those videos were pretty boring. But educational videos have changed for good now. Take the videos on Salesforce’s YouTube channel, for instance.

Ever been on the channel for help regarding sales? Give it a look if you haven’t already. Salesforce’s videos maintain the perfect balance between entertainment and education. While their videos are locked and loaded with educational content, none of that feels like you’re back at school—none of that feels boring.

Here’s a quick exercise. Think of an educational video you really liked and another one that you found boring. Quickly search both up on YouTube or any other video platform and compare the Engagement on both of the videos. Don’t worry, we’ll explain what engagement means in a bit. For now, just look at the number of likes and views on the two videos. See a major difference between the two? Which video performed better? Was it the boring one or the one that  you really liked? The interesting video won by a long shot, right?

Nobody likes plain and boring videos, and that is something that the statistics make pretty clear. Your B2B audience certainly doesn’t.

What is Video Engagement?

Video engagement can mean a lot of things for a lot of videos depending on the purpose they’re made for.

As per Cincopa:

“There isn’t a single, reliable definition of what video engagement means to every player in the market. It’s affected by a variety of factors like the length of your videos and how you generally structure your video. Generally, however, video engagement is considered the primary factor that determines how much information viewers will retain from videos they watch.”

Let’s say your campaign aims at generating more brand awareness. You would probably be interested in how many times the video has been seen and shared by the target audience. Hence views and shares become your metrics for video engagement.

On the other hand, if the campaign aims at generating leads, you might be interested in looking at the number of conversions instead. Thus the number of conversions becomes your metric for video engagement.

Different campaigns need different video engagement metrics to be tracked.

Increasing video engagement the right way is crucial to your campaign. But before we give you reasons why more video engagement (when done the right way) gives convincing results, let’s discuss how you can measure video engagement. Because let’s face it, if you can’t check the engagement on your video, there is no way for you to know how it is affecting your campaign.

In the B2B world, you deploy videos largely on two platforms—landing pages and Social Media. The purposes of using videos on the two are quite different.

Videos on landing pages are usually directed towards conversions, keeping visitors on the landing page for a longer time, or showing how your product or service works (which helps in connecting with the customer better).

On Social Media Platforms, videos have a different purpose. The videos out there can serve multiple purposes. While you would see a lot of companies trying to pitch their products and services on social media, entertaining and educational videos work much better on these platforms.

So, videos that are both educational as well as entertaining in nature are the ones garnering most of the views now. The rise of edutainment videos, as they can be called, signals towards the fact that B2B companies should be creating more top-of-the-funnel ‘awareness’ content in the edutainment format to share on social platforms. If done right, such videos have a definitive competitive edge for going viral..

Competing for attention is becoming increasingly difficult on social media. With thousands of posts flooding your timeline, calling out for your attention, what makes you check any post out? That is the question that is troubling the B2B brands right now. Edutainment videos are the perfect blend of everything necessary for you to hit that share button.

At a time where time is the most precious commodity, people are cautious now, more than ever, about how they should spend their time. Hence when they are on social media and they find a post that is entertaining but is also educational in nature, they believe that it wouldn’t waste their time should they check it out. And if that post happens to be a video, viewers are even more likely to check it out.

How Do You Measure Video Engagement?

As Facebook puts it, “Engagement is the best measure of how much your video resonated with your audience.” Facebook measures video engagement in terms of “likes”, “shares”, and “comments” on the original post and also tracks the same metrics for the reshared posts.

These metrics remain more or less the same across different social media platforms. However, they have different names on different platforms. For example, the shares on Facebook serve the same purpose as retweets do on Twitter. Yet they have different names.

And that is just the social aspect of the journey—which caters to the goal of creating a community. For landing pages, on the other hand, video engagement caters to the goal of increasing conversions. Wistia lets you track your video’s performance on landing pages in a concise manner, letting you know of all that matters. It tells you about the average engagement on your video, total number of plays, its play rate, and the number of people acting on your CTA. Moreover, you can see how your video performed second-by-second. You can see when people were most engaged and when they were least engaged.

With this information you can know for sure, the areas of improvement in your video that you can then improve upon in the next version of that video or in upcoming videos.

Here are a few metrics for measuring video engagement, which you can find on most of the platforms:

• View Duration: A lot depends on how long the viewer sticks with your video. If the viewer stops viewing your video in 10 seconds, it would probably do you no good—unless, of course, your video is 10 seconds long.

• Video Interaction Rate: (Not to be confused with conversion rates) To dig deeper into what keeps the users engaged, you can track how much the users interact with your video—be it rewatches, player resizes or in-video clicks such as YouTube’s cards, and endscreens.

• Negative Feedback: There are times when content creators add objectionable content in their videos that might make some people uncomfortable. This often leads to negative feedback. Unhappy viewers might go ahead and unlike, or unfollow the content creator. They might even hide or report the video. Such actions are big signs of the content not being suitable for the audience. Should you come across negative feedback, it is imperative for you to apologize and then revise your content strategy, and create content carefully in the future.

• Audience Demographics: Getting to know about the age, location, and a bunch of other factors about those viewing your video and engaging with it can help you streamline future videos and campaigns accordingly. It goes without saying, your ads would be a walk in the park when you know your precise target audience.

• Number of Subscribers: Number of subscribers, as YouTube calls them, is an important metric. Good old Twitter is back as an example again. On Twitter, your followers are among the first ones to watch your videos. YouTube notifies your subscribers whenever you release new videos, which helps you generate more views on your videos. 

• Conversion Rate: The number of prospects that your videos turn into customers is what determines the conversion rate of your videos. Videos with higher conversion rates are the ones you would want to invest your capital in. You should investigate into the reasons why the ones that had low conversion rates performed poorly.

How Does More Video Engagement Generate More Leads?

If you’ve followed the blog up till here, you might have figured out why already but let us tell it to you anyway. In no particular order, here are some of the reasons why video engagement directly affects the number of leads generated:

• 53% People Prefer Videos: According to a survey by Hubspot, 53 percent of the people surveyed said that they would prefer seeing video content in the future. Having more engagement on your videos would only mean that your videos are performing well (unless the engagement is just dislikes and reports—in that case, you would have to find what’s ticking your audience off and fix it).

• Patience is Gone: Patience is a goner, and so would your videos be if they aren’t able to generate the interest of your audience. If your video isn’t interesting from the start, you wouldn’t get many people to stick around  even half through the video. When you’re actively tracking video engagement, you know exactly when your viewers are exiting from your video. This helps you make better videos and hence generate more leads.

• There’s Too Much Noise: Scroll through your timeline. How many videos do you see? Imagine your video to be one of those videos out there. What chances do you have to get people to click on your video and start watching it? Not too many. Now think about the chances you have for them to watch your video to the very end. Scary, isn’t it? What if we told you that monitoring your videos for engagement can actually help you stand out from the crowd? Because it can! Interesting videos generate a lot of likes, shares, and comments. If you’re tracking them, you would know exactly what’s working with your audience and can hence make videos in accordance with the same. Here’s a quick tip: tweaking the thumbnail goes a long way in improving your video’s click through rate (CTR).

• Catch More Eyeballs: The more your videos are liked, shared, and commented on, the more they show up in your followers’ feeds. Moreover, most social platforms have it in their algorithms to promote engaging content. You thus catch more eyeballs from your videos when there is more video engagement.

Most social media platforms have tools to measure the metrics we’ve discussed thus far. However, you could always go for video hosting platforms such as Wistia if your platform doesn’t give you these insights on your videos.

For How Long Should You Track Video Engagement?

While tracking these metrics is important, it is equally important to set a timeline to it. Assuming that your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound), you would need a time-bound approach for measuring video engagement.

People normally measure the performance of their videos over days and weeks. It is quite rare, but some even measure video engagement all the way up to a year or more. We highly recommend that you set your time bounds in accordance with your SMART goals.

What Should You Do After Tracking Engagement?

After tracking engagement, you probably would have a lot of information to act upon.

That video of yours which isn’t able to retain viewers beyond the 10-second mark has to be experimented with. Since people don’t stick around for long,  they might dislike something about the way the video begins. Perhaps you didn’t focus on delivering value since the very beginning.

Let’s talk about that video of yours which went viral. Dissect it to find exactly what about it made the audience go crazy and apply your learnings in future videos.

Every statistic has a story. It is upon you, the brand, to find that story and use it to your advantage. It is only when you track engagement rates wisely and work upon them timely can you see incremental results. So if you want more conversions on your landing page, put up videos and track their engagement. If you want to build a B2B community on social media instead, the same would still be relevant.

Higher video engagement rates signals an increase the number of leads. It also signals an increase in  customer conversion rate. Moreover, it decreases your lead-acquisition cost. You would see better ROI on it than with other tactics. But the community of followers that your engaging videos generate is the biggest ROI you would see. Not only would these people see you as a thought-leader, but would also swear by your brand.

An increase in video engagement doesn’t happen overnight, so have patience. Slowly but surely, you’ll see increased video engagement (and leads). So put your analytical caps on and get growing.

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