Measure Twice, Publish Once: How to Quantify And Streamline Your Video Social Proof Impact

By now you’re most likely up to speed on five of the six Video Social Proof principles that can transform your marketing endeavors into consistently effective, engaging campaigns: Visual, Personal, Contextual, Timely, and Communal. Through these principles, you’ve no doubt gleaned that incremental changes to your messaging can do wonders as you try to connect with your customers, helping you adjust its tone and tenor until it’s been handcrafted for your targeted audience.

But how can you be sure that your adjustments are moving the needle in the right direction?

That’s where our sixth and final Video Social Proof principle enters the fray. It may seem obvious in hindsight, but the true measure of an ad’s impact can only be known if your message is... well, Measurable.

KPIs On The Prize

Up to this point, the other five principles primarily dealt with ways that the substance of your video ads can be tweaked to more reliably foster customer engagement and tailor genuine and emotional experiences to fit the constraints of a digital device. For example:

• Making an ad visual means showing instead of telling 
• Making an ad personal means infusing those visuals with a relatable and trustworthy tone 
• Making an ad contextual means explaining your brand’s value in ways that highlight common problems and the effective solution you’re offering 
• Making an ad timely means taking advantage of current trends
• Making an ad communal means bringing your customers into the conversation around your brand

Making a campaign measurable, then, means tying the previous principles to the more tangible, quantitative aspects of digital marketing that you may already be familiar with.

You’ve no doubt heard of Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, unique metrics that let you know whether or not your brand is hitting its main business objectives.

KPIs can come in all shapes and sizes, from customer lifetime value (CLV) to conversion rates to upsell rates; you’ll find no shortage of indicators for every aspect of your ad. To prove that point, let’s take a few of our Video Social Proof principles and link them to some appropriate KPIs:

• Visual: Average time for conversion, traffic-to-lead ratio, and bounce rates from mobile devices can let you know just how eye-popping your ad is. If you’ve got a video-focused landing page, knowing just how long users are sticking around can give you a better understanding of what you can improve about your video’s first impression.
• Timely: Weekly page traffic, new vs. repeat site visits, and social media traffic indicators can tell you how closely you’re following the latest trends or how far behind you’ve fallen from your customers’ contemporary conversations. Don’t be afraid to scrap an idea if it looks like you’ve fallen too far behind the curve; so long as your KPIs inform your decision, of course.‍
• Communal: New customer acquisition, turnover rates, and customer lifetime value can give you a good idea as to whether or not your customer retention efforts have been impactful or in vain. Fostering a digital community can be a lot of work, but understanding how long the average user sticks around can inform your longevity strategies and community-building efforts.

If there’s something you want to know about your campaign, chances are you’ll find the KPIs that help you zero in and focus on what matters. Build a solid deck of business goals and track the KPIs that give you the best overhead view.

But how can you be sure that you’ve chosen the right ones?

When The Stats Align

With such a large swath of potential KPIs to choose from, it can be easy to mismatch your KPIs and goals without even knowing it. There’s a word for what we’re trying to pull off here: KPI Alignment.

KPI Alignment requires a few different factors to maximize your ad output:

• A set of measurable objectives
• An understanding of your brand’s priorities
• The means adjust your approach in response to new KPI info

Let’s start with the objectives. Call them goals, markers, targets, whatever you’d like; as long as they measure progress towards your campaign’s most refined form, you’re headed in the right direction. “Measurable” is the operative word here, of course, so don’t aim for “frowns converted to smiles” or “days brightened per click” unless you’ve got the metrics in mind to back them up.

Those objectives should be angled towards the outcomes you’d like to see in your campaign, but you’ll also need to be able to replicate these outcomes across multiple projects to guarantee a cohesive vision for your brand’s next chapter. Keep a consistent vision and you’ll have a North Star that’ll orient each of your new ads and projects.

After your team has gotten a handle on what objectives you’d like to meet and how they synchronize with your brand’s overall vision, the real work begins. Keep your campaign agile by sticking to an iterative development process where your marketing levers can be pushed and pulled to match your objectives. For some, this could mean adjusting the length of an ad to keep viewers’ attention if the bounce back rate climbs too high; for others, a reassessment of ad content and placement (along with a few SEO nudges) can ensure results at the top of any search engine results page.

With these three elements, you’ll be able to maintain KPI alignment and give yourself an effective framework for maximizing user engagement.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you can put a digital tape measure to every little piece of your favorite new ad campaign; using KPIs also means knowing how to work with their limitations.

Watch Your Unmeasurables

A robust stable of KPIs doesn't mean that every little part of your ad can be measured and tailored from moment to moment. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mind you; the “soul” of your campaign can be whatever your team feels best communicates your brand’s value to the world, with KPIs serving as metrics for the less abstract aspects of a project.

That being said, KPIs aren’t a panacea for all of your ad woes. For one thing, initial KPI implementation can be a slog if your team isn’t properly prepared. With such a steep learning curve and innumerable data points to pull from, it can be easy to overdevelop your KPIs while ignoring real engagement drivers in the periphery.

Instead, be deliberate in your approach and know when to walk away from your KPI dashboard. Some objectives can be too abstract or daunting to take on with your first project; don’t be afraid to start small before working your way up to your first set of KPIs armed with a fresh set of data points and a clear-eyed vision of what should come next.

Measurement Is Betterment

Keeping things measurable is easier said than done, but at the end of the day your team will absolutely benefit from an expanded roster of engagement improvement tools. KPIs can help give your campaign direction, react to the ebbs and flows of your current and potential user bases, and clarify the true potential of your ads in an already crowded marketplace.

Using our proprietary portfolio of premier video solutions, you can easily take advantage of backend statistics to gauge the effectiveness of your video communities, customer surveys, user-created testimonials, and whatever else your campaign needs to grow.

If you’re looking for ways to leverage our video platforms and monitor the engagement capabilities of your brand’s new toolbox, don’t hesitate to request a custom price quote or schedule a personalized consultation with one of our video experts.

There’s always room for improvement in any advertising push, so let us help you take the right measurements and tailor a solution that fits your brand like none other.