Do Your Video Marketing Efforts Drive Leads?

Video Form header
James T Fletcher
CEO, Principal Consultant

5/6/2019

Drive Measurable ROI From Your Video Marketing Investment!

There’s no doubt that video is an increasingly important tool in any marketer’s digital marketing strategy. After all, video is a great way to build brand awareness at the top of the email marketing funnel, create a convincing story for your company and your products through the middle of the funnel, and give your customers and stakeholders valuable content and a way to connect with your company – and increase conversions.

But video can also be an invaluable tool for your lead acquisition and lead generation strategy, and two words sum up how having a video marketing strategy can help you generate leads: video forms.

Using video forms in your inbound marketing and outbound marketing can help you draw in leads and keep them engaged. Discover our four tips to make sure your video marketing forms are pulling leads into your funnel, driving up your click-through rate, and helping you accelerate leads through the marketing funnel.

How to turn your videos into lead magnets:

1.  Run video on your website

Using a third-party platform like YouTube, Facebook or Twitter may help you get lots of eyes on your content – but it prevents you from using video in a way that makes sense to your marketing strategy.

When you run videos on these platforms, you are not able to gather all of the important viewer engagement data you need (including how your videos are watched, how long prospective leads watch your content, and how your video content is shared across an omni-channel marketing landscape). You’re also unable to brand the pages on which your video is hosted or manage the way your video is viewed.

But, if you use a platform that allows you to run video from your website, you can keep control over how your content is viewed, interacted with, and shared.  You can then decide when and how to share it (will it be gated or accessible without any kind of gating?) and use branded forms, players, video hubs, and landing pages – all of which will help you gather important data that can help you tailor your content strategy and your multiple user journeys.

(Not to mention that you’d much rather have your website visitors share links on social media that drive more visitors back to your site, and not back to Facebook or YouTube, right?)

2. Hang on to your video data

Make sure you own your video data! To do that, you need the ability to integrate data collected from video directly into your marketing automation platform and existing tech stack.  

That’s where external hosting platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter fall short. When you use these tools you lose the ability to use the data that is collected from that piece of video content. You won’t be able to track how a piece of video content performs along the marketing funnel because it gets left out of your attribution model – and if it’s left out of your attribution model, you can’t quantify its ROI.

Make sure that you keep ownership of your data by using a video marketing platform that allows you to plug video form data into your marketing automation platform and analytics tools.  You’ll then be able to integrate that data into your CRM and turn those video viewers into leads.

More importantly, by using forms on your website (and enabling progressive profiling on your forms to gather more valuable information on your leads so you can provide them with more useful content as you nurture them through the funnel) you’ll be able to gather the data you need to ensure you are providing the most useful content, at the right time, for your leads.

Stay up to date on the latest marketing automation news!

3. Stay GDPR compliant

When you embed YouTube on your website, you are letting YouTube add five cookies – without user consent! – to your user. This data can then be passed along to Google and to the United States, where GDPR has not been implemented. With those cookies, your user’s location can be tracked for 30 minutes and other valuable user data can be collected without your viewer’s explicit consent.

Don’t let your videos put you at risk of breaking EU regulations! Make sure that your video embeds, forms, and landing pages are all GDPR-compliant so you can put out content at ease in the knowledge that you are not breaking GDPR laws.

This is one of the main reasons why we partnered with TwentyThree: as a European-based video marketing platform, they’ve taken all the necessary steps to ensure that you can use video and video forms to collect data while remaining fully compliant with GDPR regulations.

4. Make the most of your video SEO

Videos are a powerful way to get your company and your content SEO-noticed.  But you won’t be able to do that unless you can enable features that drive organic traffic to your content.  

When you use a video forms, you can collect the information that you need and edit your video pages with descriptions so potential viewers can find your content by keyword searches.  Getting descriptions onto your video also means you can add tags to your keywords so search engines can find your content (and, as an extra benefit, allow you to organise your content so your viewers can find related topics better on your site).

And, once you get traffic onto your website or landing pages, you can get those eyes on your forms – and those forms will feed data back into your marketing automation software, from where you’ll be able to track cost per lead and see how that video marketing strategy is contributing to your larger marketing strategy and objectives.

Not sure how to get video forms enabled on your content?

When in doubt, consider partnering up

We’ve partnered with TwentyThree because TwentyThree care as much about analytics as we do. Their platform allows us to deliver the right video to the right channel, and then allows us to distribute, track, edit and analyze how our videos perform. TwentyThree also is easy to integrate into marketing automation platforms including Marketo so we can make sure the lead data we gather can make its way into our analytics.

Want to find out more about how to integrate video marketing into your marketing strategy or into your marketing technology stack? Get in touch for your free audit!

We’d like to thank our video partners TwentyThree for providing background and context for this blog post and for partnering with us to provide a video platform.  All opinions on this post are our own.