The power of content as an outbound marketing tool is not in doubt. In fact, throughout 2018, one survey showed that 53% of businesses had invested in content marketing. That same survey also showed that videos were by far the most popular content format (72%), followed by blog posts (69%) and research/original data (60%).
However, this investment in content calls for enhanced dexterity, awareness and visibility in order to gauge effectiveness and ROI. So-called ‘digital dexterity’ is increasingly essential in the modern enterprise, a term described by Gartner as: “the ability and desire to exploit existing and emerging technologies for better business outcomes.”
In fact, this dexterity is central to the future success of any business. According to Gartner, 90% of corporate leaders view digital as a top priority today, while 15% of large enterprises will regularly assess and develop the digital dexterity of their workforce by 2020.
Digital dexterity – The ‘why’ and the ‘where’
Developing digital dexterity is not a simple matter, but awareness is key, especially where outbound communications are concerned. Creating ‘viral’ content that is seen by thousands of people in just a few hours is amazingly potent. But without knowing ‘who’ is viewing that content, ‘when’ they viewed it, ‘how’ they viewed it and ‘where’ they found it, it’s often impossible to replicate successes, and difficult to monetise or usefully track the figures produced.
Indeed, outright volume statistics (“Hey, we got 4 million views!”) are often highly misleading, lumping together paid and organic engagement. They also ignore the distinction between high-quality, targeted users and low-quality engagement, such as bots, spiders and other machine traffic.
How to squeeze every last drop of value from your video
The rise of video is having a profound effect on how businesses operate. What are the implications for your business?
Third party integration as standard
Driving ‘better business outcomes’ isn’t just about creating good content, it’s about measuring the effectiveness of that content. The answer lies in the data you already have and your ability to isolate and analyse it.
Imagen’s User Analytics features, for example, enable managers to review and discover what their users are interested in and, more importantly, what they are not – informing future decisions on content production and audience targeting. It also plugs into Google Analytics, one of the most widespread web analysis tools in use today, to provide first-class user demographics and traffic analysis on tap.
Providing answers with context
The importance of analytics shouldn’t be underestimated. Without any data engineering or significant integration works, it enables users to ask and answer complex questions about their video strategy. For example: How many times was a video downloaded or streamed? How many people watched it to the end? Shared it? Liked it? And if people didn’t watch a video all the way through, where did they lose their interest?
A good media management platform removes the time-intensive work in preparing this sort of data for analysis and makes it easily accessible (via a highly configurable web interface) to those that need it. This, in turn, enables stakeholders to focus on analysing the data and deriving actionable insights from it. When you know what’s working, you can do more of it.
Consistency throughout the stack
In addition, tools built natively into the best media management platforms enable a consistent approach, not only to the metrics that are collected, but also to the framework in which the assets themselves exist. Consistent delivery mechanisms, consistent user experiences and consistent video durations also help this process of analysis.
Imagen, for example, includes detailed asset level reporting that includes storage analysis and consumption data that can provide valuable context to external data, as well as highlight any internal resource requirements or shifts. Finally, the internal dashboard brings in job monitoring for ingest and workflow actions, reinforcing consistency and improving efficiency over swapping between different screens.
Creating value from the noise
It’s a fact that video content is only increasing in importance for every enterprise and the value in accurately tracking who is consuming that content is enormous. Indeed, without that digital awareness the use of content as a marketing tool is significantly reduced. If your messaging is not reaching your target market, or being consumed avidly by an unexpected market segment, that information is vital.
Although there are many tools, suites and standalone ways of achieving this, integrated and native toolsets are the most elegant, time efficient and consistent. These attributes enable all enterprises to convert digital noise into actionable insights, leveraging the newest technology to track and analyse content performance, answering questions about ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’.
This is the essence of digital dexterity.
One of the major challenges for Auburn University was to improve engagement tracking for all user interaction. Auburn can now review using Imagen’s User Analytics feature to find out what their users are interested in and, what they are not. With this valuable insight, Auburn can hone their production strategy to create even more compelling content that aligns with audience trends.
