[Editor’s Note: Each week we highlight a slide from a PR News presentation of interest. This week’s slide comes from Chris White, managing editor, content marketing, and Sukhi Sahni, director, communications and marketing at Capital One. If you have an interesting presentation to share, contact: [email protected]]
Everyone loves video. Communicators are anxious to message via video. Some are rushing to do so. A more reasoned approach, informed by data, is to think about video creation in a way similar to how many PR efforts begin: by deciding on business goals. As White, puts it, “Understand your business goals and what level of the funnel you’re playing at before you create content. Know what you want to do before you do anything.”
Knowing your goals is half the battle. The other half is “articulating [goals] through analytics and reporting, which is how you’ll measure progress.” Strategically you also want to understand how to get better over time, White argues.
Looking at the top of the funnel on the slide (Awareness), imagine a company wants to raise awareness of its brand, referred to on the slide as brand recall/lift and brand perception. It creates a video series with the goal of raising brand recall or brand lift. The problem many face is once that campaign ends, people ask about different metrics. “How many purchases did these videos drive?” Although that can be measured, it’s deceiving in the context of the awareness stage, White says, “because the videos weren’t intended to get people to make purchases. If your goal was conversions/purchases, you probably would have done things a lot differently.” You can measure just about anything, but “not everything you can measure matters.” A few metrics matter, based on your business goals. “It’s important not to conflate them.”
An example with conversion would be if a company has Facebook ads urging consumers to complete a lead form. The business goal, or outcome, is to generate leads. “But that doesn’t solve for how you get better at generating leads,” White says. This is where Optimization Metrics (right side of the slide) enter. You could pay for more traffic if your cost-per-click were lower, and could reduce cost-per-click by increasing click-thru-rate (CTR) with more compelling creative. Although these metrics don’t reflect your business goals, they influence them. “Your business doesn’t make money on high CTR, but it can definitely lose money on it.”
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