As a business owner and marketing director, I’m always asking myself, is it worth it? Every time I launch a marketing campaign, I’m looking for it to produce certain results. I hope for a specific objective — more sales, more leads, lower cost of acquisition, etc.

And video is no exception. Due to the higher cost of video — at least compared to other marketing channels, like posting on Facebook, it’s critical to be able to answer the question, is video worth it?

Adding video to your marketing can help. There is a ton of research published by marketing companies that show the show the importance of video to your business. Customers want to watch videos from companies, according to research done by Hubspot.

But, in a small, local business, we need to be careful. While all of the data shows that video performs better than a lot of other marketing, most small, local businesses have a very fixed budget.

So, it’s important that all video marketing efforts are still held accountable to the results you’re hoping to achieve — like profits, sales, brand awareness.

In this article, I’m going to give you a framework for thinking about the effectiveness of your video efforts. This is based on my own personal experience running a Lansing-real estate agency and implementing video into my own company, The Dolinski Group.

This framework can be used whether you run a for-profit company or a non-profit. It applies if you’re a business owner, and it applies if you’re the marketing director for an organization.

It will help you evaluate each video project you complete or help you evaluate a potential video project. In a sense, it helps you run a cost-benefit analysis.

Let’s dive into how you can measure the effectiveness of your video efforts.

Determine Your Objective

When evaluating any of your marketing efforts, you need to be very clear about your objective.

What do you hope to achieve? Why do you want to add video to your marketing or why did you add video to your marketing?

Every business will have a different reason. Your organization is no exception.

Your goal when answering this question is to get to a specific metric. A number. It’s insufficient to add video because “it’s cool” or you have some money left over at the end of the year.

The companies that struggle to get positive results from video often don’t have a clear objective. They’re adding video just because.

Get to a number. It could be anything — brand awareness, increased profit margin, lower acquisition costs, faster sales cycle, increased average donation at an event. Anything that might be important to you or your organization.

Whatever your objective, it can be grouped into one of two categories – top funnel or bottom funnel.

Top funnel marketing is focused on building brand awareness, brand sentiment, lead generation, or educating leads.

This was the case for Strawesome:

Bottom funnel marketing is focused on generating revenue and converting leads. It’s getting more people to buy your services or product.

For example, that was the case when I hired UnoDeuce to create a series of testimonial and case study videos for me.

I believe most organizations should focus on the bottom of the funnel, which I will explain why in later parts of the article, but I’m also not naive.

Every organization has different objectives.

It’s up to you to choose which metrics are most relevant to your overall goal and only measure those.

How to Measure a Top Funnel Video

Top funnel videos are focused on building brand awareness, brand sentiment, or educating. This is where your video will sit when your main goal is for people to “know about you” or to learn about what you do.

A perfect example is the video by Arbor Inn.

So what metrics should you focus on when you have a top funnel goal? You should be looking at metrics like reach, video views, social shares, and even engagement (view time, social comments, etc).

Remember, pick one metric to gauge success.

To measure the effectiveness of a top funnel video, take your total costs, for marketing and the video, and divide it by your results (or expected results).

Let me give you a quick example. Assume you’re trying to build brand awareness. You want to take complete strangers and turn them into someone who is somewhat aware of your organization.

In setting this goal, I’ve determined that reach is going to be my key metric. In other words, how many unique people does my video get in front of (not necessarily watch)?

I will assume that I put in $600 for the video and another $100 for ads on Facebook. From my campaign, I reached 10,000 people. So my cost per person reached is $0.07, or $700/10,000 people reached.

For seven cents, I can expose someone to my brand.

Now, when you run this kind of calculation, the next thought that goes through the head of most small-business owners and marketing directors is this: is that good or bad?

That answer depends 100 percent on your business and other available marketing channels.

Take the Facebook video ad example and compare it to advertising on a billboard. Can your company reach more people for cheaper using a billboard? Would they have better luck building brand awareness by taking out a billboard?

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s possible, but would you build brand awareness among the right market?

You could also compare branded video ads against other branded ads on Facebook.

I ran an experiment like this in my own business.

For a property I had listed, I created a video walk-through with aerial shots. Then, I used Facebook ads to market the listing. The video cost me about $75 and my total ad spend was $135.45, and my reach was 8,505 people.

My reach was about $0.025 cost per person. Is this good or bad?