When it comes to measuring the return on investment — or ROI — of videos, there are a few things to keep in mind (especially if you’re in sales). So in this blog, we’ll cover everything you need to measure great sales video performance.

ROI is a performance metric that calculates profitability. In sales, marketing and related functions, this is often a ratio of how much you spent on a campaign versus how much revenue your business gained from it. Measuring the ROI of video is valuable as it helps you identify successful tactics, which can then inform future strategy and execution, as well as where to deprioritise spend.

A heads up: analytics tracking setup prior to kicking off your video efforts is key, as you’ll want a baseline to compare results to during and after any activity.

It’s mathematics time! Thankfully, calculating ROI isn’t rocket science — all you need to know is how much your video/s cost to make, and how much revenue your company gained as a result. Here’s the basic formula:

ROI = (Investment Gain – Investment Cost) / (Investment Cost) × 100

The trick to this equation is attributing ‘gain’ and ‘cost’. If you’ve fully outsourced video production, then totalling your cost is easy. If you’ve created your content in-house, however, you’ll need a figure (or average figure) for how much an individual’s (or team’s) time costs in your currency, then multiply that by how many hours were involved to get your cost.

It’s a similar story for gain. If the content goal you’re measuring is sales e.g. e-commerce, then accessing these numbers should be simple (providing you’ve done the analytics tracking pre-work we mentioned earlier). However, if you’re measuring lead generation, or associated brick-and-mortar sales, then you’ll need to ensure a value is attributed for your average lead, or offline tracking is in place for in-store sales.

Your ‘gains’ objective will be a result of your business and content goals e.g. revenue from sales, using personalised videos for prospective customers. Depending on whether you’re in B2B or B2C, your ‘gain’ metric may be leads or sales; but either way, outlining your video objective will inform the content you create, as well as how to measure its success.

It also helps to think about your prospect’s sales funnel stage in their buying journey. For example, if your video is for cold outreach, you’ll want to hook attention quickly, and ensure you introduce yourself, your company and product, and how it can help your prospect. Here, additional video metrics like percentage watched can be useful to see where people drop off, so you can adjust your script accordingly for better ROI.

Knowing who you need to communicate with is key to creating effective video content. No matter how much time and effort you put into a video, if it’s not hitting home with your viewer/s as relevant, helpful information, you’ll never see results. So think about who’ll be viewing your video, and what they’ll want to get out of it.

Pro tip: if your audience is senior management short on time, keep your video as short as you possibly can, without sacrificing context.

Following on from #2 above, once you’ve created your video content, don’t just ‘spray and pray’. Get strategic and ensure you know where your audience lives online, so you can prioritise those channels when publishing your video. If possible, think about key words or phrases that’ll help flag your content is for them; short and sweet is good general advice for posts.

From a promotion standpoint, the sad fact these days is organic promotion on social media e.g. you posting on LinkedIn, may not get the volume of attention you need — so you may want to boost your content with a little paid promotion (in which case, it may be time to chat with marketing).

If you’re sending a video to a prospect or lead, they need to come away knowing what to do after watching your video, as guided by you; this is your call to action. For the top of the sales funnel, this will likely be simply getting in touch, whereas at the middle of the funnel, you may be asking for a follow-up meeting to walk through in-depth questions (or obstacles), and for the bottom, it’ll be about making the sale.

For your audience to follow this direction, make sure you outline next steps at the end of your video, as well as how they can get in touch with you — making it both clear and easy for your viewer/s to take action.

Having defined your objective and how to measure it via ‘gains’ when calculating ROI, you can not only determine ROI for your video/s, but also get insight into performance by measuring your videos. This analytics data can be invaluable in terms of simple KPIs like reach, views, audience engagement and conversion rates.

If you really want to dig into the numbers, watch our YouTube video guide on ‘How to read your video analytics’.

Lastly, the biggest tip we can give you is: save yourself time and effort by recycling your videos. Let’s look again at the example of personalised videos for prospects from earlier. Don’t have time to record bespoke videos for every single lead? That’s okay — think about where you can repurpose content for productivity e.g. filming one cold outreach video, and simply changing the overlay text for each prospect’s name; this is a simple, scalable way to leverage video for sales, while making the time invested work for you (see the photo below).

If you’re making videos for specific industries, you could try slicing short segments to share on social media, or even share a high-performing video you’ve made with marketing so they can write an accompanying blog.

When it comes to getting return on investment for sales videos, the possibilities are endless. Got a great example video you’d love to share with us? Tag us on LinkedIn to loop us in — we’d love to know how you’re going about creating content!