How Video Can Produce a Significant ROI for Furniture Manufacturers

The list of ways to optimize your processes in a manufacturing company is seemingly endless. With the rise of robotics, the Internet of Things, and augmented reality, manufacturing as an industry is continually evolving due to technology. Marketing for manufacturing companies should be no exception.

Old school methods like print advertising and TV commercials simply aren't gathering the same return on investment that they used to, which is why more and more companies are seeking a better way to gain tangible results from their marketing efforts. 

Inbound marketing is a better way to see results from your marketing department. Premium content is a crucial pillar of inbound, because without great content and offers it's hard to see your desired results. Using high-quality video content for your inbound marketing campaign is an effective way to attract, convert, close, and delight customers.

Video marketing is not a new concept, but many industries have yet to realize its ability to generate customer engagement and boost brand recognition. Did you know 92% of mobile video consumers share video with others? Since video continues to dominate in popularity and online engagement, it's important that furniture manufacturers are using it to their advantage. 

Why Video?

Video marketing is a tool that, when implemented as a component of an inbound marketing strategy, can produce healthy ROI for furniture manufacturers. Video content is the preferred format of information for the majority of viewers, in fact, according to HubSpot, 59% of executives would rather watch a video than read text. The popularity of videos online is measured time and time again by different studies, and the numbers are becoming impossible to ignore. Here are just a few of those figures:

• 4X as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. (Animoto, 2015)
• Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. (Aberdeen, 2015)
• 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI. (Adobe, 2015)

Study after study reveals the same fact, video content is a powerful lead generation tool that helps funnel leads right to your sales reps. Marketers in manufacturing are turning to video to bring quantifiable ROI to their companies through higher conversion rates, sales, and improved SEO as well as many other "soft benefits" that sometimes get overlooked. 

Soft Benefits

While the ROI of video marketing is clear to measure, there are also many other ways that video directly helps manufacturers, but these positive influences can be a bit harder to measure. These soft benefits include, but are not limited to, improved brand association, increased intent to buy, enhanced customer retention, effective lead generation and nurturing. These inherent video bonuses are something you can expect to experience with a thoughtful and professionally-executed video marketing campaign. 

To measure and define ROI from your video marketing investment, it's important to make a S.M.A.R.T. goal for your marketing efforts. Remember, a S.M.A.R.T. goal is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. For example, are you looking to increase conversions, sales, or perhaps website visits? Document and track the appropriate statistics to create an in-depth a report when your video campaign is complete. After you make an investment in video, it's important to analyze the success metrics you determined in the beginning if you want to prove ROI and your capability as a manufacturing marketer. Set up a goal that is fair based on your benchmark data, then set a specific timeline for achieving it. The following are some S.M.A.R.T. avenues to track your video marketing ROI.

Video Marketing ROI

Paying a professional company to produce a video for your marketing strategy can leave you with sticker shock, but understanding the concrete ways that video provides ROI could ease your concerns.  Not only will video benefit your brand and impressions, but the direct impact on your bottom line is also simple to measure. According to a study by Fathom, 55% of manufacturing marketers struggle with the inability to measure content effectiveness. Here are a a couple of key ways to measure:

1. Through Search Engine Optimization

SEO is one way that many businesses will see a direct return on investment from their video initiatives. By tracking keywords before and after your video goes live, you can measure the effect promoting a video on your website and social media channels has on your page ranking. Instead of paying for an ineffective PPC ad on Google, a highly-shared video can help boost your ranking organically, which is much more beneficial for your company.

Investing in organic results will bring your brand far greater SEO benefits than PPC because more and more people are avoiding the paid spots in search engines. SEO Guru Rand Fishkin explains, "For every one click on a paid search result, the organic results generate 8.5 clicks." The organic results appear more reliable and less salesey to consumers.  

2. With Video

Utilizing keyword-rich titles and descriptions can help you achieve this organic SEO success. Additionally, blogs, eBooks, and text-based SEO are important, but adding video content rounds out your SEO tool box. Video provides measurable ROI when it comes to conversions, in emails and on landing pages, for furniture manufacturers. If lead generation is one of the areas you struggle with as a marketer, you're not alone, 80% of marketers report their lead generation efforts are only slightly or somewhat effective (BrightTALK, 2015). Adding video marketing elements to your pages can help you turn this around because providing relevant details of your products and services encourages the viewer to take some another action.

By mentioning in a subject line that there's a video in an email, you could boost your click-through rate by 200-300%. That opportunity to reach your target persona and educate them is priceless. Videos also help conversion rates on landing pages, by about 80%. If you're looking for ROI regarding qualified leads, video marketing is a smart choice. If these statistics seem too good to be true, try A/B testing these video uses in your own business, you may be surprised the increase in conversions smart video placement can gather your business.

Let's be honest, your CEO cares about sales above all else, and sometimes the bottom line is all that's guiding your marketing initiatives. To easily prove your content's worth, calculate how many people who see your video become leads and eventually convert into customers. By utilizing a Platform like Wistia or Vimeo, your lead nurturing efforts are easily measured, allowing you to know what videos are affecting your sales funnel and bottom line.

Video hosting platforms offer many different metrics to provide insight into your actions, allowing you to adapt your video marketing efforts to be the most effective. By measuring total views, shares, video heat maps, viewer history, engagement graphs, and even viewing trends, furniture manufacturers can gain a clear idea what videos are working best. Some platforms also allow you to gate the video content, enabling you to measure leads gathered directly from a specific video. By following those leads until they make a buying decision, you can quickly calculate your complete video marketing ROI.

HubSpot, Wistia and ROI

Software such as HubSpot allows you to track customers from prospect to customer easily; and it also integrates with hosting platforms like Wistia. HubSpot is an all-inclusive inbound marketing software that makes personalization and automation simple for businesses in all verticals, but it can be particularly useful to furniture manufacturers. HubSpot helps manufacturers communicate with their diverse network of contacts, personalize their marketing towards them, and build ongoing business relationships. By linking HubSpot and Wistia together, you're providing your marketing department with the most comprehensive and intelligent picture of your marketing funnel. Using tools like HubSpot and Wistia is the easiest way to track your video ROI because once you capture leads with your videos, you can automatically pass Wistia viewing data into HubSpot to score, segment, and assign your leads.

Once your leads are in HubSpot from Wistia, your sales team can see which videos your leads are watching and segment them by content. This type of personalization will give your sales team an edge and will improve your prospecting results. Using Wistia allows you to understand your video's worth, and work out which videos are helping drive conversions to craft more personalized follow-up emails.   

Next Steps 

An investment in video content will differentiate your organization and provide great value to both your current and future clients. In furniture manufacturing, the applications for video are only limited by your film team's imagination. Your clientele could learn a lot from product demos, current customer testimonials, social videos, and interviews.

There are many soft benefits of incorporating video into your inbound marketing campaigns as well as easy-to-track and measure ROI. If you struggle as a marketer to determine the value of your content, then video marketing is just the solution you need to produce ROI in the form of increased sales, conversions, and improved SEO.

Want even more information about the impressive benefits of video marketing? Then take the next steps to utilize video even more thoroughly in your inbound marketing strategies. Check out our free eBook below; it includes valuable statistics and predictions for video marketing's future to help inform your content strategy.