How well do you know your viewing audience? Are you handing your sales team a list of prospects, but want to offer more insight about how interested these leads are? IBM Watson Media provides robust individual viewership data and audience metrics to inform marketers and live event producers on the effectiveness of their video content while enabling sales through being able to more intelligently identify highly engaged prospects.
- Individual Viewership Data
- Video Markting Module and Tracking
- Assessing Leady Quality Through Audience Metrics
- Video Registration Form Tips
If you are looking ways to take this capability and improve your marketing activities, be sure to check out our on-demand Top 5 Live Video Marketing Strategies with Measurable Results seminar. This goes over actionable strategies to utilize, along with ways to measure results, many of which incorporate the viewer tracking here.
Individual Viewership Data
IBM Watson Media has offered individual viewer tracking for internal audiences through its enterprise video platform, giving organizations an opportunity to track the use of internal video assets. This functionality is now available for external use cases as well, giving marketers and event organizers additional methods to track engagement down to a per user level.
Found under Tracking, this tool can sort by video or by user. For example, a content owner can see all users that watched a specific live stream, or alternatively can select an individual user and see their viewing history. From the platform, account administrators can quickly see how much of the content (as a %) each viewer watched and the date that the video was accessed. These metrics only skim the surface, though. Through downloading a full report as a CSV, administrations get access to rich, extremely detailed viewership data. A partial list of metrics in the full report include:
- Type of content (live or recorded)
- View type (if they watched it on the channel page or on your site)
- When they started watching (time stamp that is down to the minute)
- When they stopped watching (time stamp that is down to the minute)
- Country viewed from
- Region viewed from (States for inside the United States)
- City viewed from
- Device and browser used
- Time spent watching content (in seconds)
This data is presented either through anonymous logs, with each anonymous user being given an identifier number, or by associating access to an email address. In order for the email address to be listed, this requires adding a registration form to the video player.
Video Marketing Module and Tracking
The most powerful use case with the individual viewership tracking is through combining it with Streaming Manager’s registration gate capabilities. When activated, this adds a registration form inside a video player. This allows content owners to place required or optional fields for a viewer to fill out before getting access. Doing a product launch? This tool offers a great lead generation opportunity, granting actionable insights like not just emails for follow up, but also the ability to get further details like the industry of those interested in the product.
When paired with individual viewership tracking, this module adds powerful insight through replacing “anonymous” users with the actual email of the viewer, enabling lead qualification through seeing metrics related to interest in the content and also demographic data. Content owners can choose to have any number of fields before the video, although the email field will always be included. As a result, any viewer navigating through the registration gate will have their viewing data associated with their email.
Fields a content owner can request to be filled out as part of the registration form include:
- Name
- Phone
- Company
- Job Title
- Country
- Zip
- State
- City
- Address
- Industry
- Company Size
Available options are updated, so when requesting a demo be sure to ask if a desired field is not listed as it might have been added.
Assessing Lead Quality Through Audience Metrics
The Video Marketing Module gives an effective way to transform a video project into a more direct lead generation effort. Individual viewership tracking takes that data and presents insights to better inform sales teams or aid nurture campaigns to convert these users into paying customers. The most immediate benefit is simply being able to see how interested the user was in the actual content. If someone registered and only watched a few seconds before leaving, this might be a sign they were expecting something else. Another useful metric is seeing when a user stopped watching, using the specific time stamp metric. If the video content in question was a live stream of the product launch and the viewer stopped watching before the product was unveiled, that’s likely a sign of weak interest.
While the data can be used to sniff out uninterested viewers, it can also be a powerful way to inform a sales team which prospects could be more likely to convert. For example, back to the product launch, if a viewer watched the full live stream that would be an extremely positive indication they are interested in the final product. Organizations can also mine geographic data, knowing areas that are more likely to convert and targeting viewers who are watching from those regions. Similarly, this data, along with the device used, can help power more targeted nurture campaigns. For example, knowing someone watched from an iPhone might aid in messaging more directly targeted to this audience, especially if the product functions with this device.
Video Registration Form Tips
It’s no industry secret: the fewer fields that are required of a user on a form, the more likely they are to fill out that form. Many studies have been conducted to confirm this. Thanks to the addition of individual tracking, content owners can remove certain fields while still getting access to that data. This information includes: Country, State and City, which is passed through automatically with viewer tracking. The data for these fields will populate based on their IP address from where they are accessing the content. Because of this, the data might not always be 100% accurate at the city level, due to how the ISP was set up, but should be accurate at the country level.
Summary
Individual viewership tracking offers an extremely robust way to gauge lead interest, along with rich, highly detailed demographic and user data. Better inform your sales team or better segment your audience for nurture campaigns, enabling quicker paths to prospect conversion.
Want to start gathering more informed engagement metrics around your leads? Try out the Video Marketing Module and starting adding a more easily visible lead gen method to your video projects.