Your position in the market can be as complex or simplistic as you’d like. You need to understand what’s already out there and think about how you'll measure up. Think:

• Who do we serve?
• Who will I be competing against in my (physical) local area?
• Who will I be competing with in the digital space (paid and in search)?
• What services or products are my competitors, or close competitors, offering?
• What are your competitors saying? How are they presenting themselves to the world?
• Can you get any inkling or understanding of pricing models in your area, which end are you going to sit at, or are you going to enter as a challenger?

If you’re looking for something more visual, you could create a market map of your competitors to see where you fit. You could base your axis on something general such as cost/quality or choose something more specific. Here’s an example of a marketing map we’d plot ourselves on:

Once you put together your foundations, messaging and visual identity you’re in the perfect place to start making good content. Animations are perfect for something unique - that 100% represent your brand and product.

Once you’ve done all the hard work and are working with a team (like us!) on creating an animation around your brand purpose or vision (a hero video), you want to make sure you can measure the impact it has. Understanding how your audience perceives the animation and whether it drew any gains in traffic, brand awareness or even lead-gen could be crucial to your project. Here are some suggestions on how you could go about measuring:

Goals for brand videos

We’re not saying that you’ll never get a lead from a brand video, or that you shouldn’t monitor leads at all. But, the goal of a brand video (at least in our eyes) is not lead-gen. These videos, as our above definition suggests, are more about exposure. Finding your audience, or expanding your audience and communicating your vision.

We think some more fitting goals include:

• Increase in branded/social traffic
• Increase in brand keyword volume
• Increase in site engagement incl:
  • Time on page/site
  • Avr page views
  • Scroll depth
• Increase in social followers
• Increased social engagement
• Increased brand campaign click-through rate

Let’s go through these in a little more depth:

Increase in branded traffic (leading to brand keyword volume increases)

The goal of these videos is to get your brand out there, to explain what you do, maybe a little of how you do it and to build rapport with your audience. Ways you can show this as being successful is to measure your brand traffic - you can do this through Google Search Console (it’s free). Here’s a guide from Loves Data if you’re unsure of how to do this.

Google Search Console will allow you to see what people are searching for when they land on your site, and you can also find out on a page-by-page level what they’re typing too. The more people who understand and recognise your brand, the more will type your name into search engines (or variations of your name) to come back and find you again.

There are paid tools you can use to monitor this too - such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. And these tools also allow you to monitor keyword volumes behind your branded terms.

The more exposure your videos get, the more people should know and understand your brand, and the more people will start searching. You can see any monthly search volume increases through these tools (and you can set them up to monitor these keywords specifically).

You can also check keyword volumes for free by using Google Ads, you can quickly set up an account (if you’re not using it already).

Increase in social traffic

If you’re running with your branded content in a brand-push campaign, or a series of posts you’ll want to measure your traffic coming through to see whether there’s a positive uptick here too.

Make sure you use UTMs so you correctly capture your traffic and you can see what they interact with once they land on your website.

Increased engagement across social media

If you’re pushing your brand video out via social media - we would advise against using it solely to generate leads. If lead-gen is your aim, then your video should be more targeted (more on that later).

We’d advise considering options around impressions, website visits and building your following. Why? Well because brand videos are made for exposure. Telling the right people that you exist. It’s about starting a conversation. And social media is a great place to do that.

There are a lot of channels, so we won’t look at them each specifically here, but you should be monitoring things like:

• Website traffic (make sure you’re using UTMs)
• Website interaction (create an audience segment in your analytics where you look at what social media traffic does when they arrive)
• Video/post engagement (who’s liking, sharing and most importantly commenting?)
• Profile impressions, follower count and other similar interactions

At this stage, your main goal is to build a community and some advocacy. So, use this video as a tool to get your brand out there, and learn about your audience.

Increase in returning traffic

Another way to measure the success of implementing your video is through returning traffic. Though in most cases it will be hard to directly attribute returning traffic to your video (unless they’re returning via an ad or something) we can assume that if the introduction of your video sees an increase in your returning traffic, more people are remembering you than before.

Increased website dwell time, scroll depth and clickthrough to product/service pages

Adding a brand video to your homepage might also positively impact the amount of time people spend on your website. You could simply monitor the average time visitors spend on your site or a page or you could look at scroll depth.

Scroll depth is automatically measured in GA4 and you’ll be able to see if the introduction of a video has people engaging further with your page.

Finally, increased website engagement might come in the form of a higher click-through rate to your important pages. You could monitor average pages per visit, or monitor how many people click through directly from your home page to further pages - again this is easily achievable in Google Analytics.