Baking media effectiveness into your video marketing strategy

Streaming, scrolling, searching, shopping: these video-centric behaviours are changing how consumers shop.

Video is so powerful that 76% of South Africans say YouTube helps them decide what to buy, showing how shopping and digital content have become synonymous with one another. For marketers, this insight is invaluable. It presents brands with the opportunity to meet them where they are and develop platform-specific content instead of shooting in the dark with mass dissemination.

Today, full-funnel video marketing is more informed, strategic and trainable in the era of media effectiveness. However, there has been a historical lack of awareness around what makes a profitable full-funnel strategy, partly due to rapidly changing technology and consumer behaviour.

Here’s how top marketers implement media effectiveness and full-funnel video marketing into a blended strategy:

Why video is a marketer’s full-funnel hero

Seventy-eight percent of South Africans say YouTube is TV, showing how penetrable video is across media and marketing consumption. Makro, a grocery retailer in sub-Saharan Africa, took this data point to heart with a full-funnel video campaign to drive awareness and YouTube Shorts to increase consideration. Makro improved across the funnel, including a 41% increase in video watch-time, 8% higher conversions, and a 20% increase in revenue value; meaning it brought in more profitable conversions.

We interviewed Jean Ochse, a digital marketing executive on the Makro team, who shared more about this campaign:

Where to start: Improving the measurement of your video strategy with the right metrics

The power of your video marketing strategy is only as good as your media effectiveness maturity. Effective brand measurement involves metrics that sit within three pillars:

1. Quantity: Is your message reaching a wide enough audience of people with the potential to become customers? Quantity benchmarks may include views, on-target reach, and frequency.

2. Quality: Are you improving brand recall and brand awareness? Are consumers moving down the funnel? Quality benchmarks may include video completion rate, brand lift, search lift.

3. Outcomes: Do your marketing efforts meet your business goals? Is your chosen conversion metric, such as sales or leads, being met? Outcomes involve business drivers such as leads, cost-per acquisition (CPA), or return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
   

Mastering full-funnel video starts with testing and learning

It’s clear that media effectiveness does not have to be a murky concept shrouded in confusion. And a culture of testing is key to this success: advertisers who experiment at least 15 times a year saw a 30% increase in performance in that year, followed by a 45% increase the following year.

Start your full-funnel video journey by mixing and matching creatives with different audiences in a cyclical fashion to foster improved marketing and measurement maturity.

Get more marketing inspiration, strategies and the latest insights from across sub-Saharan Africa with Think with Google.