07 Nov Behind The Stream: The Vote Is In
Thank you to everyone who came out to rock the vote! It was a very close race, and in the end, I think we were all winners. I’m talking about our recent Behind the Scream contest, of course.
Tied for 2nd were Erica and Stephenie, and Seth (yes indeed, all 3 of them)! And Im happy to announce that I took the lead. To be fair, Stephenie edited my video, so we’re sharing the award. While bringing the Halloween spirit into our content was fun, the goal was to experiment with a more playful type of content and see how it resonated compared to our usual professional tone.
And the results are in! We had a hunch it would perform well, but not to this extent. In this week’s Behind the Stream, we’re back to our regularlhy scheduled programming talking about how video can make a difference for your business. Who knew that scary movie content could grab people’s attention? We didn’t—which is why we set a goal and tracked the metrics. Learn what we discovered by watching here.
Okay, so if you’ve been paying attention to our emails, then you know that we just recently ran a “Behind the Scream” contest.
This idea came from our producer, who wanted to do something fun for Halloween. We’ve been hearing a lot about creating social media content that taps into what people are thinking about, and she had the brilliant idea to have us all create our own little scary movie. Even with something as avant-garde as our DIY scary movies, we still made sure to have a purpose for all of our videos and knew exactly where each video was going to go. This is what I always recommend to clients who want to produce videos.
For our Behind the Stream series, which is our weekly blog and vlog content, the goal is really twofold: one, to stay top of mind with our networks, and two, to build credibility. So, the main purpose for this was to post it on our blog and include it in these emails to our networks. That’s where we started. Once you have your home base, I always recommend leveraging that video across all platforms you possibly can. Now, if you’re making a video for your business and want to track ROI, you’ve gotta know which numbers align with your goals to see if they’re actually succeeding. So, let’s dive into the numbers for our Behind the Screen contest.
First up, let’s talk about email. There are two main metrics we measure for email: one is the open rate, which mostly depends on the subject line and sender credibility. The second is the click-through rate. For this campaign, our open rate was strong at about 32%, which is actually high for us. Even better, our click-through rate jumped up a full percent to 3.4%. Our usual rate is around 2.6%, which is industry average, so it was exciting to see a nice increase with this campaign.
But we didn’t stop there—we had a perfectly good video, and we actually created four different pieces of content, so we leveraged it every way we could on socials. There are two main metrics we track on social media: reach and engagement. Reach is key because we want our brand to get in front of both known and new audiences. For this campaign, our reach shot up by 587%, helping us reach people we haven’t connected with in a while. While that may not serve a specific sales goal directly, it’s a great boost for brand awareness. Our engagement was also up by 178% across all social media platforms, which is pretty exciting.
Can I track direct sales back to this? No, and in fact, these videos didn’t sell anything directly. But sales isn’t the only metric here—the reach, engagement, and repeated exposure to our message all play a role in someone eventually deciding to buy. Plus, we had a blast creating these. The team was sharing the videos back and forth, upping our production chops and having a ton of fun. Since this campaign was successful and well-planned, we know now that the juice was worth the squeeze.
So, as we head toward Thanksgiving, we’ll probably do something fun for that as well. Now we know how to create a video that makes sense for our business while still having a great time. That’s a big thing I notice with people—they sometimes create content for creativity’s sake, but without a strategy, it may not get repeated because you won’t see how it impacts your business. Thanks for watching!