In today’s data-driven enterprises, the use of analytics to inform a company’s direction and communications strategy is rapidly becoming the new normal. While there are plenty of businesses that are currently collecting such data, if they do not have the processes in place to analyze this information effectively, it can be very difficult to convert into valuable insights.
Fortunately, companies are starting to take more of an interest in ensuring that their analytics are as easy for employees to use as possible. One such area where businesses now have both a wealth of tools and a wealth of data available is in the enterprise video space. There are more tools now available than ever to help organizations analyze their video communications programs in-depth, from network distribution to user experience metrics.
Justification is Everything
Those who work in enterprise video strategy such as employee communications, marketing or event production are often asked to show their worth and justify the value that they add to a brand.
Executives are keener than ever to fully understand how video improves communications and the overall working environment, as a result they are asking increasingly probing questions about how much video really benefits the organization. This will typically go beyond a single KPI with C-level executives asking questions such as:
- Whether the video conferences across the company have improved on previous years?
- Has employee engagement been enhanced by mobile desktop viewing?
- Which segments of their business is engaged the most by video broadcast?
- How can they improve engagement in the future?
To answer all these questions, you need to have the right set of data to hand that can back up your responses clearly. Unfortunately, far too many people working in enterprise video strategy do not have access to the right analytics for their video programs and so struggle to justify the returns of their investment. Instead, many continue to be stuck exporting their data into Excel for analysis, and then performing tedious processes to make sense of it all and arrive at a set of graphs and other visualizations in order to make it remotely readable. This is neither sustainable nor scalable. Thankfully, there are now multiple tools that manage this entire process, offering substantial efficiencies.
Analytics Platforms are Evolving Every Day
As data analysis grows increasingly important, many businesses are now shifting their funding to invest in giving data engineering teams the analysis tools needed to inform their enterprise decisions and justify their expenditure. Management teams no longer see data as a luxury, but as a critical component in running a business; this means more support and resources allocated to the tools that can make this happen.
There are now products on the market that enable enterprises to answer questions on their video strategy, freeing workers from preparing the data and allowing them to focus on the analyzing and delivery of insights to find out what makes great content. By offering time efficiencies and a better quality of information to businesses, these tools are set to fuel video usage across the enterprise space.
Enterprise video analysis has already changed rapidly with data teams switching their concentration from analyzing the number of views a major corporate video receives, to focusing more on the engagement of the video from certain groups and individuals. As the sophistication of enterprise video strategies increases, so too must the complexity of the analysis involved.
What used to be binary performance metrics of “good” or “bad” has become a nuanced and highly sophisticated segmentation of the employee base and how to best engage each segment. Just like sophisticated marketing companies, enterprise video teams are learning to hone their messages, distributions and targeting based on new sources of unlocked data and insights. As a result, it is now common for teams to perform analysis and build success metrics based on questions such as:
- How long are people watching by geography?
- How did a video posted on Portal A perform against Portal B?
- How did this new video perform against other videos in the series?
- How does engagement of a video vary by device and should we optimize for mobile, desktop or both?
This type of analysis and consequential decision-making is impossible without access to the multiple data sources made available in a powerful analytics tool. As a result, analysts have now increased in value in the eyes of their employers. Instead of new technologies replacing the role of analysts, such technologies have provided analysts with free reign to do what they’re best at… analyzing. Furthermore, this new technology reduces the cost and barrier to adopting data-driven decision-making and, ultimately, allows business leaders to arrive at more valuable insights faster than ever before.
The value of enterprises making decisions based on data-driven insights is increasing throughout all businesses, big or small. And enterprise video teams are not excluded from this. Companies now realize the importance of investing in the appropriate analytical tools to help analysts gain access to in-house data to inform what’s best for the organization moving forward. Data is the new foundation for success.
