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As marketers are seeking to create a deeper connection between brands and their consumers, they need better ways to understand the impact of their campaigns. Video marketing is the hottest thing out there right now. While you probably already know what a good video and brand pulsing can do for comprehension and engagement, there’s a huge issue when it comes to figuring out what video actually does to improve that connection.

Illustration by Propoint designer Ryan D.

That’s Where Brand Lift Comes Into Play

What is brand lift anyway? According to Nielsen’s Vizu, brand lift is a percentage increase in the primary marketing objective of a campaign. Basically, you have to figure out how opinions changed by isolating your preferred metric before, during, and after your campaign.

It sounds simple enough, right?

Then Why Is Brand Lift So Hard To Measure?

Well, most of the time, those metrics are exactly the problem. A lot of metrics intended for ad search campaigns are pretty much irrelevant when it comes to sizing your brand up.

« While clicks are useful for direct response objectives, brand marketers need to gauge more subtle metrics…at this point clicks are relevant mainly for online retailers. » – David Hallerman, for Vizu

It turns out measuring your brand’s performance isn’t as concrete as the definition makes it sound. All is fine and dandy until it comes to connecting these campaigns with results. And while intuition is great in its own right, it’s nothing to base the success of your campaign off of. But, there are some tools and goals you can keep in mind that will make your metrics feel a lot less like fluff.

You can measure brand lift by monitoring the performance of your creative, media frequency, and audience segments. Adjusting these three factors in real time can have a huge impact on how your ads impact perceptions and behaviors. And once you have that impact pinpointed, you’ll be able to spot its ripple effect as you look at metrics like ad recall, purchase intent, and even brand awareness.

Finding The Right Metrics

The benefits of video marketing don’t all come across in your media plan. If you want to identify a positive shift in customer awareness in perception, you’ll have to take a look at awareness, attitude, recall, favorability, and intent to see if interactions with your brand somehow changed because of your campaign.

So how do you figure out if your video marketing campaign is actually working? Primary research is everything. It’s important that you keep your ear to the ground and keep track of buzz and hear what people are saying through some combination of social listening, surveys, interviews, and focus groups. At this point, you’re trying to gauge aided and unaided awareness and any inherent preferences before and after your campaign….and trust me, this is all much more approachable than it may sound.

The Tools For The Job

When it comes to tracking what your campaign is doing for your brand, you have a couple of fairly popular options.