How do you demonstrate the power of your marketing services to clients? I imagine you draw on successful campaigns to prove that you can get results and show the data behind your claims. In addition, when writing articles and speaking at events, I research online for industry insight and intelligence to show how effective I know that video can be for brands.
However recently I’ve been discovering that there is a proliferation of suspicious stats out there. Take the one that “the average user spends 88% more time on a website with video content”. This is a bold claim, adding punch to an article or social post about video’s effectiveness. But how accurate is it? What was the sample size? What does the average user look like, and actually how useful is that to your audience? We investigated this statistic but found that it was no longer online and therefore we can’t verify any of this.
With the Oxford English Dictionary proclaiming ‘post-truth’ the word of the year, election surprises on both sides of the Atlantic, and the fake news scandals, this may not be a surprise, but it’s definitely worth thinking about and even more important to “not believe everything you read”. And so inspired by shifty video stats, at Hurricane we’ve created an animation calling time on dodgy data and encouraging people to concentrate on the messages that matter.
The real value of video comes with targeting your messages, knowing your audience and telling powerful stories. Data is vital to running effective marketing campaigns, but it has to be accurate and put to work to continuously improve and create better brand stories which will resonate with your target demographic.
What do you feel about dodgy data? Join the debate via @Hurricanemedia