What is Video Engagement and How to Leverage it for your Business?

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, one thing is clear: a huge percentage of companies worldwide are now using video to market their goods and services. According to research by Wyzowl, 87% of businesses use video to communicate internally and externally – a significant jump from the 63% found to be using it in 2017.

And it’s easy to understand why. Video excites and engages people like few other types of content. Savvy business leaders know that they can use video to host live events; share educational webinars; demonstrate product applications and more. For these enterprises, video has become another way to provide valuable content to their most interested audiences, hoping to eventually convert them into loyal brand advocates.

In this article, we’ll unpack what we mean by “video engagement” and examine some of the most popular video engagement features. Lastly, we’ll share some of our best advice for choosing a video engagement platform for your business.

What is video engagement?

Traditional video conferencing software was built with a few limitations. These platforms fail to successfully engage audiences and provide a complete solution for engagement. Clunky IT problems, outdated use cases, and limited communication methods make it clear that the old way of video communication needs a change.

To address these problems, Livestorm created the world's very first video engagement platform. Livestorm focuses on video and all of the engagement features surrounding it.

Definition of video engagement

Video engagement goes beyond simple video communication. Video engagement allows users to connect with audiences, collaborate, and engage the target audience and measure key performance indicators – all in a single, centralized environment.

What is a video engagement platform?

Due to the growing popularity of remote working, you’ve probably attended several meetings that were conducted through a video communication platform. But video engagement involves far more than simply speaking to another person through a computer screen. Instead, video engagement is the act of actually using the platform itself to increase viewer interest, hold viewer attention, and assess your strengths and weaknesses after the fact.

In other words, a video engagement platform provides users with the ability to connect with, collaborate with, and engage the target audience and measure key performance indicators – all in a single, centralized environment.

Video engagement platform territory

Instead, a VEP will help to facilitate every aspect of a virtual event, engaging audiences across the entire process. Video engagement platforms are ideal for complex events that occur frequently. Company meetings, webinars, sales demos, and customer training sessions are just a few examples of a VEP’s perfect use cases.

Key benefits of video engagement

Why is it important to do all this? Well, firstly, if you have valuable information you’d like to share with key stakeholders in your industry, keeping them as engaged as possible in your events will help your message resonate long after you’ve switched off the connection. We’ve all sat through a boring lecture, meeting or presentation at least once in our lives, which is why it should come as no big surprise that the more boring the content, the less information is retained.

With all that said, though, we’re guessing you didn’t go through the effort of hosting an online event just for the sake of educating the public. You’re probably also hoping to garner more traffic, clicks, conversions, and ultimately, revenue! And, for the same reason outlined above, video engagement helps with all that, too.

How to measure Video Engagement

Livestorm's Video Engagement Score™ (VES) calculator is a new way to evaluate the success of your online events. Through VES you can see if your event was truly a success by looking at key factors, including not only how many people attended but how long they stayed, how many of the polls launched impacted engagement, and how many overall messages, poll votes and questions were sent. Each factor is assigned a rate in order to calculate success, offering hosts an entirely new outlook on how to measure success. Calculate your video engagement score now!

Whenever you need to spark customer delight, motivate an entire company at once, or simply showcase the benefits of your product – a video engagement platform will help you meet your goals with ease.

The evolution of video engagement

As our consumption of video increased, the scope of video engagement changed. From being a simple social media KPI to providing a broader business impact, the definition of video engagement evolved. Let's dive in!

Video engagement in social media

Video engagement metrics were originally used by content creators on YouTube or social media channels such as Facebook or Instagram. Engagement was key to ensuring that fans and followers interacted and liked the content shared.

The video engagement rate was calculated as follows: the sum of all engagement types such as likes, shares, link clicks, comments, or view counts, divided by the number of video impressions.

Video engagement in web conferencing

But the definition of video engagement evolved as businesses were forced to look for new ways of remote communication. During the pandemic, their usage increased significantly: in 2021, 68% of professionals reported increased use of video conferencing, according to a Livestorm survey.

Businesses started using video as a way to connect and collaborate, for internal meetings (for example, all-hands meetings, 1:1s, and employee onboarding sessions to name just a few) or external events (like customer trainings, hiring sessions, live events, or product demos).Indeed, professionals needed to understand how registrants, participants or team members engaged with their events before, during and after.

Why should you use a video engagement platform?

Nowadays, millions of virtual meetings, webinars, or virtual events are hosted on a weekly basis. With the overwhelming amount of information communicated through video and the attention span of virtual attendees decreasing, tracking the number of registrants or participants of an event is not enough to measure the event performance.

Event organizers should track the performance of their event based on the engagement of their audience, which can be measured by the number of chat messages, the number of polls answered, the amount of questions asked, or the average attendance duration during the event.

Gather customer insights and analytics

Tracking video engagement data with the help of a video engagement platform will enable your team to customize the way you communicate with your participants during and after the event.

You'll be able to access analytics and customer engagement to tailor your follow-ups and provide your audience with what they are truly looking for.

Increase conversions

Video engagement platforms include robust features that will convert audiences. Some of these features can be used before your event even begins.

For example, Livestorm's pre-built landing pages come with customizable forms that can be tailored to include the information you care about most. In addition, these pages can be embedded anywhere you wish, whether it be on your website or within a blog post. This makes it easy for your audiences to register and for you to track those conversions within the Livestorm dashboard.

During the event, you can display live call-to-actions within the event room that lead participants to a specific page. Or you can redirect the audience to a conversion page or a special discount offer once the event is over.

Improve retention

Leveraging video engagement data in your customer relationship is also an effective way to educate existing customers and easily secure higher customer retention. After all, video engagement is a great way to build customer relationships and boost trust.

For example, customer success teams can analyze the video engagement data after a live customer training to identify questions and follow-up individually with more information.

Teams can provide top-notch service from the get-go by personalizing the customer relationship thanks to video engagement data. Whether customers have just purchased your product or they’re ready to use its more advanced features, customer success managers can build a complete engagement funnel with the help of video engagement.

Build relationships

Building genuine relationships with customers is key to establishing brand loyalty. By leveraging video engagement data, professionals will know how engaged is their audience (whether they are students, employees, prospects, or customers) during video events.

Professionals will be able to identify the most and least engaged participants and tailor their follow-ups after the event. With the help of video engagement data and a video engagement platform, events organizers don't have to drive blind anymore! They can know exactly which contact has engaged with the presentation and how.

The video engagement data can later be used to personalize the post-event experience for each registrant and build a meaningful relationship with the audience

How to choose your video engagement platform?

We’ve mentioned various video engagement features here and there throughout this article.

Now, let’s take a deeper dive into some of the most innovative gadgets and gizmos you can use to drive audience awareness.

With so many web conferencing and webinar software available, it's hard to choose the best platform to host your online meetings, webinars, or virtual events.

There are a few different things to take into consideration when you are selecting a video engagement platform. Here's below a list of features that you should consider to get the right video engagement platform for your business:

• Browser-based: Platforms that don't require a download are popular among professionals. They remove the barriers to entry for the participants and lead to a higher attendance rate.
• Ease of use: Avoid clunky platforms that will require a long adoption time for your team or the involvement of the IT department.
• End-to-end features: Prefer platforms that allow you to create registration pages, send emails or reminders, host your events, and track performance - all-in-one place. It will be easier to run your events with a single software!
• Engagement features: Look for handy features that will let you engage your audiences before, during, and after your events. For example, automated emails, CTA buttons, and recordings are all powerful tools a VEP should have.

Promotional features

While most video engagement features are designed to be used during an online event or webinar, some can be used to help promote the event and boost registrations. For instance, embeddable registration forms can be added to your company website, your emails, your employee’s or coworkers’ emails, and your social media pages – pretty much anywhere you think it might be seen.

You can also make that registration page work harder and hopefully convert more leads by spicing it up a little. Customizable registration pages allow you to add your own color scheme, logo, and various branding elements in order to appear more friendly and professional to potential attendees. You can also customize forms with particular fields, like “occupation,” “age,” or anything else you’d like to measure during the analytics process.

A lot of promotional features are designed to be used in email, which is one of the most high-converting marketing channels. Email invitation tools can help you import your contacts directly into the addressee field, and real-time email status updates can inform you when your message has been received. Lastly, automated email reminders can help you automatically remind your guests about your event, so it doesn’t slip anyone’s mind!

Live engagement features

These are the features we’ve discussed the most in this article, with good reason, because live engagement is a key difference between message retention and lead conversion and a passive audience that exits quickly and never returns.

Live video engagement features help keep the conversation exciting and interesting and, importantly, make audience members feel actively included in the discussion. Chat boxes allow attendees to share their thoughts with both the event host and each other; Q&A tabs allow them to submit questions for the host to answer; question upvotes help hosts quickly identify which questions are the most popular; and polls allow hosts to survey their attendees in real time. One particularly fun engagement feature, emoji reactions, even lets your audience join in on the fun and “react” to whatever is happening on the screen.

Live video engagement features can make things easier on the hosting side of things, too. For example, screen sharing tools allow hosts to visually demonstrate complex ideas, demo a new product, or simply show off recent projects – all with the push of a button. Hosts can also use video pre-recording features to record sub-videos, product demos, and interviews before the event and play them for attendees during the live webinar.

Team engagement features

Certain video engagement tools are especially helpful for organizations that serve hundreds and thousands of people – like municipal governments, universities, and large enterprises. For example,team-wide accounts allow multiple team members to host webinars from a single, shared account. Registrant moderation settings allow hosts to grant or deny access to registrants before an event begins, an important security tool that can help prevent “zoom bombing” and similar disruptions. Registrant records, which keep a detailed history of each user’s identifying information and use history, are essential security features that can minimize hacks and cyber-vandalism.

Reporting features

Reporting features aren’t discussed as much as other types of features, most likely because they aren’t as exciting as, say, emojis. However, reporting features are the most impactful and useful features when it comes to your bottom line. These tools allow event hosts to gauge things like which moments sparked the most comments and reactions, which moments began to lose audience interest, and which event time duration tends to yield the most attendees. This information can then be used to improve presentations and meetings in the future.

More importantly than that, though, is the customer insights aspect. Analytics reporting features help hosts identify the customers who are most likely to use their products! Hosts can then use these insights to fine-tune promotional strategies, select topics and subjects that are most likely to interest the target audience, and even adjust the actual product and services to better accommodate customers. You can even measure your own Video Engagement Score with Livestorm's handy Video Engagement Score™ (VES) calculator and adjust your event to make it even more engaging!

Top video engagement features to have

Once you make sure that the platforms that you've short-listed are browser-based, easy-to-use, and allow your team to organize an event from end-to-end, make sure to check out this list of must-have video engagement features.

Engaging before your event

• Branded registration pages: Create a registration page with a banner, your company logo, social channels, and speaker's information, without any coding skills.
• Custom registration forms: Customize the fields of your registration form to capture insights on your audience.
• Invitation emails & reminders: Create, customize and send your invitation emails and reminders from the same platform.

Engaging during your event

• Polls: Create polls during your events, publish them, and see the answers in real-time.
• Q&A: Reply to your audience's questions listed in a specific tab for an easy overview.
• Question upvotes: Choose the right questions to answer based on the number of upvotes from your audience.
• Emoji reactions: Allow your audience to react to your live presentation with emojis displayed within the event's room.

Engaging after your event

• Unlimited replays: Automatically record your event and send it to all registrants.
• Analytics dashboard: Access a dashboard gathering the video engagement data of your registrants and participants.
• Automated emails - Schedule your replay to be sent to registrants and plan follow up emails in advance.

How do I choose the best video engagement platform?

These days, there are plenty of video communication tools out there, but not all of them facilitate the kind of audience engagement that will result in higher-end revenues. Still fewer offer comprehensive customer support, another must-have for any software. While this list is far from comprehensive, here are three key features to keep in mind when you’re choosing a video engagement platform for your team.

Browser-based connection

Be sure to look for a video engagement software that is easy to connect to. One good tip is to use a platform that connects through a browser instead of requiring a download and installation. Browser-based software has the benefit of its own security protocols and the protection of the browser itself. As some of the most massively used browsers in the world, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari all have excellent security resources at their disposal, and browser-based software users can benefit from that.

First-class support

No one likes to call a bank or utility company and hear an automated voice message droning out a litany of options, or worse, an advisory to “check the website.” (Who, in 2022, doesn’t already know to check the internet first when they have a question about a product or service?)

To return to video engagement – essentially, we all want to be heard, preferably by someone with more than 6 recorded answers for us. That’s why it’s important to choose a video engagement platform that’s committed to addressing any stumbling block that might arise.

For instance, at Livestorm, we offer both live demos of our product for first-time buyers and a live support team fluent in English, French, and Spanish. For issues that don’t require in-person interaction, we also offer an extensive library of how-to videos, tutorials, and miscellaneous product guidance. And, of course, there’s also our content library, which gives users and guests alike all the tools they need to build a robust video communication strategy.

Collaboration

Some video streaming platforms are really just a digital podium that allows one person to speak while others sit back and view. However, a great video engagement platform should have features that make it easy to interact and collaborate with both teammates and guests. For instance, features like polls, question boxes, and chat boxes allow event guests to communicate with the host and even each other; while features like document sharing, screen sharing, and digital whiteboards make virtual meetings every bit as collaborative as in-person meetings, perhaps even more so.

How to boost video engagement in your online events?

Using a video engagement platform (VEP) is a great way to communicate internally and with your external audience. Whether it's for hosting engaging online meetings or to break the ice, a video engagement platform will give you the possibility to connect, engage and collaborate at scale.

Video engagement for virtual meetings

When creating an informal 1:1 meeting with only a few participants, you may not need all video engagement features and data. However, that's another story, as soon as your online meeting becomes a business objective.

Think of all-hands meetings or compliance training, it will be essential for the leadership team or the organizers to understand who took part, attended the whole meeting, and engaged with the presentation. Video engagement features such as Q&A, polls or, emojis reactions will be essential to increase the participation of your audience.

>> Discover how Freshly uses Livestorm for all-hands meetings and company-wide training sessions

Video engagement for webinars and virtual events

Video engagement is also key when organizing external webinars or virtual events for prospects or customers.

By leveraging video engagement features such as registration pages, branded emails, polls, Q&A, question upvotes, and the analytics dashboard, you can easily capture your audience's attention. Moreover, events organizers can dive into the video engagement data after the event, synchronize it with their CRM, and leverage it in their marketing and sales follow-ups.

>> Discover how Recruitee uses Livestorm to establish their brand and generate leads

Conclusion

To sum up, modern video engagement platforms can, and should, do far more than just facilitate communication. They should also help businesses engage audiences; facilitate seamless collaboration between teams; and capture actionable user insights, all in one convenient place. Hopefully, this article has shown you just how robust a video engagement platform can be!