Return on investment (ROI) is the ultimate goal of every marketing video you create. And brands that use videos get results, with 52% of marketing professionals saying that video has the best ROI of all content types. The only thing you need to worry about it is making sure that you’re creating the right types of videos.

In our third post of The Definitive Guide to Maximizing Your ROI from Marketing Videos series, we discuss six ways to increase your marketing video ROI.

1. Set Clear Goals

The first step to increasing your marketing video ROI is to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) goals, which we discuss in more detail in “Tips for Measuring your ROI from Marketing Videos.” These goals will guide you in creating quality video content and measuring its success.

Goals can include:

• Boosting sales by a certain amount within a specific time frame
• Increase brand awareness by monitoring engagement
• Improving conversion rates via downloads, link clicks, email signups, etc.
• Educating your audience resulting in fewer technical support calls.

The foundation of any marketing video is its goals, and once you’ve set them, you can then start executing your video strategy following these four steps: film the clip, edit and format to fit distribution, analyze the results, and continually optimize.

2. Understand Your Audience

What are the challenges, goals, and motivations of your target audience? Who are they? What do they want? How can you provide the solution to their problems? Knowing this information will enable you to create videos that provide real value to your potential customers. And when you provide genuine value, your video content is useful and allows you to connect with your audience on an emotional level. In turn, this emotion will greatly affect your ROI, because “every decision is emotional,” according to Tom Snyder, the founder of VorsightBP.

3. Create a Distribution Strategy

Once you know who your audience is, then you need to publish your video marketing content when and where your audience is active. The truth of the matter is that not every video works on every channel—Instagram (where there’s been an 80% increase, year-by-year, for videos) prefers short snippets less than 60 seconds while Facebook prefers silent videos with captions (85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound). So, you’ll want to format your video and create a storyboard for each distribution channel.

One way to do this is to create a publishing schedule for your various video templates and channels. And don’t just post on social media and YouTube. You’ll want to use your video marketing content in other places as well, such as on your blog (where video attracts 3 times as many inbound links), in emails (where video increases the click-through rate by 96%), and on your website/landing pages (where video can increase conversions by 80% or more).

4. Include CTAs

If you want to drive ROI, encourage conversation, and boost conversions, you need calls-to-action (CTAs). CTAs are a perfect way to prompt and direct viewers to perform any type of action that you require. Learn more about taking your video engagement to the next level here.

In most cases, a CTA at the end of your video is the ideal way to encourage users to share your content, ask them to tag a friend, remind them to visit your website, or direct them to follow you on social media. The key is to determine what type of request is most appropriate for your specific video. Not every viewer will respond to your CTA, but if you match your CTA to your target audience and the video, you have a much greater chance of success.

5. Reuse Your Existing Videos

To get the most bang for your buck, don’t be afraid to reuse existing videos in different ways and on different channels. Just because a video was successful on Facebook doesn’t mean it can’t also be successful in an email, on your blog, or on Instagram if you change it up. Ideas for reusing your videos include:

• Breaking a large video into smaller segments to share on social media
• Writing a blog post based on your video content
• Formatting a social media video to be optimized for sharing in an email.

6. Track Results and Optimize Accordingly

Across the board, marketers admit that video is effective, with 97% reporting video helped consumers better understand their product or service, and 76% saying video increased their sales. The key to getting these results is to track them by implementing a metrics-based software that helps you monitor play rate, average engagement, and click-through rate.

Then, once you have these statistics, use them to continually improve. Using A/B testing, produce multiple videos at scale using storyboards and test which video works best based on the results. Then, optimize your videos to get a better play rate, engagement, or click-through rate based on what works best. The key is to A/B test small changes at a time, so you know exactly how and where to improve.

Improving ROI is the key to a successful video content strategy. With these six tips, your video efforts will enhance your sales, engagement, conversions, and more.