Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Liz, it depends on how you promote it. If you just wait for people to accidentally stumble across the videos, then anything greater than 1 per month would probably be good.

What you'll probably find is that views are a function of how you get people to notice the videos. What do you promise them? Where do they find the link? How often do they see your ad or blog mention with a link in it? Etc.

Hi, Liz.

Expectations (goals) are the result of a plan. So, before you can determine how many views are reasonable, you need to create action steps that will cause views to occur. You can estimate viewership (set goals) by adding up expected results from each element of the plan.

As I'm sure you know, the most important factor in viewership is not how many people view your video, but how many of the right people see it. So, you might set two goals; e.g., X views per month from your prime target audience of A; Y views per month from everybody else.

Chances are your organization already knows what the typical response rate for past promotions on your website, email newsletter, blog, Facebook, Twitter, press releases, landing pages, etc. Using those numbers, you'll want to calculate potential viewership based on a portion of that typical response.

For example, if your company normally sends an email newsletter to 25,000 people, and the typical "open" rate is 15%, then 3,750 people will read the email message. Of these, perhaps 10% will click through to the video, resulting in 375 views. Use a similar approach to calculating the results of each method of promotion.

By the way, if you go to YouTube and enter "case study" in the search box, you can look for analogous case studies and see how much viewership they have had over time. But realize those numbers are not just serendipitous; they usually are the result of a plan.

If your company doesn't have a promotional plan for the case studies, but still wants some kind of goal, then reverse-engineer the plan. (How many views do you want? 500? Well, that number requires an email newsletter, an ad on the industry organization website, and a three-step campaign on Facebook.)

Hope that helps a little.

Don't focus just on the number of views - measure the number of people who after watching the videos take action (either refer it to others or contact you). A success should be a measurable ROI.