Why You Need to A/B Test Your Internal Videos

The science is in: video has become one of the most powerful content formats. Studies have shown that including a video on your website can increase conversion by 80%, while mixing video with full-page ads enhanced engagement by 22%. According to recent reports, 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it online. Other studies have pointed out that videos shared on social media sites generate up to 1200% more shares than text and images combined (and no, that was not a typo).

Businesses are catching up to this trend as well. According to a survey by Ignite Technologies and Ragan, 71% of companies are already using video to communicate with employees. However, there’s one important aspect that differentiates between the use of video in marketing vs. video used for internal communication. While most businesses A/B test their marketing video content to ensure the best results, enterprise videos rarely get the same treatment. And that’s a shame, because analytics captured from internal videos can provide even more information than data acquired through your external video content.

If you’ve been guilty of this oversight, read on to find out why you should A/B your internal videos and how it can benefit your company

It’s not easy to manage your human capital, but someone has to do it — and that someone is probably you. As your company grows and offices expand to new locations, internal communications become a challenge. Additionally, as more of your employees work remotely, traditional internal communication channels are no longer effective.

Video has proven to be an effective way to streamline internal communication procedures and improve employee engagement. Its ubiquity allows you to communicate quickly with your team and partners about important project changes. If you formerly had to create pages and pages of documents to share with your employees, now you can create, edit, and upload a video in a matter of minutes. Not only is video simple to create, but it’s also easier to digest than long, boring PDF documents and Powerpoint presentations.

There’s no doubt that enterprise solutions like video content have a direct impact on the productivity and engagement of your colleagues and employees. But are you able to accurately tell to what degree your efforts have helped your team or increased your bottom line?

Probably not.

You can track how many employees read the company’s newsletter, sign up for training, or get an overview of the last project’s metrics. Videos, on the other hand, usually get a “set it and forget it” designation.

If you’ve ever managed a marketing campaign, then you are probably familiar with the concept of A/B testing. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a controlled experiment through which you are comparing two versions of a website, app, copy, or video to determine which variant gets better results than the other. You compare the results by showing the two variants to different target audience members at the same time and measuring their engagement levels.

Here’s an example:

Let’s imagine that you just got the results back from a difficult project on which everyone in your company had worked tirelessly. The metrics show that although there were some problems with the implementation of the project, the overall results were rather satisfactory. You want to share this piece of information with your team in a constructive way, so you decide that video is the best medium for conveying your message effectively. But should you create an animation to illustrate the statistics or address the team in a talking video?

You could try both approaches and A/B test them on your team members to see which one performs best. Pay attention to metrics such as the average duration of video viewed, engagement rates, and other relevant KPIs. Compare the results to determine which video can help you maximize viewer engagement with the information that you just laid out for them.

The data that you and your HR managers acquire from your internal videos can help you improve the overall structure of your company.

Think about it this way: it’s almost impossible to check if your employees have read your emails or the important documents you send them, but you can measure if they’ve watched an entire video. You will be able to see bounce rates, engagement rates, and other valuable data to help you fine-tune your internal videos so that they get more views than ever before.

Collecting analytics on video through A/B testing can also go further than simply looking at how many of your employees have seen or engaged with a particular video. You can drill down deeply into the viewing habits of your team and get valuable insights into how to tailor future enterprise video content in order to keep your internal audience engaged and informed.

Are employees watching the entire video, or are they closing it after a couple of minutes? Do two-minute videos perform better than five-minutes ones? Do interactive videos get more engagement than talking-head video content? Pay attention to these factors as you compare data from your control and test group enterprise videos.

Another way that A/B testing your internal videos can help you is by providing an individual breakdown of your employees’ viewing habits. This data could be especially valuable when you have internal content, like training videos, that you need specific employees to watch.

Through A/B testing you can see which type of video content has kept employees engaged from start to finish and has helped them absorb information better and faster.

Here at PulaTech, we’ve been leveraging the power of data for a while now to create better enterprise video content for our employees. Here are some of the things that we’ve learned by A/B testing our internal videos.

• You Must Value Your Employee’s Time

A lot of businesses wrongly assume that because a video is targeted at an internal audience, everyone will be eager to hear the latest enterprise news. So they create long, boring video content that gets turned off halfway through.

If you create a 20-minute video of the CEO blithering about something abstract, then you’re not only failing to convey important information efficiently, but you are also impacting employee productivity. Our data has shown that short and concise internal video content gets more views and engagement than long ones.

• Emphasis Delivery

A common mistake that we used to make with our internal videos was that we put a lot of importance on the script but completely overlooked the delivery part. An unnatural delivery of content could affect your viewer’s experience, making them pay less attention to the information you are trying to send.

• Pay Attention to Visuals

It’s easy to put a talking head in a white studio, but is it the most effective way to get the message across? Our data has shown us that nice backdrops can work wonders in keeping the engagement rates high. And you don’t even have to struggle to find a good location. Something as simple as filming the video in a natural setting (such as the meeting room) can ensure maximum retention.

• A Greater Production Value Could Get You More Views

There are a lot of moving parts that can increase or decrease the perceived quality of your internal videos. Things like the sound quality, the amount of work put into editing, or the location where the video is shot can impact the engagement level of your internal videos.

Through A/B testing we discovered that our internal videos got more views when we increased the production value. That’s because employees are getting a clear message that we’ve put a lot of work into creating the video and that the information contained is important, so they should watch thoroughly.

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