So you've made the video. Do you know what you got out of it?

Before you place marker to whiteboard for your whiteboard animation video, you should ask yourself what your return on investment should be. Return on investment, or ROI for short, isn't something you should consider after the fact; by determining how you want your video to perform, it'll often dictate the tone of your whiteboard animation.

Targeting

It all starts with two questions: Who do you want to watch? And what do you want them to do? Be concrete in your choices; for example, if you're creating an explainer video that sells your product, you want your customer base to watch, and you want them to buy. Who's your ideal customer? What are their concerns? How does the product solve them? How can you take the "friction" out of buying? Before the first stroke of the marker, make sure they've got the ability to engage the way you're aiming for, and that the video you've written will appeal to your audience. Remember to use tools like YouTube's annotations to put your message front and center.

Metrics

You'll quickly learn that with whiteboard animation, you can use any metric you can imagine, ranging from hard numbers like how many people watch your video and how long they watch it, to metrics like mind share that depend almost entirely on spinning out the opinions of a survey group to the entire world. It's very easy to bury yourself in numbers and have no idea what they mean, so you'll need to narrow it down.

There are a few metrics you should have no matter what. At the very least you should track how many total views your video gets, and the overall engagement, or how long your viewers watch the video. If you have a link of any sort in the video or on the video page, you should also track clicks. It will give you a more nuanced sense of what your audience is drawing from your whiteboard animation.

In addition to those, you should add only the metrics that most directly measure what you want to know. Again, your goal is your guide: Pick a handful of metrics that will most clearly illustrate those goals and how you've met them. Also, do some research and set realistic goals for your metrics and your audience; if you're aiming at a very narrow section of your potential viewership, your standard of ROI should reflect that.


What's yours?

Analysis

Finally, when the video debuts and the data is collected, you've got to figure out what it all means. In some cases, it's as simple as it gets; you put out the video to sell through, and your sales went up. In other cases, it can be a bit stickier and may require more than just looking at the metrics.

Let's say you're a company looking to explain how you make your product in an environmentally friendly way; you're not looking for sales so much as a shift in how customers and the general public perceives you. High viewership is great, but you may need to conduct surveys of potential customers to get a better sense of whether your goal was achieved and to what degree.

If this sounds a bit subjective, well, ROI is subjective. The ultimate lesson here is that you should know, as specifically as possible, what you want to get out of the video so that you know what to look for.

Not sure if you'll get the right ROI from whiteboard animation? Learn how it works and how it's right for your business.