Company Background
Recently recognized by Inc. Magazine as the 4th fastest-growing media company in the United States, VideoBlocks empowers over 100,000 customers to enhance their creative projects. VideoBlocks’ customers range from leading television and movie production networks like NBC to prosumers and hobbyists looking to enhance their video projects and productions. These users download over 1,000,000 video clips, motion backgrounds, After Effects templates and more from VideoBlocks.com each month, and millions more media elements from sister sites GraphicStock.com and AudioBlocks.com.
The Challenge
Under the direction of former CMO and current CEO TJ Leonard, VideoBlocks’ marketing department has one primary objective: revenue contribution. “We are the team that’s tasked with revenue in the business, including acquiring new customers, keeping them engaged, and keeping them retained,” says Leonard.
But VideoBlocks’ marketing team faced a challenge: fighting for share of voice against larger, more established competitors. “If you’re in a yacht race, and you’re winning, all you have to do is match the moves of the guy in 2nd place and you’ll win,” says Leonard. “But we were the guy in the 2nd yacht. We had ground to make up.”
The challenge for VideoBlocks centered around understanding the content topics and tactics that foster community and deliver value to their audience. “Most marketers are creating content, but don’t have a meaningful audience to distribute it to,” says Leonard. “We had the audience, but didn’t know the best topics to engage them.”
“We found that engagement with our content is a great leading indicator of future success."
The Approach
To make up ground on leading competitors, VideoBlocks decided to overhaul their content strategy. Inspired by Andrew Chen’s experiment of using retweets to measure content virality, the VideoBlocks team used TrackMaven to measure content engagement across their digital channels. The data from this analysis served as a real-time feedback loop that helped the VideoBlocks team identify the content topics that would better engage and retain their audience.
“We found that engagement with our content is a great leading indicator of future success,” says Leonard. “We look to interactions with our content as the primary metric to drive our editorial calendar. We aggregate those interactions across the primary digital channels we care about, and we come up with a weekly interaction goal. Mostly, we’re trying to drive that number up as much as we possibly can.”
Here’s an example of how Leonard’s team used the TrackMaven platform to optimize their editorial calendar. The company launched a trial contest. It was a call for submissions of two minute videos created from VideoBlocks content. They noticed that content associated with the contest earned above-average engagement from their audience. Their blog post about the two video finalists, for example, reaped eight times as many social interactions as VideoBlocks’ average.
Based on this insight, VideoBlocks launched a series of blog posts that explained how users could achieve the effects featured prominently in the video finalists. These how-to blog posts provided both inspiration and practical tips to help the VideoBlocks community become better technical filmmakers. These newly-identified content topics proved successful; the resulting series of blog posts drove above-average engagement levels for the brand.
VideoBlocks used TrackMaven to identify trending topics related to their “2 For 2” Contest. Using these insights, VideoBlocks created a series of “how to” blog posts on these topics that drove above-average engagement.
The Results
By Q1 2015, overall interactions across all four of the brand’s primary digital channels (blog, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) grew 151% compared with Q2 2014, the first full quarter of activity with TrackMaven.
VideoBlocks’ Klout score — a measure of a brand’s influence across social networks — doubled in just 90 days.
With more engagement across its digital landscape, VideoBlocks saw a corresponding surge in interactions on their website. Across 2014, the average number of pageviews per session doubled.
By Q1 2015, overall interactions across VideoBlocks’ key digital channels grew 151% versus Q2 2014. Specific numbers withheld per customer request.
Conclusion
VideoBlocks used TrackMaven to implement a data-driven approach to maintaining their editorial calendar. Actionable insights from TrackMaven helped them to course-correct their content strategy in real time based on feedback from their audience. As a result, VideoBlocks massively grew their digital audience across key social media channels, magnified the impact of their marketing content, and drove greater engagement on their website.