What’s the last ad you recall seeing? It’s likely that whatever it was, it caught your attention and kept it — and that’s not easy to do. Many businesses are able to deploy memorable ad campaigns without spending a fortune by employing video in their marketing.
Video ads can be the future of advertising for marketing a business, product, event, service or anything you want to promote. Video advertising involves paying to market videos so you can reach and engage a global audience. It includes anything from a social media or television commercial to interactive outdoor display ads.
According to a study by video advertising company VidMob, video ads drive a 48 percent higher sales rate than static ads, making them a strong promotional tool. The company compared more than 8,000 ads from 429 campaigns for 35 retail and e-commerce brands on Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Facebook Audience Network in the fourth quarter of the past two years to come to that conclusion.
Almost every business could benefit from video ad campaigns to do everything from telling their brand story to launching a new product or service. You can also leverage the video ad’s benefits to optimize your video marketing campaigns by adopting these simple steps.
Create Persuasive, Engaging Content
Video advertising is an effective medium for storytelling that can help people remember your message long after watching the video. Videos can also increase ad recall, purchase intent and click-through rate. Each video can help you reach diverse audiences and convey information within a short time. You can achieve this by following three simple steps.
● Video Creation – The first step of a video campaign is to come up with the video concept and purpose you want it to serve.
● Video Editing – Once you decide the purpose of the ad video you want to create, you’ll need to come up with an angle and how you’ll make the video unique to accomplish your goals.
● Ad creation – Next, include the headline and text description and choose your target audience carefully. Create the ads for each platform, set your ads to run, and monitor their performance.
Flexibility to Choose Platform
You can choose any online video advertising platform for your marketing campaign, but each one may have different technical requirements, audience reach and best practices. Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are a few of the most popular video advertising platforms. However, there are alternative ad networks to choose from, which can also help you connect to your target audience.
Option to Select Ad Placement
Display ads via Google allow you to showcase your video ads on different participating sites, extending your brand’s reach. You can target a specific audience and choose what type of websites you want your ad to appear on. You can achieve retargeting by showing the ads to users who have recently engaged with your brand, product or service.
Both Facebook and Instagram have several different video ad placements, such as feed ads and story ads, where your video ads will show up in a user’s feed or user’s story updates. Facebook also provides you with options to show video ads in the middle of other publishers’ video content, on the “suggested videos” section and on mobile apps of users who match your targeting criteria.
YouTube automatically shows your ad to interested viewers. There are two types of placement of YouTube ads: bumper ads at the starting of a video and discovery ads that show up in the search results.
Analytics Availability
Most video advertising platforms provide you with reports or analytics that can help you determine how effective your ads are at reaching your audience and delivering your message to them. Digital video advertising is a strategy that can work for any type of company; B2B or B2C, enterprise, or small- to medium-sized businesses.
You can easily measure the impact of your video ads on multiple platforms to determine the number of likes, shares or comments you’ve gotten. The analytics can help entrepreneurs rebuild their marketing campaigns to drive traffic toward their websites. Viewers can also provide feedback in real time, which you can use to determine the success of a marketing campaign.
Provide More Traffic
With more people using mobile devices than ever before, you can optimize your video ads for mobile to increase your website traffic, which could mean an increase in the number of sales. Video advertisements can be shared on multiple platforms, thus increasing the exposure of the brand. Entrepreneurs can often choose whether they want to force the customer to watch the entire ad or allow them to skip the video.
Increase Sales and Revenue
More than 40 percent of people purchase a product after seeing a video about it, one report says. Ad videos showing a call to action (CTA) usually have a higher purchase rate than ads without a CTA. The more entertaining and educational the videos are, the more sales will result. Entrepreneurs can target a wide range of audiences by using video advertisements to increase sales. Thus, video advertising can help you generate and convert sales leads by prompting the consumer to go to a particular website and buy the product.
Audio Adds Impact
You can add audio to your video advertisements to make them more impactful. The way you conceptualize, create and market your digital video ads can have a significant impact on your marketing ROI now and in the future. Entrepreneurs can make their ads more engaging by incorporating audio-visuals in their video advertisements. Ad videos can also be more effective when launching new products or services.
Increase Brand Awareness
Video ads can offer entrepreneurs an opportunity to connect on a deeper level with their customers. Companies can expand their advertising reach and tailor their video ads on any webpage. Thus, they can increase the level of customers’ engagement and brand awareness.
SEO Advantage
Video ads can help brands rank high in search engine results. Sharing the videos on different social media platforms and posting ads on your blog can help you attract consumers’ attention. Visitors reading the post can also visit your website and make a purchase.
Video ads are not limited to a specific format, so entrepreneurs can design and build ads using different media options. These videos can be posted on various platforms to increase web traffic and reach a wide range of consumers on a massive scale.
Cost-Effective
Online platforms like Google, YouTube, etc., are much cheaper than traditional mediums like TV. Video advertisements stay online in Google search results for a very long time. Thus, it can be extremely beneficial for your brand if you have engaging video content. It’s a very cost-effective method of sharing values among consumers for brands.
Tips to Optimize Video Advertising
Understanding your target audience can help you create more leads through video ads. However, there are a few best practices that can help you improve your video advertising across any platform. These include:
- Using captions in ad videos can help users with hearing disabilities, making your videos more accessible. Ads with text in the frame often have more online purchases than ads that don’t have captions.
- Choose your video ad length based on your purpose. Shorter ads are less convincing for driving online sales, though they are useful for brand awareness campaigns on social media platforms.
- Always analyze the reaction of the audience to your ad to optimize the length and creative elements like text, graphics and CTA for your video ads.
- The first five seconds of the ad video should be engaging to grab customer’s attention. A short video with eye-catching titles and messaging is typically more likely to go viral and offer value to users.
- Keep the video ad short and under one minute.
- Include CTA, and design each ad video to drive a specific action from viewers. It’s essential to incorporate a strong CTA in the video ads.
- Don’t go into detail in your video ad. Just mention unique and interesting facts that can lead viewers to remember your brand.
- Wisely choose your target audience. Then create tailored video content to target that specific group of consumers.
