The Secret to a Perfect Video Ad Campaign
Traditionally when businesses think about creating a video, they envision a single video to introduce their brand to customers and perhaps share the features and benefits of their product or service. There isn’t anything “wrong” with this per se. Featuring a video like this on your homepage or product pages can improve conversions and help build a deeper relationship with your customers. However, there may be a more effective way to leverage video in your marketing.
Instead of jumping right into content and storyboarding for your video, take a step back.
Start with Mindset
Video production is expensive. Between writing the storyline and script, potentially hiring actors, models, or animators, and post production, creating a video is a big investment of both time and money.
So, don’t you want to get the most out of it? And maybe even generate a positive ROI on your video investment?
If that’s the case, start with your mindset and develop a strategy for your videos before you even begin to think about storyboarding the video itself.
Be a Media Company
There is a huge opportunity to generate revenue by advertising through great video content. But that’s the catch. It has to be truly entertaining video content that your audience wants to watch. With video marketing, whether it be on Facebook, YouTube, or any other marketing channel, you are interrupting your audience on their way to doing something else. There is no chance that your potential new customer went to their computer and opened up their browser to watch your video content. And after just a few seconds (usually 5) they’ll be able to skip on past your ad. So you need to capture their attention with something interesting and engaging. Otherwise your video advertising will just be a waste of your advertising dollars.
So instead of considering yourself a video advertiser, consider yourself a media company and approach your videos accordingly.
Keys to the Perfect Video Ad Campaign
Gather feedback.
When you are doing videos the “traditional” way (creating brand or product videos to feature on your site), there is no opportunity to gather feedback or gauge your audience’s response. How long did someone watch through the video? Did it produce a sale? What is the cost per view? When you just place a video on your site, you don’t really know if it is effective, let alone how to tweak it to make it more impactful.
When using videos for video advertising you can gather all of this in-depth data to figure out what about your video is working and what’s not! Whether you run videos on Facebook or use Google ads for YouTube, these platforms’ reporting dashboards will arm you with metrics that tell you exactly how much engagement your videos receive. This data will be your guide as you make improvements and optimizations.
Be agile.
Take that information and use it to try to improve your video.
A video is not a “set it and forget it” kind of thing. Your video will need to be optimized over time, just like any other type of advertisement. Typically you tweak the copy or CTA or imagery several times in your ad to figure out what converts best. You need to be doing the same thing for your videos.
Focus on the first 5 seconds. That is the window that you typically have in video advertising to capture your audience’s attention. At Metacake, we typically create tens if not hundreds of variations of that first 5 seconds to test and see what works best.
Create videos for each stage of your marketing funnel.
Don’t just create one engaging video for advertising. That might be the first step, but ideally you are creating videos for each stage of your marketing funnel. The first might just introduce your brand. But if a user engages with that video, the next video should go deeper into the features and benefits of your product. This continues all the way down your marketing funnel until the user makes a purchase.
The benefits of truly entertaining video marketing are incredible. Look at the success of Purple or Poo-Pouri as examples. These brands were built on entertaining videos.
