You all know the trend flowing through digital marketing right now- video. Dynamic and creative video content is filling the social media channels and is making it easier every day to reach your target audience with a more enticing experience than photos provide. Although video is becoming the powerhouse for social interaction, are companies and brands utilizing it to its fullest extent? I’m here to break down a winning video advertisement strategy that both engages the audience AND drives leads. If you want to make more money via social, I’d suggest this read.
Step 1: Knowing Your Audience
The biggest piece that I see brands miss each time is understanding the audience that they are marketing the video ad towards. Each day, I receive video advertisements on social media channels that don’t even relate to me: real estate capital companies, a cross fit gym 40 miles away. Understanding the people you are selling to is key- if not, you’ll be wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars on these ads with no return on investment. Uh-oh.
The strategy here is to delve deeply into each customer segment you work with. Let’s use a fitness clothing brand as an example. Your target audiences might be males, females, males + females, females that are searching for pants, females that are searching for shorts, etc. Each of these ad sets would have a different advertisement catering DIRECTLY to them. That way, you only pick up on the people you want and can tighten down who receives the ad.
Step 2: Creating the Video
The production and final video are going to be the most important piece of the ad strategy. Since we all know that attention spans are thinning out, you only have about 4 seconds to entice your audience before they lose interest. The overall video should be about 10-20 seconds and should be straight to the point. Doing a product giveaway? Put GIVEAWAY in huge graphics on the first frame of the video. Entice with creative and dynamic shots and create an exciting and invigorating experience for the viewer.
The second part of the video is how it’s viewed on each platform. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter all have a different use. Facebook is becoming less effective while Instagram and LinkedIn are now the business advertising powerhouses. Instagram video format is best used in a vertical video format, while LinkedIn and Facebook videos are better framed as a horizontal cut. Choose the right platform and use the right video format!
Step 3: Utilizing a Landing Page
If you don’t know what a landing page is, that’s okay. It’s basically a quick and easy extension to your website, specifically created and used for the advertisement. Your main goal with the landing page is to extend the advertisement to some sort of “call to action”. When the viewer clicks the “see more” button on the ad, they will be funneled to this page specific to the ad they viewed on the social channel.
Inside this landing page, it is smart to repost the video they viewed on the advertisement along with more information about the ad. For example, if we’re still speaking about the product giveaway, this is the time where you put down all of the info about the products you are giving away. The last thing to include here is a form fill to capture their information. (For the future, this list will be perfect for retargeting)
Step 4: Running the Video Advertisement and Understanding Analytics
The last piece of the puzzle is to actually execute the advertisement. Cost allocation is a key element in this step. It is important to make sure that if you are running the advertisement for the first time, don’t throw a massive budget at the campaign. You will definitely not run the perfect ad in your first go-around, so introduce this ad at a lower campaign cost. 
Once this first campaign is complete, get the hang of understanding the numbers and how to improve on your strategy. Take a look at the entire process: Did the customer not even click on the ad? Why could this be? Did they convert to the landing page but not complete the form fill? These are all questions you need to go deeper into and understand why the process wasn’t perfect, revisit the strategy and recreate the campaign with the more refined strategy.
Once you’ve mastered the video advertisement strategy, your campaigns will begin to drive real revenue numbers. You can then get into A/B testing with different videos, different landing pages and even differentiate these campaigns on different platforms. Advertisements, when executed correctly, will be one of the most amazing and exciting ways to drive new business. It’s time to get ahead of the trend and be the one that builds their business off of advertisements!