Best Guide To Video Advertising For Digital Marketing

Video advertising is one of the most popular forms of online display advertising. We have seen a massive increase in video advertising in the last few years.

More brands have realised the benefits of getting into this type of display advertising.  

Videos generally have great potentials for brands in various ways. It helps brands tell a story about their business in a visual form helping their audience to easily understand what the brand represents. 

The good thing with video advertising is that it works for all businesses across the board whether is B2B, B2C, SMB, Enterprise, High-Tech or analogue products.

Video has become an important part of internet browsing as more brands recorded high engagement on video display platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat to mention just a few.

In the last year alone, experts estimated over 7 billion US dollars was spent on Video Ads alone while Cisco estimated that 80%  of all internet traffic by 2019 will come from video content and global video traffic will increase threefold from 2016 to 2021. Due to these high expectations and the importance of video marketing/video advertising, it is important all digital marketers have a clear understanding of video advertising and video marketing.

The good thing with video advertising is that it works for all businesses across the board whether is B2B, B2C, SMB, Enterprise, High-Tech or analogue products.

Video has become an important part of internet browsing as more brands recorded high engagement on video display platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat to mention just a few. 

In the last year alone, experts estimated over 7 billion US dollars was spent on Video Ads alone while Cisco estimated that 80%  of all internet traffic by 2019 will come from video content and global video traffic will increase threefold from 2016 to 2021.

Due to these high expectations and the importance of video marketing/video advertising, it is important all digital marketers have a clear understanding of video advertising and video marketing.

So let’s jump into…

What is Video advertising?

Video advertising generally comprises display Advertisements that contain video Ads in them which are shown in the beginning, during the video, at the end of the video or after the video stream online.

These advertising units are also known as pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll advertising units which comes with the online streaming videos just the television Ads but are normally shorter than the Ads in the TV programs.

It is common knowledge that Video Ads are now shown on almost all streaming services including social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat among others.

Video Ad format

Video Ads comes in various formats. However, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) guidelines, there are three main types of video ad formats which are namely:

• Linear Video Ads: These type of video ads are similar to the above-described video ads that are shown before the video, during or after the video is streamed on the internet by a user. Similar to this type of video ads are the commercials seen on the TVs before, during or after the TV program is watched by the audience.

• Non-Linear Video Ads: these ads run concurrently with the video content so the users see the ad while viewing the content.

• Companion Video Ads: commonly text, display ads, rich media, or skins that wrap around the video experience.

These video Ads formats are the most used in both TV Ads and on the internet. The most used on major platforms such as YouTube and Facebook are the Linear video Ads.

Video Advertising Platforms for brands?

Even though there are numerous video advertising platforms also known as Ad Networks out there, there are some that are more effective and popular among digital marketers due to their scale, efficiency and effectiveness.

Below are the most used Video advertising platforms

Google Ads and YouTube Ads

There is no doubt Google ads is the biggest display advertising platform in the market. Although platforms such as Facebook/Instagram video Ads are scaling up but still far behind Google Ads.

The display Ad section of Google Ads is what marketers use to place video ads on YouTube and other Google Video advertising platforms.

The good thing about using Google video Ads platforms such as YouTube is that YouTube single-handedly is the second largest search in the world with over five billion videos viewed every day and over 1.5 billion active users every month.

You can agree that YouTube as part of Google display Ads has a lot of potentials your business can benefit from.

Apart from video advertising on YouTube, It is one of the best platforms for video marketing.

Also, when it comes to targeting your audience, Google display Ads gives you the best options for reaching your audience. Hence, we advise you to give YouTube a trial for video Ads.

YouTube Ads are very important when it comes to video advertising. Even though it’s under Google Ads, It is important to elaborate more on YouTube Ads to enable marketers to understand the most important types of Ads that produce more effective results

There are two automatic YouTube Ads that are designed to grab the attention of your audience which is namely, TrueView Ads are usually played before a video. Bumper Ads are too, but these Ad types are designed to last for only 6 seconds and they can’t be skipped.

To improve your ROI on those Ads, You can also run Discovery Ads to improve the reach of your video, but this helps you show up in the search results.

Another valuable feature of YouTube Ads is the analytical system which gives marketers the opportunity to analyse their advertising reports periodically and adjust their Ads in order to achieve better results.

By adjusting your Ads, You are also able to cut down the cost of advertising and prevent your Ads from showing to the unwanted audience and places to increase advertising ROI.

With these analytical tools, you will be able to understand what is working and what is not working so you can adjust your Video Ads to target the right people and save the cost of advertising.

Facebook and Instagram Ads

Facebook and Instagram video Ads are integrated under one system, hence, we will be treating them together as one Video Ad system.

Both Facebook and Instagram Ads are displayed within the users feeds. Within these feeds, advertisers are allowed to show story video Ads on both platforms in order to reach their target audience.

These video Ads are allowed to be 15 seconds or less and also are full-screen mobile experiences designed to increase audience engagement.

In recent times, Facebook launched Video Ads which are shown within publishers video content mostly in the middle of the video content from various publishers.

In addition, Facebook places video ads in audience network placements such as mobile Apps and blogs that match their targeting criteria in order to increase targeting.

How to use Video Ads to spur engagement online

One of the recent trading video Ads is mostly the short or micro-video Ads that are less than 10 seconds but highly engaging and designed to leave a massive impression on viewers.

These Video Ads have created several challenges for the traditional 30 seconds video Ads usually used in television Ads.

In several studies, these video ads have proven to be more effective than other longer video Ads formats.

The brain behind these winning micro-videos is the fact that digital marketing these days takes more than one interaction before customers are converted or convinced to buy.

It’s a curated process that comes with stages and techniques to completely win the customer’s heart.

Using micro-videos does not give you all the privilege to say everything about your goods or services which means, you just have to target on saying the most attractive and interesting stuff about your business to lead your audience to find out more about your products or services through other channels like content marketing, emails and lead capturing.

Since most people engage with your content on silent mode, It is advisable to make sure your micro-videos are able to engage with your audience even when their audio is turned off.

Using micro-videos for advertising should not completely stop you from crafting 30 seconds of videos. Make sure you leverage the power of both 30 seconds of videos and 6-second micro-videos for successful video advertising and marketing.

Social Media and Video Advertising

Social media users have become accustomed to videos being filled in their feeds especially on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. These auto-playing videos are created by various marketers and publishers.

Video marketing on social media has become very popular due to its effectiveness. people from all works of life tend to spend time on social media scrolling through tons of text and video content.

This gives digital marketers the opportunity to dominate their specific markets by creating videos that match their audience interests as well as video Ads that could grab their attention easily.

Facebook specifically is a great tool for video marketing. Billions of users scroll through their feeds watching tons of videos each minute making Facebook one of the most popular social media platforms.

Creating storytelling videos that help tell your business story in an attractive manner will obviously take your brand to the next level.

Best Practices for Video advertising

When it comes to video advertising, the advertiser needs to understand that, every brand and business is different, therefore, originality and creativity will play a vital role in the video-making process.

An understanding of the target audience will be very important as well as it will help in crafting the required video.

Here are a few step-by-step guides for improving your video advertising results.

Make the first few second count

The first three seconds of your video is very important and should be used to grab the attention of your audience.

Give them a reason to stick with the video until the end. Make them curious and motivated to hear the rest of your story.

See the Dove video below did a great job of capturing their audience attention from the first three seconds and keeping them till the end of the video

You have to understand that those first three seconds are also been counted and charged by the advertising agencies and counted for as well.

In essence, make sure whatever you are going to say or show in the first three seconds has the capacity to keep your audience engaged till the end.

Optimise Your Video For Mobile

Since mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic in 2015, mobile has become a very important part of digital marketing. Hence, it is important to keep this in mind when creating videos for advertising or digital marketing purposes.

Because of the massive traffic coming from mobile users, it is important to keep your videos short, informative and attractive so you don’t lose the mobile traffic.

You can as well include a lot of vertical content in your video and also make sure it appears full-screen in your mobile viewer’s screens.

Use Storytelling Videos

Storytelling videos have a strong emotional attachment to them. They are probably the best means of emotionally engaging your audience.

These videos leave lasting impressions on viewers. They are designed to make viewers remember your story even after a long time watching your video.

Using storytelling videos is a way of interrupting the online audiences and it is important to make sure they remember your story even after they leave the platform and get back at what they usually do so they can come back again to visit your web pages.

Use Call to actions (CTAs)

For every video campaign, you run or create, One thing you can’t afford to miss is using the right CTAs to drive your audience to take the right action.

Your video campaign will only be valuable if you drive viewers to take the necessary step(s) to either converting or make a purchase or rather visit your website for a specific action.

It only makes using the right CTA at the end of the video to tell your potential customers what step to take next and be specific about it.

See the example of the right CTA in the video below:

In summary here, use the right CTA that suits your campaign.

Use Closed Captions

Using closed captions may help do your video advertising campaign a lot of good.

It turns out not many online viewers use sounds to watch videos especially Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Also, people with hearing disabilities could easily understand your video with closed captions. Make sure your closed captions are well framed with the right worlds.

Conclusions

Video marketing and video advertising has become a very important part of digital marketing and will continue to be impactful for a long time.

If you have not taken the necessary steps to boost your video marketing and advertising, the time is now.

The manner in which videos are consumed is also evolving as people watch videos online in several ways with several devices, you have to keep in mind video advertising is key to growing your business especially now that the number of internet users is increasing day by day.

I would like to ask you guys to share your experiences with video advertising and video marketing in general so we can continue to update this post to help others improve their video marketing skills.