If you’re an internet user, chances are, you’ve seen a video ad today! Look around. You must have noticed that video ads have recently become a more common digital marketing strategy for increasing sales and brand awareness than it once was. This is happening because videos are effective.
When using video ads, sellers can interact with consumers and capture the interest of people who aren’t exactly consumers.
Do you own a business? Here’s how to use video ads to increase awareness and influence purchase intent:
1. Know Your Target Audience
As a brand or business owner, this cannot be overemphasized. Knowing your audience allows you to focus your marketing efforts and money on users that are most likely to purchase your products or services.
One way to know this is to think about what group of people will appreciate your content the most. A company making video games would have young teenagers and young adults as its primary audience because gaming interests these sets of people.
A company manufacturing sanitary pads will have women who have reached menarche as its target audience because, well, only women of a certain age make use of pads and tampons. Etc.
For your video ads to yield impressive turnovers, you have to target them at a specific audience niche.
2. Original Ads, Please!
Trust is, the key is in being intriguing yet original.
Have no doubts about this: except you’re venturing into a business that hasn’t been done before (if you are, big ups), there are probably a hundred other brands out there offering the same services as your brand.
If you must draw the attention of your customers or target audience, which of course you are in competition for, you have to stand out and be, well, different.
Don’t try to be another brand. Make videos that are creative yet original. Create ads that can easily be recognized as yours.
Use humor and style where necessary. If you have got a logo or brand music, use these in your ads.
If your audience finds your ad interesting, they’ll be comfortable with clicking on links and then going on to purchase whatever it is you’re selling.
They might even show it to their friends—this is a big stride for your brand’s awareness.
3. Why Pretty Long Video Ads When Shorter Ones Will Do?
Everything is happening so fast these days. And happening even faster on social media, where you might want to place some of your ads.
Imagine a teenager scrolling through Facebook. Boom, she spots an ad—or an ad pops when she’s trying to watch a video.
What do you think the teenager will do if she looks closely at her phone to see that the ad is 10 minutes long? I’ll tell you what: she’ll skip the ad faster than she can say her three names!
This might be just an imagination, but it’s real-life sometimes. Long video ads bore, and they fetch you more skip ads than sales.
Most people don’t watch ads to the end. So, if you want to make sales and improve brand awareness, make your strike before your audience loses interest.
Begin your video ad with tension, and end before this tension dies away. Short ads over long ads, any day, anytime.
4. Be a Creative Storyteller
Lifehack: people want to hear stories! Your wife or friend wants to listen to you talk about your day. Your grandma wants to hear stories about your life. And even you do want to listen to stories about her.
Your audience is no different. Remember, they’re real human beings with real cravings for the real stuff. Storytelling is a big, big part of advertising and branding. Each brand and product has a story behind it.
Your audience will connect with you more if you tell this story in your video ads. Why do you have a brand? What does your product do?
It helps to include someone who has used your product or has been a part of your brand in your video. This person should tell a story of how your brand has been helpful.
5. Video That Resonates With Your Brand
Energy drinks almost have video ads that include athletes or kids playing in the street. Sanitary pad ad videos include women or young teenage girls dressed up and smiley.
Ever wondered why this is so? Well, in case you’re still wondering, imagine fully grown cis men in a video ad about sanitary pads.
There are different kinds of video ads, and you can use each one for different reasons. When choosing where your ad video should be set, you should consider your product, target audience, and brand.
If the goal of your ad is to introduce a product, keep it concise and discuss the principal features of the product without overwhelming the viewer.
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6. Incorporate How-To Videos
There is a reason why you do what you do, and this reason is your selling point. Making how-to videos is a huge way of pulling traffic to your brand, and this involves going into details about the use of a product or service.
You can also use this medium to reach out to your customers, get them to speak to you, and ask questions related to the products you’re making.
It lessens the gap between you and brings them closer to your brand. You can also show the results or impact of your products or services on your life or that of a customer.
It is best to know that they should know your brand for its knowledge and excellent customer relations.
7. Add Testimonials of Other Customers
We discussed this a bit earlier. Simply using yourself, the creator, or your employees as a reference for your brand is often not reliable enough to fetch you the turnovers you need.
Most people relate better to a brand after seeing testimonies from other consumers. For example, if you work in the digital space and are an SEO consultant, reviews from clients will encourage others to interact with your company.
Reviews from satisfied customers tell your audience that they can trust your brand, and it would motivate them to try out the goodness of your product.
Encourage your customers to write reviews about your products by making reviews a core part of your sales engagement.
Offer incentives to your customers to encourage them to drop a review after using your product.
They can make videos reviewing your product to other potential customers if they like it, thus increasing sales and awareness.
8. Optimize Your Videos
Every platform works differently from others like it, and understanding this difference is crucial to improving your brand’s awareness.
Know the rules and algorithms guiding the platform you’ve chosen to display your ads on. Learn to work your way around the algorithm and use it to your benefit.
The key things to note while optimizing your videos are:
- Use of keywords and captions that go with the video.
- In cases of platforms that use hashtags, use hashtags that go with the video.
- Keep your video short because shorter videos perform better than longer ones
- Use of links to your website or social media accounts in the video.
- Create two or three video ads and rotate them to keep things fresh in order to avoid creative fatigue.
- Consider adding targeting to your video ad campaigns
Also, for your videos to be accessed by different people, make sure it’s suitable for all devices. This means that regardless of the device being in use, the viewers can still watch it.
You need to gain proper knowledge on how to optimize your videos, so they’re easily accessible regardless of the platform you choose to advertise on.
9. Choose The Right Platforms
Asides from social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, there are two other platforms that focus mainly on video creations: Tiktok and YouTube.
These two platforms are used all across the world as they offer the opportunity for video creation and are widely used.
To choose the right platform, consider your brand, its objectives, and the target audience. You might also want to consider the interests of your audience.
When you know these things, it’s easier for you to choose a platform to help you achieve your goal.
10. Promote Your Videos to Increase Brand Awareness
Lately, many people are more focused on their mobile devices than on their television screens. Promoting your videos is the first step to take while creating videos.
If you don’t promote them, the chances of them getting seen by consumers drops. The time spent on creating the video makes up only 20% of the process. The rest of it is determined by the promotion, which carries a whole 80%.
One app that provides a chance for videos to get the attention of new consumers is YouTube. Other social media apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are excellent places to promote your videos.
The more platforms you promote your brand on, the more you’re likely to get noticed by your ideal customers.
Bottom Line
While working on reaching your target audience organically, paying to advertise even makes it better. You will be able to extend your reach to a lot more people with the targeting features of ad networks.
Video ads allow you to look at your creatives and discover which resonates best with your target audience.
Knowing which of your videos turns out pretty well and optimizing it will boost your views, traffic, and sales and put you ahead of the competition.
Videos represent your brand and create a personality around it that customers understand and trust. Now that you know all of this, you’re ready to take the next step towards bringing your brand to the limelight.
Photo by Szabo Viktor on Unsplash
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