8 Steps To Creating A Successful Video Ad

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Nothing beats video when it comes to engaging your audience.

Videos that run for less than half a minute is more than enough to share a full story, taking advantage of a broader range of the human senses compared to any other format. Why does video reign supreme? Easy – it’s because the human brain generally takes in visual content easier. I mean, who would rather read a boring block of text rather than watch a video that does the same job?

Video content makes for a beautiful medium for advertising and marketing in general. This tool will reinforce your brand’s identity by allowing you to form deeper connections with your audience – connections that are personal and convey a higher level of emotion. It’s no wonder how statistics show that 64% of the consumer audience is much more likely to buy a product after viewing a related video.

Video media has been in the marketing game for years now, and it’s still going strong despite the rise of other media. In fact, it’s getting better and better as time passes. Uploading videos online has never been more convenient, fast, and cheap. This gives access to a broad consumer base even to the smallest companies and brands. Businesses can now take advantage of the consumer-friendly environment of social media to promote themselves through video content.

Facebook alone garners billions of daily views, so there’s no shortage of an active audience. However, the competition is just as active. You can’t just create any conventional video and getaway with it. You need to dedicate a lot of your time and resources if you want your video to gain some attention.

A diagram of a sales funnel that says engage your visitors convert visitors to leads nurture leads to customers

Videos need to be entertaining, engaging, and shareable because the audience has a higher degree of expectation than ever before. The sheer amount of online content being uploaded daily means that you need a video that has a lasting impact while delivering your desired message.

Lastly, digital marketing has seen a huge shift in the last years. Long gone are the days where the desktop is the leading platform. Today, the mobile platform is becoming more and more active because of the convenience and accessibility that it offers. Did you know that mobile usage has been surpassing the desktop by an excessively large amount, with the normal user spending 3 hours a day on their phone ?

And since we’re talking about video content, just look around your surroundings. It’s now common place to see someone watching videos and sharing them with other people on their phones. YouTube recently shared that the number of video views on their platform is rising by 100% of the previous year, and this trend isn’t stopping. Most people nowadays live and active and busy lifestyle. So they prefer to use smartphones as their source of video content.

8 Steps To Creating A Successful Video Ad For Mobile Platforms

Video marketing for mobile can be a very critical turning point for any brand. This is one of the most prevalent forms of advertising that can “go viral,” be shared between users and engage your audience immediately. Sadly, this popularity has a price. Given that video advertising strategies are dominating the current market, every brand has to step up their game when creating a plan.

The essential tools are already available to anyone. There are plenty of paid and free implements online that can help you create fantastic videos for a product or service, with little to no technical knowledge or resources required. However, what you need is to all your efforts on the right path. Otherwise, you risk potentially losing a lot of your time and money without the results to show for it.

Although there’s no real “definitive guide” to making your brand successful because it’s a pure case to case basis, there is a general guideline that you can follow to make sure that you’ve got the basics down. Now that we’re on the same page, here are our 8 simple steps that will help make your video advertising for mobile devices reach the numbers you were expecting:

1. Make Sure To Account For Users With Lower Bandwidth Connections

If you’re going to target mobile phone users, you need to keep the quality (in terms of resolution) and length of the video in mind. Being on mobile platforms means that there’s a chance of getting bad reception.

Because the main user base of smartphones is a younger generation (i.e., Millennials), you need to create content that’s suited to their tastes. This generation has gotten used to short-form types of content (Vine, Tik Tok), so keeping your ads below 15 seconds is advisable. The smaller screens on smartphones also mean that resolution won’t matter that much, where 720pand 1080p barely have any noticeable difference.

A graph showing the device usage of facebook users worldwide as of october 2020.

Regardless of what device the user is viewing your ad on, people want online videos to load as quickly as possible. The more the delay, the higher the chance they’ll just give up and move onto the next video. Remember that nothing will rain down on a video experience more than choppy frames or slow load times.

The relationship of page loading times, latency, and available bandwidth can be complex for the uninitiated. But one can still create videos that can perform well in every bandwidth connection without having a lot of technical knowledge.

With the massive influx of mobile device usage, more advertising content is uploaded using an HTML5 format compared to your standard plugin for Adobe Flash. Even the very video files already have available customization features that let you improve their performance and speed. If you don’t take advantage of this optimization, you can potentially delay the playtime of your videos by a few precious seconds. And it only takes a short time before most users will get impatient and skip it.

2. Use Advanced Streaming Techniques For Optimizing Your Video’s Quality

A graphic showing the supported video ratios for facebook ads.

It’s isn’t hard to deduce that video quality plays a large role when it comes to engaging your audience. Video publishers have developed quite a number of innovative methods to help optimize video streams, resulting in an increase in quality without requiring additional data. Many publishers use what’s called Multi-Codec Streaming. This technology can reduce the need to take up more than the required bandwidth, allowing players to stream a very efficient codec depending on the browser that they’re using.

Technologies like these are currently being used by the leading figures of the video industry, like Netflix, for example. The online company recently shared that H.365 (or HEVC) can deliver 50%of bitrate savings compared to the older codec generations like H.264 (aka AVC). Regardless of your target demographics, using this up-to-date technology can potentially deliver a 50% save in bandwidth without losing video quality. And this covers all browsers. Because of VP9 and HEVC, creating high-quality videos and excellent user experience is becoming even more common place, and you should integrate it into your strategy if you want to keep up with the online marketing game.

3. Make An Offering That Your Targeted Audience Will Appreciate

If you want to create a compelling and effective video, you’ll first need to know what you want it to achieve. Are you focusing on purely the service or product? Or do you just want to share the quality of your brand’s culture? The main goal for every type of advertising and marketing campaign is selling whatever it is that you’re offering. Remember that no one wants to see just a display of your company’s products and nothing else.

A diagram showing the steps of targeting optimization

So, it’s not a good decision to make product promotion the main focus (at least, not overtly).These types of promotion can be seen as too spammy and boring, so they often go ignored, or worse, blocked. Your marketing strategy's main goal is to be completely customer-centric. What does this mean? It entails educating, inspiring, entertaining, and reaching out to your audience on an emotional level. This is the type of content you should aspire for, the videos that everyone wants to share, and will be retained in the minds of its viewers for a long time. Granted, you’re a marketer, so calling your viewers into action should be the main goal, but they shouldn’t feel like they’re being given a pitch of your product. Otherwise, you potentially lose a customer.

For example, let’s take a look at a Starbucks’ Facebook page with more than 37 million followers. Their video that celebrated pride month was only 5 seconds in length, but it managed to receive plenty of attention (7.3K views and 575 shares.) And why? Because the main focus of their video isn’t just about their product, instead, they made something memorable into the star of the show to encourage people who follow their business. With that said, you need to thoroughly understand who your targeted audience is and what makes them tick. What is the main driving point that will make them buy, like, follow, and share?

4. Make Sure That Your Videos Go Hand In Hand With Your Brand

Creating a powerful and well-crafted video will mean that you have to impart a clear message within a short time frame. Psychologically speaking, the average attention span of the human minds getting shorter while the demand for it increases. Therefore, one good mantra to follow when developing a new video is “More bang for your buck.”

Always keep your content right down to bare essentials. Remove any unnecessary fluff that can potentially stop your main message from reaching the audience. Because any moment where your video becomes too long or sloppy is another chance that viewers will simply scroll down to the next portion of their feed. One piece of advice is that the initial part of your video should have some form of your brand’s representation. This way, the brand impression is created even for those who didn’t watch the video completely.

Many video marketers make the mistake of overlooking the necessity of incorporating brand identity. This can be done by implementing logos, fonts, colors, or the mood and tone of the video. And these are vital in keeping to your brand's message and consistency alive. If you observe the most prominent brands like Uber, Target, Starbucks, or McDonalds, all of them have a theme that they stick to with every marketing gimmick that they produce.

So don’t be afraid to add a clear and big logo of your brand in your video ad. With consistency, a brand becomes more memorable.

5. The Ad You’re Making Should Still Make Sense With No Sound

Music’s main role in any advertisement is to amplify the impact of your video’s overall theme. However, owing to the fact that we’re focusing on the mobile platform, we have to take other factors into consideration. Most mobile users don’t like playing the sound on their feeds, especially when it comes to ads. In addition, apps like Instagram won’t play the audio of a video unless the phone is tapped. Because of these factors, almost 85% of every video view is done with no sound.

A graphic showing the stats of facebook videos

However, we're not entirely discouraging you from implanting sound into your ad, but were commend that the content you're creating will still make sense even with the lack of noise. A few marketers will rely on the audio content of their videos instead of focusing on the message, so they end up losing a large chunk of impact for the viewers watching their ad in silent mode.

You can utilize several ways to make silent and short (yet meaningful) videos that can still stick to someone's mind. One of the things you can do is to impress your audience visually. Implement an eye-catching color scheme that can capture a viewer's attention. For example ,blue, red, and yellow (the primary colors) have been known to do this. Make it as easy as possible for your viewers to understand what’s happening all throughout your video, so this means reducing any needless distractions or background noise.

6. Implement A Call To Action (or CTA)

A CTA, as the name suggests, is a portion of your video where you’re asking viewers to do something. Lacking a CTA is a huge reason why plenty of businesses fail to nudge their audience into doing what they want, despite having produced an excellent video. Every advertisement must have at least one CTA. It can be implemented as simple as a URL, hashtag, phone number, or any other way that your customer can reach out to you or make a purchase.

CTA placement is crucial, and you have three locations to choose from:

Pre-roll: This is where CTAs are added before the beginning of your videos so viewers can see them immediately without watching the whole of your ad.

Mid-roll: These CTAs are added right between your ad. You can insert them in moments where your viewers will be engaged the most.

Post-roll: These CTAs are placed at the end of an ad where a viewer should already have plenty of interest having watched the whole thing, so they’re more likely to search for more information about your brand.

A graph showing call to action conversion rates.

7. Make Sure That Your Video Is Optimized In Every Major Platform

Because more people now have access to social media platforms through their mobile devices, video marketers have to consider and review their content to see if they play well in all of these platforms. Every platform will have different structures, so to make for an effective marketing plan, you need to analyze where the most substantial portion of your audience is going to be in for a whole year. This can be a lot of work, but the potential gains are worth it.

It’s also vital that you optimize your video ads on every platform because it plays a significant contribution to your ad’s success.

8. Take Advantage of The B2B Form Of Video Marketing

A majority of B2B marketers will know how vital video advertising for the mobile platform is. However, B2B marketing can get tricky within this platform. The main problem of B2B services or products is that they’re normally seen as not having enough “flash” to make for entertaining and attention-grabbing videos. By using just a little bit of creativity and imagination, every product or service from marketing automation to SaaS has the capacity to be successfully marketed in a very engaging way to capture the attention of a large viewer base.

For example, FME extension has successfully used YouTube to fully demonstrate the wide range of their product’s applications while keeping it entertaining enough for YouTube’s audience. They manage to engage a broad audience by producing, explainer videos, DIY videos, tutorials, testimonials, and many other educational content.

Conclusion

Making use of video marketing in the mobile platform can help you engage your viewers and ensure the presence of your brand’s identity and central message. This great medium will give any brand the power to experiment, play, interpret, and analyze their content and their audience to produce even better results for the next time around.

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