The key to video advertising success is to make sure your ad is both seen and completed.
Many video ads are seen only in a scroll-by feed with a few seconds of engaged viewing. These ad placements have very little value, and might as well be display ads. To increase the likelihood that your video advertisement drives engagement, and is viewed to completion, the most sophisticated advertisers do the following:
- Develop and target ads as part of a sophisticated customer journey, not as one-offs.
- Leverage voice of the customer technology to measure consumers’ attitudes and behavior in real time as a campaign runs, leveraging that data to segment audiences and target consumers who want to hear from and engage with your brand.
- Work with real-time first-party and third-party data to create expansive reach and results-based targeting.
Making Shareable Videos
It all starts with knowing your brand objective: Are you trying to build brand love, drive shopping behaviors, educate, persuade, conquest, or one of the dozens of other brand objectives? Once you have clarity of purpose, and have developed great content, the key to driving engagement and sharing comes from relentless measurement of which consumers are watching and why, who the ad appeals to (within your target set), and using AI-based optimization to hone in on those viewers likely to be most engaged and excited.
Digital video is not TV. It is its own medium defined by interactivity. Marketers can turn their video ads into engagement experiences to pull viewers into a two-way conversation and ask questions that reveal how they feel about an ad, product, or brand. By using declared consumer feedback, marketers can inform their subsequent video messaging to make sure that a given consumer sees the next logical ad—in sequence—to reflect their stage in the buying journey. This use of sequential journeys to engage consumers is similar to the way email marketers have used sequential messaging for years. The more relevant the ad, the more likely a consumer is to engage with your brand and share your content.
The Best Kinds of Online Videos
The most successful video campaigns move the needle on an important objective for the brand. Effective video ads surprise and delight, engage and inform, and most of all, tell great stories.
Marketers should focus on creating relevant digital stories that speak to the consumer—who they are, their preferences and their behaviors—and where they are in their customer journey. By focusing on relevance, marketers can reveal insights that improve brand perceptions and favorability, and drive consumers to take action.
