Video advertising: tips on strategy

While video is an appealing channel for advertisers, there is still some lack of common agreement when it comes to strategy and metrics for video ad campaigns. One common misconception is that video campaigns need to be complex to have significant ROI.

“Use video to simplify your customer experience landscape, not make it more difficult and convoluted,” said Merkle VP of CX Strategy Rocco Albano at MarTech. “Know from the beginning of your planning that integrated, effective and easy-to-use video experiences are difficult to achieve but benefit your customer and business greatly.” 

Watch Albano’s full presentation here.

The increased use of video ad campaigns intend to drive higher customer engagement and accelerate sales. The volume of video ad campaigns will only increase as the roll-out of 5G continues and higher broadband speeds are implemented. The impact of video and film having more impact than imagery or text has also been well covered in dozens of studies, including a 2020 HubSpot study that found that 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service via video. 

“Live videos on Facebook and Instagram are watched about three times more than pre recorded videos,” said Adtaxi Senior Sales Director Lindsy O’ Connor during a recent webinar. “Implementing the right video strategy is less about seeing your brand and more about if you want consumers to convert more than seeing your brand or its site. That is how you pivot to generating revenue for a business than just being seen on video advertising.” 

Watch the full Adtaxi/MarTech Today webinar here.

Keeping track of the trends

Despite all of the movement in the video space in 2020, all of the 2019 trends have carried over to this year. Shorter video ads on mobile devices with deeper personalization are the three trends in the video space that are here to stay. Marketers also continue to see high ROI when implementing programmatic ad buying the right way. 

“Do not underestimate the data that can be captured from programmatic ad campaigns,” said O’ Connor. “It has the most data ROI and is the easiest [advertising channel] for capturing this data.” 

And despite the many platforms, products and tools available in the video space, there should be one main campaign goal for most enterprise marketers: taking engagements and turning them into conversions for revenue. To accomplish this, many marketers believe an expensive, high-quality video campaign is needed, however that can work against achieving high ROI.

“The video does not have to be high quality,” said Bob Batchelor, director of CX at Adtaxi during a recent MarTech Today webinar. “Authentic videos are more real and are received better by the public. And the video does not have to cost a lot or be time consuming either.”

A vendor best practice is to turn around client video requests in three or four business days, and marketers facing smaller budgets and fewer human resources should not hesitate to incorporate past video content if it is still relevant to the current campaign. To extend smaller budgets, multiple versions of a single video can be used, just change the call to action to increase distribution and instantly scale campaigns. 

“The whole point of your video content is to engage users in the first 10 seconds,” said Batchelor. “And think of other ways to generate video content to stretch your budget, from using your internal staff, help from college students or anything in between.” 

Choosing a channel

So what advertising channels should marketers use to achieve the highest ROI on their video content? O’ Connor strongly recommends two—connected TV (CTV) and online pre-roll ads. 

“No matter what channels you use, all video advertisements should be made clickable and drive traffic straight through to the website,” she said. “If you have not implemented a video campaign before, or have only done so in small increments, start lower in the funnel before heading straight into connected TV.” 

While CTV and its channels like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube TV and others, is enjoying immense popularity, marketers should strategize video campaign content as a form that can cut across all channels and be implemented in CTV, pre-roll advertising, social platforms and Google/YouTube. 

“Connected TV is the number-one audience right now, this is where the audience is and you need to adjust your strategy to get in front of that audience,” said O’ Connor. 

Embracing immersive environments

For enterprise marketing teams and those with deep enough budgets, investing in an immersive environment generates high ROI, and shortens the sales cycle while building the brand. 

A shining example of the ROI from an immersive environment comes from international art auction house Sotheby’s, which created an immersive environment that has already hosted over 250 live online auctions in 2020. This has led to numerous online sales records being broken, as paintings have been sold for well over $50 million. 

So how did Sotheby’s use video to transform the art market? 

Sotheby’s implemented high-quality presale marketing videos in an immersive VR web-based art gallery experience where guests can zoom in on paintings, get a presale estimate and even retrieve the biography of the artist. To increase revenue Sotheby’s now produces live and remote real-time auctions and uses data from its VR art gallery to forecast auctions and identify what art pieces draw the most interest based on web analytics. 

“They really use video to build drama and theatre about what they are selling,” said Albano. “Granted, these are large ticket expenses in most cases, but that is not to say that these kinds of presale videos are not relevant for different kinds of lower-priced items in different product categories.” 

Methods and metrics

New video campaigns are being developed for the upcoming holiday season and current video campaigns are being modified for the holidays and the ‘new normal.’ Regardless of the status of the campaign, make sure the method matches best practices for what is being communicated. 

Brand awareness videos developed to influence and educate an audience should be kept to 15 to 60 seconds, as should community outreach videos. Both should rely heavily on contact information and weblinks. 

Product and service sales videos that are meant to drive eCommerce and new lead generation can be longer in length, from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. This video content should emphasize how to buy the product, share product information and the product page online as well as offer product information available to download. 

Once the correct method is identified, implementing a range of measurements to truly gauge campaign performance is necessary. Standard measurements like impressions, views, frequency (views by the same person), reach and unique reach should all be a part of performance reports, but marketers need to dig a bit deeper into analytics to identify the true performance of their video campaign. 

“Marketers should use deeper measurements to rate their performance,” said O’ Connor. “Measure awareness lift, ad recall lift, brand interest, website visits, rewatch numbers and completion rate. Also, marketers should not forget the value in sending thank you and upsell videos after conversions, they drive revenue.” 

This story first appeared on MarTech Today.

About The Author

Rodric Bradford

Rodric J. Bradford is the Editor of MarTech Today and has worked in the marketing technology industry as both a journalist and corporate project manager. Prior to joining MarTech Today Bradford served as Convention and Technology Beat Reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Business Press publication and worked as Technology Reporter for Global Gaming Business, the world’s largest casino publication. In the corporate world Bradford has served as Technology Project Manager for CNA, Cigna, General Dynamics and Philip Morris. Bradford is an alumnus of the University of Missouri-Columbia.