Angela Hausman, PhD June 2, 2021 Video advertising is hardly new as video marketing underpinned advertising since the first soap operas acted as a vehicle to reach housewives with advertising directed at their interests as homemakers. Yet, when it comes to digital advertising and your own website video advertising isn’t utilized very often, to the detriment of your online advertising campaigns. It’s a shame more folks don’t use this advertising vehicle, especially on new platforms such as TikTok, because of the many advantages to using video as a tool for marketing your products. We’ll turn our focus to the advertising realm in a few moments, but check out the graphic below to see the growing use of video for online marketing.
Image courtesy of Zagfirst
Read on if you need more encouragement to for using video advertising to prompt your products and spur conversion that helps you reach your marketing goals.
Why use video advertising
Video advertising offers a plethora of options from the Google Ads platform, where you can construct, target, and display video ads on more traditional outlets, such as YouTube, Twitch, and Vimeo, to TikTok video, to using influencers (and data shows 76% of users trust these average folks more than brands) as a tool for reaching an audience with video endorsements, explainer videos, and tutorials. Consumers cutting the cord offer opportunities for over the top advertising (OTT) involving using video ads as part of streaming services such as Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix, which produce much higher video completion rates than other types of video ads and avoid being stripped by ad blockers.
Video ads on social platforms also offer advantages over other forms of advertising on these platforms, with 89% in-target performance.
More people watch videos
One of the biggest advantages of using video advertising is that, quite simply, video is consumed more easily and enthusiastically than any other form of media. That’s because videos are easy, fun, and don’t require committing much of your your gray matter. Proving my point, video encourages visitors to stay on your landing page 5X longer and increase conversion by 86%.
The same holds true for video advertising, where data shows video ads receive 20% more clicks than ads containing only images. Video ads work because you don’t have to read them, they’re entertaining, so you don’t have to work hard at understanding them, and they can even play in the background allowing the viewer to take them in while doing other tasks. This means that, sooner or later, the right people ee your content – this is very different from an ad that consists of lots of text, for example, which visitors can easily ignore.
Effective targeting
Targeting is the main benefit from any form of digital advertising over more traditional advertising platforms. And, video advertising is no different. Using targeted advertising, including video advertising, generates far higher click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates, increasing the ROI of your advertising campaigns in a way not possible with traditional advertising. Sure, you can choose to place your ads within certain TV programs that tend to attract a certain audience but these audiences are fairly broad compared with the much more highly-focused advertising available through video ad platforms with the thousands of niche programs. TikTok also provides the benefit of reaching a highly-selective audience of younger GenZ users (although, as you see in the graphic below, TikTok is much more intergenerational than you might think), while utilizing a platform that’s underutilized by other commercial brands.
Image courtesy of Wordstream
Videos convey more than images and text
One of the other significant advantages of video advertising compared to text or even images is that video conveys much more information in a short period of time than other options. When you add video and audio together, increase the appeal of your campaign.
Video works because you create stories that engage the viewer. The best videos don’t seem like ads at all. Video ads are a form of native advertising that embeds a commercial message within a story to create engagement, enhance recall, and encourage clicks. Subtle advertising is much easier when you do it through video, and you can educate the viewer while entertaining them at the same time.
For instance, explainer videos don’t seem like ads at all. Instead, explainer videos provide information and solve problems faced by viewers while including helpful suggestions for resources to aid in the solution. I use a bunch of Adobe Photoshop videos to teach my digital marketing students about image customization, which translates into more buyers for Adobe products once these students graduate and recommend Adobe to their new employer.
An explainer video also enhances a buyer’s enjoyment of the products already purchased by explaining how to set up the product to get the most from its capabilities. By making their products easy to use, these videos don’t look like ads at all but do promote user recommendations and enhance reviews that encourage others to purchase your products.
Video is more accessible than ever
Today, it is easier than ever to make videos that support your brand and enhance conversion. With access to the best video content management software, huge content libraries, stock footage, and much cheaper video editing and hosting services than ever before, anyone can make a great-looking video that inspires, educates, and entertains. For instance, if the power and complexity of Adobe Premier Pro (which is used by major studios) doesn’t fit your skillset or the time you want to dedicate to making a video ad, Adobe has 2 other products, Premier Rush and Spark, available at lower price points. Both products are also much easier to learn because they don’t have all the bells and whistles of their big cousin.
Video advertising doesn’t require perfection since viewers don’t expect as much polish and pizzazz from these ads as they do from traditional TV advertising. You can craft a quite acceptable product using your iPhone, some lighting, a directional mic, and a little practice. And, hopefully, the result encourages viewers to buy from you or get in touch or whatever it is you want the video to do for you.
If you want to make a video, you have several choices. You can pay for a specialist, and there are a bunch of reasonably-priced options available, or you can try doing it yourself, using the tools recommended above. Your choice depends on your budget and the time you have available but, in the end, both can produce spectacular video advertising that really works.
Video Is Versatile
Video is highly versatile in terms of what they can do for your business. They can convey any message you want, meaning you can ensure the viewer gets the most information possible in the best way for them when it comes to learning more about what you can do. In this way, one medium can produce many different results for different audiences.
Conclusion
There’s a lot to recommend video advertising and, if you haven’t tried it, you really should. Throw out your preconceived notions of video creation as expensive, time-consuming, and available only to large businesses. Video advertising is accessible to even small businesses, so give it a whirl.
I hope you found this information valuable and you now have a new option for marketing your business. I’d love to hear from you so post your suggestions and questions in the comments below. Also, if you have topic you’d like to suggest as a future post, let me know.
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