We produce a variety of ads for television, but a good portion of our business comes from corporate and branding content for the web. When we are working on one of these videos, we often ask the client if they intend to do any advertising with their new content. Usually their initial response is “We don’t do TV ads”. This makes a lot of sense for businesses who specialize in unique or niche products…and even more so for B2B products and services. Advertising on television can be a very costly net that you cast out only to hit far too small of a target market. This is why Facebook and YouTube video advertising can be such an amazing asset.
YouTube and Facebook ads are able to target a very specific demographic. You can select age, sex, location (city, state, country, etc.), interests, devices (computer, mobile, etc.) and so much more. You can also select a very precise duration and budget for your campaign. Say you’re running a weekend sale on women’s clothing at your store in Chicago…you can run a targeted ad at women, ages 18-40, within 100 miles of Chicago for 3 days and put as much or as little budget in as you want. The more you spend, the more the ad will run. Typically, you pay for one of two things, impressions or clicks. Impressions are the amount of views your ad gets total. Clicks are the amount of engagements your ad receives (Visit Our Website, Subscribe, etc.). We usually recommend opting for clicks as this tends to be the best bang-for-the-buck.
To setup a YouTube video ad, first you need to setup a Google AdWords account. Once you’ve done this, simply go in and start a new campaign. For more details, check out this video. For Facebook video ads, go to the page of the business or brand that you manage and upload the video. Once it is uploaded, you can choose to boost the post or you can go in and create an ad and use the video as the content of the ad. We recommend that later since you can customize the ad better this way. For more details, check out this step-by-step guide.
Here are a few “best practices” for video advertising:
- Have a clear goal with your ad campaign (i.e. Visit Our Website, Order Now, Subscribe to Our Channel, Share, Like, etc.). This will help you gauge your return on investment better. If you try to get people to do everything (Visit Our Website and Share and Order and…) you probably won’t get them to do anything.
- Likes and subscribes are rarely good marketing goals. While it’s great to have a larger community for your page or channel, the ones you get off of ads most often won’t be as engaging as fans you get organically.
- You really want to grab people’s attention in the first 5-10 seconds. This will encourage them to watch your video through and not just skip or scroll past. This is why it’s good to create unique content specifically for Facebook or YouTube.
- When doing video ads on Facebook, make sure the video has subtitles. 80-90% of people who watch video ads on Facebook don’t listen to the audio.
If you need help developing video content for YouTube, Facebook, TV or the web, feel free to contact us. We’d love to use our expertise to tell your unique story.