Marketing your small business on Facebook can be tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. For the best results, you need to understand everything. From Facebook’s unique opportunities, how it differs from other social media and how you can leverage this to give your audience the most value. Just as you wouldn’t run a radio ad on television, you shouldn’t market on Facebook the way you’d market in a magazine or on your website. And the best results from Facebook Marketing come from Video.
The Value of Video for Your Business
Digital video consumption is continuing to grow massively, and it’s easy to see why: it is one of the most immersive ways to tell your story. It’s more exciting than reading text and more engaging than just looking at a picture. So, it makes sense you should be utilising it for your marketing and ad strategy.
Growth in video views exceeded 50% from May through July of this year. Additionally, since June there has been an average of more than 3 billion video views on Facebook every day (in 2018), just to give you an idea of how big it really is.
Studies have shown that from the moment a video ad was viewed (even before one second), lift happened across ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase consideration. This means even people who never watched the video – but did see the impression – were still impacted by the ad. And, as expected, lift increased the longer people watch the ad. (Lift is basically a measure of how well an advertiser is able to shift perceptions through exposure to its ads.)
So clearly there is a lot of value for your business using video, but how do you actually create not only a great video ad, but a great video campaign?
Set Clear, Measurable Objectives
When beginning a video campaign, it’s important that you understand your goal. Without one, you may as well be just posting any old video on Facebook. This is the first step. The second is understanding what metrics to track in order to achieve the desired end goal.
Here are the common goals of video campaigns:
Increase Brand Awareness: Track towards video views and unique reach. Remember, Facebook records a view when the user has watched for 3 or more seconds.
Introduce a New Product: Track towards completed video views. A completed video view confirms your audience has heard and seen your message and suggests your audience is interested in the new product.
Drive Action: Track towards clicks to site or on-site conversions. A link to your website can be included in the ad copy or as a call-to-action at the end of the video.
You need a concrete goal to not only help you determine campaign effectiveness, but also directly inform the type of content you post and who you target.
Which leads us to our next step…
Grab Their Attention
It’s more important than ever to generate captivating, engaging, and emotionally powerful video content that resonates with your audience. You can do this by following a few rules:
Shorter is Better. Ads under thirty seconds drive both the highest view rates and video completions. If an ad is too long, you risk losing the attention of the viewer.
Be Informative. The image and text should of the video should explain what your company or product is, how it works, and why the viewer needs it.
Pick an Engaging Thumbnail. Although video ads will automatically play by default, Facebook users can disable the feature. Plan for this by selecting a thumbnail that features your product or main message front and centre.
Go Mobile to Pinpoint Video Viewers
With video ads, platform is the game changer when it comes to performance. Mobile ads drive the most effective video views which isn’t surprising, as more than 65% of Facebook users watch videos on their mobile device.
Capturing video views should be your initial goal, but views don’t mean anything if they aren’t driving toward your bottom line.
If you’ve followed these steps, you’re already on your way to creating a successful video campaign. For more tips on creating amazing content, follow us on twitter @StrategySMedia.