Steps for Building an Effective Video Advertising Strategy

Steps for Building an Effective Video Advertising Strategy

  04:59    Silver Push

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The popularity of video content is ever increasing. Consumers are now watching more online videos in comparison to any time before. Experts predict that the online video viewing time for an average person will reach 100 minutes per day by the year 2021.

For brands and advertisers, video advertising has become a high-valued tool. To advertise through online videos, you need an effective advertising strategy. Following the steps given below can help you build a video advertising strategy that is powerful and effective –

Determine your advertising goal

You should be clear with what you want to achieve through your advertising campaign. Whether you want your targeted audience to buy your product, avail your service, contact you, become aware of your brand, or become strongly associated with your brand – you should determine beforehand.

This should be the first and fundamental step as your entire online video advertising campaign will be based on this step. If you want to increase brand awareness, your video should effectively communicate your brand’s stories and values. If you want to create a sale, your video ad should be attractive and engaging enough with a call to action for driving a profitable response from customers.  

Identify the audience you want to target

You should define the audience for which you want to create and run the online video ad campaign. To define the target audience, you can consider the following –

·       Identify the group of people whose needs your products or services meet.

·       Look for common characteristics in your existing customer base such as age, gender, education, interests, location, income, purchasing habits, marital status, etc. This will help you target your potential customers.

·       Know the audience of your competitors’ video campaigns.

Select the right advertising platform

For displaying video ads to your customers, various advertising platforms are available. Google Ads is an advertising platform from Google that allows you to run your video ads on YouTube and Google video partner sites & apps.

YouTube is a mammoth video content platform with over two billion monthly signed-in users. Through YouTube advertising, marketers can effectively promote brands and amplify sales. For setting up a video campaign on YouTube, you have to first upload your ad video to YouTube. After that you are required to choose your target audience. You will have to choose the locations where you want your ads to show up along with the types of users that you want should watch your ads. Then, you have to decide how much you want to spend on your video ad campaign.

By using Facebook Ads Manager, you can easily create ad campaigns for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or Audience Network. This powerful ad tool provides a wide range of functionalities including creating ads, managing ads, ad tracking, and ad performance analysis. Your campaign parameters such as objective and audience can be easily selected through this tool.

Some of the other advertising platforms for running video ad campaigns include Yahoo! Gemini (now called Verizon Media Native), Twitter videoads and LinkedIn video ads, among others.

Your choice of the advertising platform should take into account factors such as nature of your business, areas you serve – local, national or worldwide, and target audience. For example, if you run a local business, then LinkedIn may not be of use for you. Another example that can be cited here is that if you want to sell women’s products, then one of best way to do so is to advertise on women channels on YouTube.  

Traditional advertising vs. AI advertising

Conventionally, ads are placed on the basis of factors such as consumers’ web browsing behavior, purchasing history, and keywords. The results achieved by traditional advertising campaigns are sub-optimal and raise privacy concerns. Artificial intelligence advertising solutions that use natural language processing (NLP) and semantic analysis for achieving contextual relevance also have their own limitations.

AI advertising technology that makes use of computer vision to accurately detect contexts in video offer much greater degree of context relevance than any other type of video advertising technology. Computer vision has revolutionized online video advertising industry including YouTube advertising. By using computer vision powered in-video contextual advertising, you can place ads that are in line with the content the users are actively engaging with, thereby significantly boosting user engagement and reach. This technology also prevents placement of ads against brand unsafe content, thus ensuring brand safety.

Mobile vs. desktop video ads 

People are increasingly using their smartphones for consuming online media including video content. Smartphone users tend to watch more video ads in comparison to desktop users. According to a Google report, video ads are more viewable on mobile than desktop. The report found that video ad viewability across the web, excluding YouTube, was 83% for mobile, while for desktop, it was 53%. According to Akamai’s report, when compared on a weekly basis, significantly more mobile users search and buy products than desktop users. Before creating a video ad campaign, you should consider these points.  

Create a video ad for each sales funnel stage

Target different groups of audiences that are in different sales funnel stages with a different video ad. You should create a specific video ad for a particular stage of sales funnel. To facilitate purchase making by customers, show them ads repetitively to an extent.

The above-mentioned steps including computer vision powered contextual advertising will help you create and run high-performance video advertising campaigns, enabling you to realistically achieve your marketing goals.