Video content is a major focus for me in Q4 of this year and going into 2024.
I’ve started playing around with some videos that I’ve posted on Twitter. I also had a couple of YouTube channels in a different niche a while back. But I’m a bit rusty.
I’m also totally clueless when it comes to short-form video.
My friend Alex Garcia (insanely talented marketer) wrote a guide on how to win with short-form in his newsletter. One of the few pieces of content I actually read and bookmarked last week.
A few highlights:
Think In Slack Groups
“When Oren makes a video, he thinks about what will get shared in a work Slack channel.
Which is two main metrics: Saves & Shares
Video saves equal content so valuable you want to come back to it.
Video shares equal content so valuable you want others to know too.”
Content Funnels
“Our content strategy focused around top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel content.
And we categorized it like this:
Top of funnel = Content that has a wide reach
Middle of funnel = Content that's valuable but includes product placements
Bottom of funnel = Content that drives a specific action
The volume shifted based on our goal that quarter. But usually, the split was 60% TOF, 30% MOF, and 10% BOF.”
Alex also told me that him, Oren John, and Colin Landforce (this is a serious power team) are running a cohort-based course on how to grow with short-form video in October. I’m in.
This isn't sponsored btw. I would have plugged this piece and resource regardless. If you want to learn short-form video strategy, check it out right here.
A panel of experts chose the most creative, compelling, and effective YouTube campaigns of 2018. Kim Pedersen of Kantar, who advised the panel, shares some lessons to help any advertiser or agency create videos that drive real business results.
What does it take to create a great video campaign? This year, I got to find out.
As partners of the first ever YouTube Works Awards — a competition that celebrates the brilliant minds producing the most innovative and effective campaigns on YouTube — my team and I at Kantar reviewed dozens of submissions, spoke to the judges who chose the winning campaigns, and even carried out a quantitative analysis of the most impactful ads.
Here are the insights we gathered that can help any advertiser or agency create a YouTube campaign that drives real business results.
How to create a winning YouTube campaign
Sparks: Tap into YouTube insights to come up with new ideas
For the marketers behind the winning campaigns, YouTube wasn’t just a platform on which to reach their audience. It also provided the inspiration they needed to create stand-out ads. Of the finalists, 86% used YouTube to identify insights that could serve as the creative spark for their campaigns.
After noticing the rise of grossly intriguing and humorous experiments on YouTube, Liquid Plumr created a series of videos that both picked up on this trend and helped showcase its product. The videos increased awareness and favorability by 38% and 40%, respectively.
Samsung did something similar for its winning campaign, which showcased the new Galaxy smartphone. Knowing how popular YouTube creators can be among the Gen Zers it was trying to reach, it created a video series called Make, which featured influential YouTuber creators doing things like reviewing scripts and shooting footage on the smartphone. According to Samsung, 17% of those who were exposed to the ads were more likely to purchase the Galaxy as their next phone.
Signals: Use audience signals to inform your creative and media approach
When people go online to start researching a family vacation or head to YouTube to watch highlights from their favorite sport, they’re giving all sorts of clues as to their passions, interests, and needs.
The most effective advertising campaigns draw on these signals to inform both their media and creative processes. For example, 71% of finalists (compared with 42% of nonfinalists), used YouTube to personalize content to individual audiences at scale.
That’s what Xfinity did in its Grand Prix-winning campaign “Data in Dollars,” a series of pre-roll, six-second ads that showed users how much the video they were about to watch would cost to stream using their current cellular provider.
“We shot completely different commercials to match all of the most popular genres on YouTube,” explained Tristan Graham, a creative director at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the agency that worked on the campaign. For example, if someone was about to watch a beauty tutorial video, the pre-roll, six-second video they saw was on a related topic. “It was a lot of work, but it created a sense of mass intimacy,” Graham said. “Every part of every ad felt like it was made specifically for the person watching it.”
Stories: Choose the right storytelling format and techniques
People are fascinated by stories, yet only 40% of advertising uses storytelling as a technique.
The most effective YouTube campaigns we saw all understood the importance of storytelling, but none more so than “Dundee: The Son of a Legend Returns Home.” The team behind the award-winning ads, Tourism Australia, Droga5, and Universal McCann, created a trailer for what viewers were led to believe was a remake of Crocodile Dundee, a movie that, when it was first released in 1986, spurred a huge amount of interest in Australia as a tourist destination. The team created a dedicated YouTube channel and used YouTube in-stream ads to get the trailers in front of viewers. Two weeks later, they released a new trailer that revealed the truth: It was an advertising campaign, not a movie.
The elaborate story captured people’s imagination and their attention. Visitor spending increased 30% and U.S. tourist visas increased by 12% in the six months following the campaign.
Building a winning YouTube campaign
Anyone looking to build a video campaign that captures attention and drives real business results will want to take into account these three lessons. It might just make them the next YouTube Works Award winner.
Kristen Shipley September 2019 Emerging Technology, Video
Creating a marketing campaign is no small feat. From ideation to execution, a well-planned campaign takes time and money. So once you have all of your assets, how can you make the most of them? By adapting existing assets for different contexts and campaigns, you can maximize your impact, reaching more people with minimal creative lift.
That’s exactly what some brands are doing with video ads: taking footage from longer spots and condensing them to six-second bumper ads — an ideal format for driving brand reach and frequency. We spoke with four such brands to understand what the benefits are.
To give existing assets new life
“We used to manually create bumpers based on a longer-form ad, to ensure continuity across a campaign. But by using Bumper Machine — a tool powered by machine learning that creates six-second bumper ads from one longer ad — we’ve been able to save time and money. That’s freed us up to focus on telling our story in a more complete way.
For example, in a recent campaign, we used a longer ad to set some context and tell the full story. Then we used Bumper Machine to create a six-second version that prominently featured our brand and product, which made it easy for viewers to make the connection with the broader story.”
Metin Cherasi, Head of Digital Strategy and Marketing at Arçelik, Beko
To stay connected to customers “We have over 20 million active rewards club members, so six-second bumper ads are great for reminding people of our upcoming deals. We wanted to do that for a recent campaign, however our traditional creative process only called for building 15-secondand 30-second creative assets. Instead, we used Bumper Machine to cut these existing longer ads into six-second ones.
That helped make our campaign more versatile and meant we could get even more reach and frequency without annoying our customers. The approach paid off: We found that we were able to drive a cost-per-store-visit of only $0.53 using bumpers. It allowed us to deliver a more succinct offer message and drive potential sales in just six seconds. Now that we know how effective this format can be at helping us achieve our marketing goals, we’re even creating custom bumpers for our campaigns.”
Steve Haffer, Senior Vice President, Chief Customer Officer, Big Lots
To reinforce your message
“For the launch of Mercado Point, an electronic payment management and processing service, we wanted an ‘always on’ video campaign. Traditionally, we’ve only used longer ads and tutorial videos in our marketing campaigns. But we realized that by using bumpers, we could remind people of what we had to offer.
So we used Bumper Machine to create a variety of strong, shorter messages from our existing long-form creative, and then we retargeted those six-second ads at people who had already watched the longer ones. The bumpers reached 60% of people who had watched our longer ads, at a higher frequency and lower CPM. When combined with the longer formats we use, bumper ads really helped us amplify our message.”
Julieta Bessi, Senior Marketing Analyst, Mercado Pago Point
To break through the noise
“In Hong Kong, people have busy lives. Even during their leisure time, many people are doing several things at once. When you’re trying to capture the attention of someone who is multitasking in this way, keeping it short can be effective, so bumper ads are a good way to enhance brand awareness in just six seconds.
Of course, squeezing everything you want to say into six seconds is a challenge. We found that a simple message and interesting, eye-catching animation was key to our success with this format. Short, easily digestible video content is now a staple of successful digital advertising.”
YouTube is testing a software tool called "Bumper Machine" that aims to optimize video ads for mobile audiences, TechCrunch first reported. The video-editing tool uses machine learning to pick out key moments from a longer spot and condense them into six-second bumper ads, a format that the video-sharing site introduced three years ago.
Food delivery app GrubHub shortened two 13-second ads with Bumper Machine by identifying more exact marketing messages the company wanted to show. A GrubHub spokesperson told MediaPost that the short-form videos gave it more flexibility in its ad placements as part of ongoing campaigns.
The Bumper Machine looks at video spots and identifies elements such as human characters, motion, sharpness of the focus and quality of the framing. It can help marketers to identify the message and how best to convey that in six seconds, Vishal Sharma, VP of product management at YouTube, told MediaPost.
Insight:
YouTube developed bumper ads, which appear at the beginning of videos on its site, to be less intrusive for mobile viewers who don't want their viewing experience interrupted. By using machine learning to fuel the Bumper Machine, YouTube could encourage adoption of the six-second format by cutting costs for mobile marketers who can rely on artificial intelligence to edit previously produced ads and repurpose old content.
Agency creative executives have fretted that the short ads make it harder to make an emotional connection with viewers, but other studies have shown that viewers can mentally process an ad quickly. Mobile ads start triggering an emotional response in consumers in less than half a second, according to a study by brain researcher Neurons for the Mobile Marketing Association. On TV, six-second ads captured 8% to 11% more attention per second than longer ads, per a study by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and TVision Insights.
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YouTube's Bumper Machine test comes as research shows that mobile video ads are a key driver of digital media spending. U.S. mobile advertising grew 40% to $69.9 billion last year, making up 65% of total digital ad revenue, per an annual report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PwC. Digital video ads on mobile devices expanded 65% to $10.2 billion, outpacing the 37% growth for digital video in all formats, including personal computers. Mobile video ads are forecast to grow as high-speed 5G mobile networks expand nationwide over the next few years.
Google-owned YouTube isn't the only platform expanding its inventory of six-second ads. Snapchat last month announced plans to introduce a service to let brands reserve and buy non-skip, six-second commercials during premium shows in the image-messaging app's Discover section. The Snap Select service features ad inventory in Snap Originals, sports programming and premium shows on a fixed cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) basis.
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, a video might just be priceless.
The number of daily videos produced on Instagram has quadrupled in the last five years, and YouTube users watch more than a billion hours of content every day. With stats like these, it’s no wonder 87 percent of online marketers are investing in video content.
What does it take to create a top notch social video? To save you a bit of headache and a whole lot of blooper reel, we’re sharing some of our most effective tips here.
Bonus: Want to know how a viral social video creator makes millions of dollars in sales? Download the free guide now.
The 6 most important ingredients of a successful social video
1. Be platform-conscious
From YouTube to TikTok, there are dozens of different video platforms to choose from. Make sure you tailor your video accordingly, just like you would with any other content.
Here are a few quick tips for getting it right:
Choose platforms that engage your audience
The first step to creating a killer social video is deciding where to post it.
Some platforms, like Facebook, have a wide user base, attracting different ages, genders, and income levels. Others reach only a narrow demographic.
For example, Pinterest resonates with 25 to 44 year olds, while Snapchat almost exclusively attracts teens and young adults.
Before you even pick up a camera, ask yourself two questions:
Who am I trying to reach?
Why am I trying to reach them?
If you’re trying to educate your audience, consider posting your video on LinkedIn. If you’re simply trying to entertain, YouTube might be a better bet.
Make sure to brush up on the recommended specs for your platform of choice before producing your video. Optimize for each place you post to avoid stretched images or black bars around your content.
If you don’t have time to optimize for each platform, a 1:1 aspect ratio usually does the trick. Plus, square videos take up 78 percent more social media feed real estate than landscape (16:9), so this strategy may win you some extra attention.
Upload directly to the platform
Not all platforms are compatible with each other—another reason it’s important to optimize your videos for different social channels.
YouTube is owned by Google, a direct competitor to Facebook, which means YouTube links don’t do well on Facebook. By uploading directly to the platform, your video will look better and get up to 10x more organic shares.
Here’s an example from our own Facebook page. This (adorable) YouTube video got a little lost in our feed, but our native content really pops.
2. Be mindful of time
Our attention span is just eight seconds long—shorter than a goldfish’s! Keeping viewers engaged from start to finish is tough, but it doesn’t have to be impossible.
Keep it short and sweet
Stick to a 60-second time limit if you can.
While only five percent of people will stop watching a video after one minute, 60 percent will after two. Not only are short videos easier to finish, they also eat up less data—making them perfect for mobile viewers.
But don’t rule out long-form
Lengthier videos can make their mark too. On Facebook, videos over 90 seconds get more views and shares. On YouTube, the average mobile user session is an hour long.
But if you decide to go long, make sure your content is top notch. Luckily, brands like AirBnB and Hyundai are known for their long-form videos, so there are lots of great examples out there to learn from.
This AirBnB video about a family in Palm Springs is more than a minute long, but is one of the company’s top-performers on YouTube.
3. Optimize for mobile
Over half of all videos are viewed on mobile. For Twitter, that number is as high as 93 percent!
Here are a couple of simple tips for getting mobile friendly
Simplify your graphics
Make sure your visuals look great on a small screen. Think bold, bright, and—if you’re using text—legible. Remove visual clutter to boost comprehension, and test your video on several different screens before posting it.
For example, our Hootsuite Boost video uses vibrant colors and a clear, high impact font that’s easy to read, whatever the screen size.
Before sharing your video, do a quick sound check. Is it engaging with and without audio?
Add a compelling caption or description to help fill in any gaps, and add subtitles if needed. Bonus: subtitles will help make your video more accessible for hearing-impaired viewers.
4. Use analytics
36 percent of businesses now use some form of video analytics. Don’t be the last to the data party! Here are two ways to get analytical:
Track and improve
There are tons of helpful social media analytics tools out there. Keep tabs on how your videos are performing, and consider what you could do to improve them.
Some key questions to ask include:
Are people watching my videos from start to finish?
Are my videos underperforming on any platform?
Which topics are getting the most views or shares?
Reuse content with a proven track record
Analytics are also great for generating ideas for future videos.
Does your company have a blog? Dive into your user stats to identify top-performing content that could be repurposed for video.
As adorable as cats on Roombas are, some of the top performing YouTube content is useful in some way.
Just look at our video “5 Free Sites for Awesome Social Media Images”. It was one of our most watched videos in both 2017 and 2018. Why? Our video solved a real problem for marketers, who often spend hours browsing the web for free stock photos.
Does my video have a clear beginning, middle, and end?
What is the setting?
What’s the conflict?
Writing out a script, using a storyboard, or talking a colleague through the key plot points in your video are all great ways to make sure your story is strong.
Apple’s “Unlock” is an example of visual storytelling at its best. Created to announce the launch of the new iPhone X, the video grabs attention with a fast-paced plot and a surprising twist.
Get sentimental
Emotion is a powerful communication tool, just like stories. But not all emotions are created equal.
Videos can evoke far more emotions than photos. While not every video needs to pull at heartstrings, connecting with viewers on a human level can go a long way.
For example, our “#knowyoursocial” video combines surprise and humour and has more than 10K views on YouTube.
6. Start with a bang—and end with a call to action
Forty-five percent of people who watch the first 3 seconds of a video will continue for at least 30 more. Hook viewers right from the start with something that sparks their interest, inspires their curiosity, or catches them off-guard.
Our Facebook video “2019 Social Trends” literally starts with a bang. The first 3 seconds are dynamic and colourful, and the question “Are You Ready for 2019?” quickly piques the viewer’s interest.
Seal the deal with a stellar CTA
Videos have one of the highest conversion rates of all content. Including a video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by as much as 80 percent.
Include a clear Call To Action at the end of your video to benefit from all the effort you’ve put in. Whether your goal is to get viewers to buy a product or simply to follow your brand, this crucial step moves your hard-won audience to the ‘next step’ in your sales funnel.
Writing a compelling CTA can take some time and experimentation. It also differs between platforms. But all awesome CTAs share a few things in common: they’re personal, straightforward, actionable—and they pay off!
Video ads using 360-degree technology drive 7% higher purchase intent on smartphones and a 12% increase in the belief that a brand has a "unique story to tell" when compared to traditional video ads, according to a new study by IPG's Magna and IPG Media Lab units done in conjunction with YuMe by RhythmOne.
"The 360° Effect: Understanding Immersive Video," whose findings were made available via email to Marketing Dive, analyzed consumers' perspectives on 360-degree video from brands including BMW, Royal Caribbean and PBS. It found that 360-degree ads paired with other 360-degree content were viewed as 8% more relevant than when a 360-degree ad ran with more traditional content.
Virtual reality headset environments were the ideal platform for viewing 360-degree ads, according to the report, followed by smartphones. Such ads on smartphones had a 10% lift in purchase intent over ads delivered on PCs.
Dive Insight:
As marketers continue to put a greater focus on mobile video strategies, 360-degree campaigns offer opportunities for sharing content that's not only visually-focused but also highly interactive. Along with BMW, Royal Caribbean and PBS, other brands have seen impressive results with the format. In November, PepsiCo's Mountain Dew used a 360-degree video teaser to promote a VR experience where viewers could compete against the street basketball player Grayson Boucher. The campaign saw a 63% video completion rate and 22% post-video click-through rate.
According to "The 360° Effect," 69% of consumers expressed intent to interact with brand videos in the future. Consumers are also eager to experience 360-degree video, even in advertising, but they expect the content to be fun and exciting. To drive higher purchase intent with 360-degree video, marketers must balance entertainment with brand messaging, as 88% of users who found 360-degree video ads to be "entertaining" plan to interact with similar efforts in the future.
While embracing 360-degree video can help brands target younger consumers who tend to be more tech-savvy, marketers still face some challenges. The newness of the technology can be distracting for some users, according to the report, so adding cues for users can help them better navigate the experience and improve its overall quality
A lot is happening in the world of video marketing, and an infographic by explainer video company Breadnbeyondcaptures much of what's been going on in the recent past and what marketers can expect this year.
For instance, livestreaming—which we posted about just recently—will become even bigger in 2018: 82% of consumers prefer live videos over other types of social posts, the infographic claims.
It also points out that short-lived content, such as videos on Snapchat and Instagram, may have a narrower reach, but that type of content comes with greater urgency—and so it can still show strong results.
When you are creating videos, consider using a square format for Facebook, which has more reach and more engagement, the graphic reports. And remember to letterbox and caption so viewers can read the content instead of hearing it, if they so choose.
The graphic goes on to give tips for marketing videos across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn, as well as for ensuring your videos render well on mobile, and many more tips.
To see the overview of what's happening in video, check it out:
