It’s no doubt that traditional forms of marketing are no longer as effective as they used to be, and those who are seeing success by utilizing digital marketing may be missing out on key strategies that can accelerate growth further.
Every day, while scrolling on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or other social media platforms, users are increasingly getting targeted with sponsored posts by advertisers. There are more image ads that are being shown every day largely due to the increase of businesses going online and in the number of new advertisers joining Facebook every year.
As more businesses turn to Facebook for marketing campaigns, the more expensive it will cost advertisers to advertise, based on Facebook’s auctioning algorithm, and the more difficult it will be to capture attention on social media. I’m going to let you in on three powerful reasons why video marketing is important in 2020 and how you can get better results with less of a marketing budget.
1. Capture attention quickly.
There are so many advertisers competing for attention. Having a picture as a creative won’t always do it anymore to grab people’s attention on social media. There is plenty of content out there and so many people running ads that our brain skims through a lot of the photo content we come across, whereas video holds attention 5x more than stills.
It’s important to make sure that in the first split second of your campaign, you can attract people’s attention and make them stop scrolling through their feed to pay attention to your brand. As Facebook Marketing Partners, we know that the average user spends 1.3 seconds on each post in their news feed. That means we have a split second to captivate our audience and keep their attention longer.
At our agency, we aim to capture attention quickly by placing our most captivating elements — often including movement — in the opening seconds. We do this by incorporating brand identity early, hooking users with our most engaging content and choosing attention-grabbing video thumbnails. This is something many businesses overlook. Advertisers often believe the content looks good, but will it capture somebody’s attention while they scroll on social media? The goal is to stand out and break through the competition while keeping branding and messaging consistent.
2. Optimize ad spend.
Video marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to market to people online. Spending money on video views is a great method to get your brand exposure with the best bang for your buck. There is no doubt in our company that the most cost-effective way to target our prospective clients on social media is by video view campaigns.
For example, we have paid — and are currently paying — cents per video view. Yes, that’s right. We often even pay one-tenth of a cent for a qualified video view. In comparison to other forms of video marketing, such as commercials, which often cost tens of thousands of dollars with fewer possibilities, Facebook video marketing rings the bell for being the most affordable. Even compared to other Facebook marketing objectives, none even come close to being this cost-optimal.
3. Retarget viewers by viewing thresholds.
A golden nugget for marketers that lies beneath running paid video view campaigns is the fact that Facebook grants the ability to retarget the exact video viewers based on the duration each user watched the piece of video content. It’s built directly into the Facebook Ads Manager platform, making it possible to retarget users without installing a Pixel (cookies) on a website.
This is huge for advertisers. Not only because you can initially show ads to people who have previously watched your first piece of video content for a certain duration, but because you can then repeat and show a third video ad only to those who have watched your second and so on. By the time the user has watched at least 10 seconds of video three to five, we know they are likely qualified and ready to be targeted with direct response advertising. Once potential clients have engaged with videos one through five, we can assume they are warmed up, know more about our brand and we can advertise them OTO (one time offers), LTO (limited time offers) and more direct response campaigns that will drive revenue.
So there you have it: three solid reasons video marketing is important on social media in 2020. If you want to stand out amongst all the noise and competition, you should keep these tips in mind and start implementing video content as part of your marketing campaigns. Video marketing on social media is important because it helps capture attention, allows for remarketing based on previous viewing thresholds, and is overall more cost-effective.
