Types of Video for Online Advertising

In the marketing community, there’s a lot of buzz around video. Thanks to overwhelmingly favorable statistics around video ads, business owners are investing a lot of time and money into creating quality content that complements and maximizes their digital marketing and advertising strategies.

Here’s what’s great. These aren’t expensive television commercials or high-end video productions. So no matter what your budget is, you can afford to make video ads. In fact, you can’t afford not to. Video ads are currently the most attractive format for consumers, getting better engagement rates and more information retention.

Using a diverse combination of mediums and different types of content will maximize the effectiveness of your video ads and lead more people through your virtual doors. Let’s take a look at some strategies for incorporating video content into your online advertising strategy to get a huge ROI—and give huge enjoyment for your audience.

Going “Live” on Social Media

With the growing popularity of live-streaming on social platforms, a lot of companies are now using live stories on Facebook and Instagram to advertise their business or demonstrate new services. Live events also give you an easy platform to connect with your audience on a more personal level, answer questions, or give general information to continue to garner overall interest in your product or service. Q&A sessions are extremely beneficial for creating transparency and trust. There’s no substitute for two-way communication between your brand and your audience.

You can cover pretty much any topic, but keep consistency in mind. When committing to using a live strategy to generate interest, your audience needs to know what to expect. Make a plan for what you’ll typically talk about and when you’ll usually broadcast live events—and give your audience plenty of notice and reminders.

Social Stories

In October 2017, Instagram Stories had over 300 million active daily users, and that number was consistently growing. An easy way to utilize Stories to promote your business is to drive traffic to blog posts, landing pages, or sales pages. If your Instagram account has more than 10,000 followers, you have access to the “swipe up” feature, which lets you link to outside web pages within the story itself.

Creative brands are already fully embracing Instagram stories to engage with their audience and give them quality, original video content that contains specific calls to action that drive sales and conversions.  With the amount of exposure Instagram Stories receive in comparison to standard posts, why not take the opportunity to drive the traffic to one of your sales or product pages and watch those social media conversions grow.

With the platforms’ changing algorithms, companies are using Instagram and Facebook stories to draw more attention to their posts and maximize exposure on those channels. Since stories remain chronological, it’s easy to use them to boost engagement and advertise new things.

Facebook Live Ads

Facebook recently adopted a new method for users to run ads during their Live sessions. Certain broadcasters who host Facebook live events have the option to take a short break and play an ad during that time. Live ads are still relatively rare as Facebook figures out how to qualify which accounts can use them.

Right now, only pages with over 50,000 followers and a reach of over 300 viewers in their live videos can run ads. Users have to be live for at least four minutes before the option appears. After the first ad, you can run an ad every five minutes during the rest of your stream.

Explainer Videos

Whether a paid advertising strategy or organic attention on your website, explainer videos are highly engaging and can rapidly grow your audience. To engage and expand your audience, you can create different videos for different services or services, then target different viewers based on demographics or audience segments.

Explainer videos can be beneficial to virtually any industry and any type of product. You can distribute them on many platforms and mediums such as Facebook ad content, Instagram Stories, as introductions to webinars, or even as regularly scheduled social media posts.

With explainer videos, remember to keep them brief. Under 3 minutes is a good rule of thumb to avoid excessively long videos that aren’t adding additional value. They should also be specific, keeping everything coherent around a single idea, whether that’s a particular product, a service offering, or an idea that you’re doing thought leadership on.

If you feel intimidated by the idea of making an explainer video, there’s no need to be. In addition to all of the agencies and experts out there who focus specifically on this type of video content, explainer videos are not much different than other forms of video content. Their purpose is to inform your audience of a particular product or service and present the ideas to viewers in a new and unique way.

This explainer has much of what a good explainer video needs to—engaging graphics, a specific and understandable focus, and no time wasted in getting to the point.

Sponsored Content

To really maximize the reach on video ads, you can double down on organic video content and pay for sponsored advertising content on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Video ads on these platforms have an average clickthrough rate of 1.84%, making it the highest performing format for digital ads.

There isn’t much more that needs to be said about the capabilities and value of paid and sponsored content on. Companies realize that they can create massive returns on their advertising investment by creating highly targeted ad campaigns. By putting more of an emphasis on video ads, you can maximize that ROI even further.

Live Demonstrations

Consumers who understand your product are more likely to buy it. Seems pretty obvious right? The facts back it up. According to data by Adobe, shoppers who watch demos of a product are 1.81 times more likely to make a purchase than non-viewers.

Video demonstrations clear up a lot of confusion. Text explanations or screenshotted images help give some picture, but video is simply more complete. Seventy-one percent of consumers agree that video explains services better and paints a clearer picture of what it is you’re trying to sell.

Video demonstrations—and live demonstrations specifically—are a great opportunity to connect with your audience because, well, you’ve got no place to hide. If your product malfunctions or doesn’t work like it’s supposed to during a live demonstration, then it’s there for everyone to see. Live sessions will hold you accountable for your services. The payoff? Customers will trust you.

Webinars

In a strategy that’s similar to hosting live demonstrations, a lot of B2B companies use live stream webinars or seminars on Facebook, YouTube, and specific webinar platforms. Webinars can also demonstrate a product, possibly but not necessarily also doing a soft sell.

You can host events yourself, but you might get even more benefit from asking your customers to share their stories. Sometimes, they offer the most compelling pitch as they talk about why they use your product or service. In addition to being a soft sell of the company, webinars can generate leads much faster than other video methods if you require attendees to register ahead of time or enter their information for access to the live link or recording.

Whether you choose to create video content that organically advertises your business or product, or you use sponsored videos to spread your reach even further, video ads are proving time and time again to be a successful way to deliver your message and engage new audiences. As more platforms introduce video features and increase their advertising functionality, we’ll likely see video content go even further than the tips mentioned here.

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