Are you pouring your heart into your social media marketing efforts but feeling like you’re not quite hitting the mark? You’re not alone.
According to marketing and ad agency pros surveyed in 2023, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are the most effective channels for video marketing. Yet navigating the waters of social media video ads can be challenging, and using the wrong approach can lead to costly mistakes.
Our guide will help unlock the secrets to captivating your audience and boosting your video ad performance across major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and TikTok.
We’ve also teamed up with Nina Dans, the Director of Paid Social at Socium Media, who’ll share insider tips and strategies to stay competitive.
Let’s jump right in!
The following are our top 11 tips to create winning ads on social media:
Understanding your audience is the foundation of any successful video advertising campaign on social media. Each platform, be it Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube, is brimming with users from diverse backgrounds, each with their unique interests, needs, and challenges. So before creating your video ad, it's crucial to invest time in researching and segmenting your target audience.
Start by determining who your ideal customer is. This could be based on descriptive information like job titles, industries, skills, or even the size of the companies they work for. You can also factor in demographic information like age, gender, and education level. There are advanced search and filtering options offered on each social media platform that can help you target your ideal customer based on these descriptive and demographic characteristics.
Pro Tip: Create personas for each type of customer that represent your ideal customer. If you’re selling a nutrition bar, you could create the persona “Kyle the Weekend Warrior” and think about what kind of interests and descriptions represent that persona.
Next, aim to understand your target’s professional pain points (What do they need help with? What problems do they need to solve?)aspirations (What are their ultimate goals? Dreams?), and the kind of content they engage with (What type of content would get them to stop scrolling?).
Explore popular topics and trends within your target industry by following relevant hashtags, joining industry groups, or keeping an eye on thought leaders.
When you have a clear understanding of your audience, you can craft a message that resonates. For instance, you can create a founder video ad that tells the story of your brand's creator so potential customers can easily relate to your offerings.
Tailor your video's storyline, tone, and visual elements to appeal to their sensibilities. Make sure the content is relevant, relatable, and addresses their needs or challenges. By doing so, your video ad will not just capture their attention but also encourage engagement and drive action.
Takeaways:
A clear message is vital when crafting a social media video ad. It’s the core idea you want your audience to remember and act upon after watching your ad. The clearer your message, the more likely it is that your viewers will understand and respond to your call to action (CTA).
To develop a clear message, first identify the primary purpose of your ad. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, promote a product, or drive sign-ups for an event? Once you have defined your goal, everything in your ad, from the script to the visuals, should be designed to support and enhance this main message.
Remember, you have a short window to engage your viewers, typically just a few seconds. Make sure your core message is conveyed early and succinctly in your ad. Avoid industry jargon and keep your language simple, relatable, and direct.
Visual elements and storytelling can also play a vital role in conveying your message. For instance, showing a product in action can be more impactful than merely talking about its features. The right visuals can quickly convey complex ideas, evoke emotions, and add depth to your message, all while making your ad more engaging.
Finally, ensure that your call-to-action aligns with your core message. If your message is about the benefits of a product, your call-to-action could be a prompt to purchase or learn more about the product. By maintaining consistency between your message and your call-to-action, you can create a strong, coherent ad that drives the viewer towards the desired action.
Takeaways:
Consistency in branding across your social media video ads is an essential strategy for enhancing brand recognition and trust. Consistency means ensuring that all elements of your video ads - like colors, fonts, logos, messaging tone, and even the style of visuals - align with your brand's identity.
Why is this important?
Consistent branding helps create a coherent and memorable brand image in the minds of your audience. It contributes to a sense of familiarity, which in turn leads to increased trust and loyalty. When viewers see similar styles, colors, or messaging across your video ads, they can instantly recognize it as belonging to your brand, even before they see your logo or brand name.
A few ways to ensure branding consistency across your video ads include:
By maintaining consistency in your branding across all video ads, you reinforce your brand identity every time a viewer interacts with one of your ads. Over time, this can significantly boost your brand recall, recognition, and loyalty, contributing to long-term growth and success.
Takeaways:
The sales funnel is the model illustrating the journey that a customer takes from the first interaction with your brand to the final purchase and beyond. A well structured sales funnel is an integral aspect of any marketing strategy. Creating social media video ads that align with each stage of the sales funnel is critical for effectively guiding potential customers towards conversion.
Most social media platforms allow you to choose the campaign objective that best aligns with the different stages of the sales funnel. These objectives can range from increasing brand awareness, driving engagement, promoting app installs, to ultimately pushing for conversions or sales. By selecting the appropriate objective for your video ad campaign, you're essentially targeting the right audience at the right time in their purchasing journey. This allows for more efficient use of your advertising budget and increases the likelihood of achieving your desired results.
By tailoring your social media video ads to the specific stage of the sales funnel, you're delivering the right message at the right time. This strategic approach increases the chances of guiding the viewer from mere awareness to actual conversion, ultimately optimizing the effectiveness of your ad strategy.
Takeaways:
Utilizing high-quality visuals in your video ads is pivotal for creating a professional and polished impression on your viewers. In the digital age, where visuals dominate our screens, the quality of your visuals can profoundly impact the effectiveness of your ads.
Above all, your visuals should enhance and support your core message, not distract from it. High-quality visuals not only draw attention but also reflect your brand's quality and company professionalism.
Takeaways:
Keeping your video ads short and engaging is key to the best performance on social media. With a multitude of content vying for user attention on the platform, time is the most valuable commodity. The brevity of your video ad can make a big difference in capturing and maintaining viewer interest.
The optimal length for social video ads is generally between 6 seconds to a minute, while 15-second and 30-second video ads are most widely used. This duration allows you to convey your message succinctly without losing the viewer's attention.
However, the most critical part of the video is the first few seconds. Studies show that you have as little as 3 seconds to hook your viewer. Therefore, your video should start with a captivating hook that instantly grabs attention and encourages viewers to continue watching.
Here are the most common social media video ad durations depending on the platform:
Remember, an engaging video is not just about catching the viewer's eye. It's about delivering value in a concise and captivating way that encourages viewers to take the desired action.
Takeaways:
Adding subtitles to your social media video ads is an important strategy for enhancing accessibility and boosting engagement. Many users browse social media platforms in settings where they can't or don't want to play audio, like while commuting or in a quiet room. As a result, a significant percentage of video ads are viewed with the sound off.
By including subtitles, you ensure that your message is conveyed clearly to all viewers, regardless of their audio situation.
Subtitles can also aid comprehension. They help clarify complex terms or information and are a useful tool for those whose first language is different from the video's language. We should always take the opportunity to make content more inclusive and user-friendly, which also expands your reach.
From an accessibility standpoint, subtitles are essential. They allow deaf and hard of hearing users to interact with your content, ensuring it is accessible to a diverse audience.
Creating subtitles often involves producing a text transcript of your video's audio and synchronizing it with the video using software tools or online platforms. Many social media platforms also offer auto-caption features, although you should check to make sure any auto-generated captions are correct and free of errors.
In summary, subtitles aren't just a nice-to-have – they can significantly enhance your video ad's effectiveness by ensuring your message is accessible and understood by as many people as possible.
Takeaways:
Creating a compelling Call to Action (CTA) is a key aspect of any successful social media video ad. The CTA is your invitation to the viewer, instructing them what step to take after watching your video. It’s the result you want from your video, from visiting your website, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading an app, and buying a product, to simply sharing the video with others.
A well-crafted CTA is a vital tool in converting viewers into potential leads or customers. Without a CTA, even an engaging video with a clear message can leave viewers wondering what their next step should be.
Pro Tip: Ad viewers will not take action unless you tell them to.
Here are some essential considerations for your CTA:
In conclusion, a well-thought-out CTA acts as a bridge between viewer engagement and conversion. It's a crucial driver of the impact of your video ad on social media.
Takeaways:
Optimizing your social media video ads for mobile is increasingly important given the rise of smartphone usage. Studies suggest that a significant percentage of social media users access these platforms via mobile devices. This means that creating a mobile-friendly experience is critical to effectively reach and engage with your audience.
Here are some strategies for optimizing your video ads for mobile:
By optimizing for mobile, you ensure your video ads are user-friendly and accessible to the majority of your audience, regardless of the device they're using. This can significantly improve the effectiveness and reach of your video ads.
Takeaways:
User-Generated Content (UGC) is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, or audio, that has been posted by users on social media platforms. It's essentially word-of-mouth for the digital age. When incorporated into your video ads, it can significantly boost their effectiveness and in the best case, go viral.
Here's why UGC is so powerful:
Authenticity: UGC offers a genuine and unfiltered view of your brand from the customer's perspective. It shows your product or service being used in real-life situations, adding a level of authenticity that can be hard to achieve with professionally produced content.
Trust: People trust their peers more than they trust brands. In fact, according to research, user-generated content is considered more trustworthy and influential on purchase decisions than other types of media.
Engagement: UGC is often more engaging than brand-created content. When your audience sees people like them in your ads, it can encourage them to interact, share, or even create their own content.
To leverage UGC in your video ads, start by encouraging your audience to share their experiences organically with your brand on social media. This could be through contests, giveaways, or simply by asking for their feedback or stories. When you receive UGC, always ask for permission before using it in your ads.
Next, incorporate the best UGC content into your video ad strategy. This could involve creating a montage of customer testimonials, showing real-life product demonstrations, or sharing stories of how your product or service has made a difference in people's lives.
By leveraging UGC, you can create more authentic, engaging, and effective video ads, ultimately boosting your social media advertising performance.
Takeaways:
Using analytics tools to measure the performance of your social media video ads is key to understanding what works and what doesn't for your specific audience. The right metrics can provide actionable insights that you can leverage to optimize your future ads for engagement and conversion.
Some essential metrics you should track include:
It's important to note that the relevance of these metrics can vary depending on your campaign goals. If your goal is brand awareness, view count and engagement might be the most critical. If it's conversions you're after, then CTR and conversion rate will be the focus.
By regularly reviewing these analytics, you can make data-driven decisions to refine your video ad strategy. Identify trends, uncover areas for improvement, and determine which aspects of your video ads are driving the most results. Ultimately, this allows you to create more effective video ads that align with your objectives and resonate with your audience. We discuss how to review and optimize video ads in our other blog posts.
Where do you find analytics?
Every platform usually has a dashboard like Meta Ads, Google Ads, or LinkedIn Ads. You can view the metrics on the dashboard and customize which of them you want to see by default. For example, information on LinkedIn impressions can help you make more informed decisions for your brand. Doing so can let you craft the best video ads LinkedIn users rave about.
Alternatively, you can always download spreadsheets or plug into the APIs to programmatically access the data.
Takeaways:
The perfect video is different for each business. But with the following steps and best practices, you can greatly increase the odds of success by making sure the video you create is aligned with your audiences needs and desires.
Nina Dans at Socium Media agrees, "The perfect social media video doesn't exist. No two audiences are alike. Finding the perfect video formula will take lots of testing, and things can change overnight."
Creating high-performing video ads on social media is a multifaceted process that requires thoughtful planning, creativity, and strategic execution. From understanding your audience to crafting compelling narratives, leveraging analytics, and aligning your content with the sales funnel stages, each step plays a pivotal role in the success of your video ad campaigns.
But the key to truly captivating your audience lies in delivering value. If your video ads educate, entertain, inspire, or solve a problem for your audience, they are more likely to engage and ultimately convert.
As technology and consumer habits continue to evolve, keeping these best practices in mind will help you stay ahead of the curve and maximize the impact of your social media video ads. Keep iterating and innovating, and you'll witness the power of well-crafted video ads in driving your brand's growth and success. Happy creating!
Success in the realm of social media video ads can take on many forms, but at its core, success results from creating a meaningful connection with your audience that is strong enough to drive them to complete a desired action. Success could mean building brand awareness among an audience, generating leads for follow up contact, driving website traffic, or promoting sales of specific items.
Beyond just numbers, true success means creating content that resonates with viewers, sparks conversations, and cultivates long-lasting relationships. In a modern world where everyone is dealing with information overload, sustainable success means being authentic, delivering value, and creating memorable experiences that keep your clients and customers coming back for more.
But how can you come up with and create a video ad that achieves these goals? How do you stand out in the crowded social media space and truly engage your audience? That's exactly what we'll explore in this blog!
We will explore proven strategies and practical tips to guide you in crafting high-performing video ads across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. Buckle up and let’s transform your social media video advertising strategy!
If you want a team behind you that understands how to maximize the impact of your social media video ads, from planning, to creative production, to testing, get in touch with us. We’d love to hear your goals and discuss what approach might be best for your video ads!
