The future of digital video advertising is undeniably bright. When it comes to brand awareness, it’s hard to beat an engaging video, with 84% of consumers attributing a brand’s videos to their decision to purchase a product.
The runaway success of TikTok and the continued growth of YouTube and Instagram provide a rich landscape of potential customers to target. But the future of digital video advertising is not without its challenges, from difficulty measuring success to challenges with targeting.
In this article, we’ll look at the future of digital video advertising, the challenging advertising market, how it will keep evolving, and how to get the most out of your video marketing.
Defining Digital Video Advertising
As a marketing strategy, digital video advertising involves using brief, engaging videos to promote a product or service. These ads will air before, during, or after the main video on platforms like YouTube, or in between posts on platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook.
Over six months, digital media company MediaMind analyzed over three billion ad impressions across the globe. They found that video ads had a whopping 27.4 times higher click-through rate (CTR) than standard banner ads.
This speaks to the fact that digital video advertising is highly effective at breaking through ‘banner blindness’ – searchers reflexively ignoring all static adverts due to oversaturation.
On YouTube, video ads will be played for at least five seconds before a ‘skip ad’ button is displayed – long enough to establish your brand name and what you sell while the viewer is fully engaged.
Across platforms, the dynamism of video makes it much easier to ‘hook’ your viewer with storytelling techniques. Furthermore, a humorous and compelling video makes for eminently sharable media. People resonate with media that makes them “feel”, especially on the platforms that they use for leisure.
The principles behind effective content marketing – supplying your audience with valuable content free of charge to build trust and brand awareness – can also be applied to digital video advertising. If you create truly entertaining and knowledgable content, not only will your brand remain in viewers’ minds, but they will also happily share it themselves.
Challenges in the Future of Digital Video Advertising
That’s not to say all video content is guaranteed to capture the audience’s attention. Like with written content, having a strategy and effective targeting is essential. Otherwise, you’re not likely to see much ROI.
Not incorporating SEO into your strategy, beginning the video with a call to action (ie, taking a hard-sell approach), or creating a video with low production values are all likely to repel viewers as they grow more aware of advertising approaches.
Creating content that offers value to your viewers is crucial – although combining entertainment value with information is a balancing act that’s easier said than done. There’s no point in creating a ten-minute video methodically explaining how to do something if the first few seconds don’t compel viewers to keep watching. Likewise, creating an outlandishly bold ad for viral video bait is unlikely to reap results if it’s unclear what you’re offering.
Your strategy must also take into account the differences in tone between platforms. The same potential customer will be engaged by different things on LinkedIn than on Instagram, for example, as they will browse these platforms with different intents.
Assuming that you create good quality, valuable ad content, the advertising landscape is the next hurdle to overcome. In the current market, ads are providing less and less ROAS. The changes in data collection across a variety of platforms has made it more challenging to target the right audience. Without effective targeting, ads have limited success.
As a result, it’s now more expensive to reach your audience and generate conversions with ads of any kind. So the question is, how do you ensure that your video content works for your marketing strategy?
What is the Future?
While it’s clear that advertising is still finding its feet in the midst of new data collection trends, there are other ways to resonate with your audience via video content.
There is still a vast audience to be tapped into on video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Lack of ads success doesn’t mean that you should avoid them altogether. In fact, each person consumes around 100 minutes of video content per day, across platforms. YouTube has over 120 million daily active users that your marketing needs to target.
So, if ads don’t work, how do you get your content in front of the right audience?
Affiliate marketing continues to expand in popularity, particularly in the B2C space. The strategy makes use of the existing relationships that affiliates have built with their audience to boost a companies reach.
Affiliate marketing allows you to ensure that your content reaches the right audience, by partnering with the right affiliates or influencers. It’s also a great way to boost your reach, while your content or inbound strategies take hold. Affiliate marketing offers the same benefits as paid advertising, with improved potential for a good ROI.
Great marketers will also realize video content should be used far beyond advertising for full effectiveness. Videos can be embedded into email sequences, lending more professionalism and value to outbound campaigns. Webinars can be a powerful form of gated content. How-to videos relating to your buyers’ industry are an impactful form of content marketing, as many people process instructions better over video than written step-by-step instructions.
Video Ad Agency for B2B
To get the most out of your video ads, you need a dedicated eye on the analytics and key metrics of your ads. Effective targeting, consumer research, competitor analysis, and persuasive landing pages all underpin video marketing success.
An ad agency can be a powerful ally in this. Consistency is key in any marketing campaign, but especially crucial for leveraging content to build loyalty and trust. Even if you can hypothetically manage all your marketing yourself, it’s important to be aware of logistical challenges – will you have the time to ensure results?
Doing your marketing in your spare time may cut costs in the short term, but if your efforts don’t build into a synergistic strategy, they may not amount to much.
A video ad agency can do the crucial, in-depth research into how you should be pitching and targeting your ads, create a content plan for you accordingly and then write, shoot and edit the material. They will then monitor your campaigns and experiment for maximum ROI.
At Nituno, we are a full-service marketing agency that uses a selection of methods, from video ads to inbound, outbound, and affiliate marketing to meet our individual clients’ needs. Experience has taught us that every client requires a fresh strategy and a keen understanding of their goals and objectives. Book a strategy meeting today.
