Let video be your brand ambassador.
Consider how many hours a day you spend surfing the web, either for work or for play. How many of those hours are spent watching or listening to videos? From social media and news sites to company web pages, video content is fast becoming the number one way to engage audiences.
This is where digital video advertising comes in. At Stream Companies, we know what it takes to create and curate video ads to send more retail traffic your way. The visual web is here to stay, so harness it as your latest and greatest digital tool!
What is digital video advertising?
And why does it work?
Digital video advertising is the delivery of promotional video content to a target audience via an internet network. The audience sees the content on an internet-connected device—perhaps a laptop, smartphone, tablet, or even a TV.
It’s no surprise that video ads boast high engagement. After all, they appeal to the user’s senses. And not just visually (an appeal they share with banner ads) but also through movement and sound.
All these play a role in conveying a message well and doing so efficiently. (Remember: Efficiency can’t be overstated in an era of short attention spans!)
The video advantage
Of course, image and text ads play a part in any successful digital advertising campaign. You shouldn’t replace them—but you can enhance them.
Image or text ads rely on less immediate cues to set the tone. The user must follow the hints left in the copy, punctuation, and visuals to understand. But the most effective advertisement doesn’t need to be deciphered.
Video meets that high standard of engagement. When we say this format delivers your message more efficiently, we simply mean users can absorb it more easily.
A video ad that uses sound and movement to captivate an audience AND follows through with a relevant call-to-action? It puts you in the driver’s seat so you can hold your audience’s interest and compel them to continue engaging.
Users remember 95% of a message when it is watched
That’s compared to just 10% of a message when it is read! Your prospects are more likely to remember your message when absorbed through a less cognitively challenging medium like video.
Here’s another statistic for you: If a user has a positive experience with a video ad, it increases their purchase intent by 97%. That nearly doubles the probability that they will buy a product or service.
The same experience has been shown to increase brand association—the mental connection between the brand and the concept in the video—by 139%.
Yes, you can quibble about the results of any one study—and about how well these numbers represent your particular industry. However, you can’t argue with the underlying trends that favor video as a marketing medium in the digital space.
What are videos good at?
Okay—we’ve established that people like videos! But let’s dig a little deeper. What makes video such a powerful marketing agent in terms of creating more customers?
Depending on the types of videos you make and—very importantly—where you promote them, you’ll find that videos succeed at:
- Brand storytelling. Every brand has a story to tell, and that story must be told to stand out from the crowd. The visuals, sound, and movement of video make it the prime advertising choice for brand storytelling.
- Raising brand awareness. Closely related to the previous point, the compelling nature of video content makes it excellent for raising brand awareness—making your target audience aware of your brand and its solutions.
- Driving conversions. By their own accounts, many consumers have made purchasing decisions after being influenced by videos on social media.
- Generating leads. Before you drive conversions, you must create leads. Videos excel at generating consumer interest in a product or service.
- Increasing website traffic. Yes, video content plays a major role in SEO, with Google highly favoring videos for its search engine results pages (SERPs).
Who and how do we target with video ads?
So, how does Stream approach video advertising differently? Every campaign is precisely targeted. We run 95% of our campaigns at the zip code level, so you can run video ads in areas where you’re doing the most business.
We can help you track metrics that other agencies can’t. With our addressable geofencing capabilities, we can show you how many people saw your video ad and showed up in person at your showroom 30 or 60 days out. We’ll use that same tech to deliver personalized video content to users!
We run general market and Spanish-language campaigns, too. Our team targets people who are enjoying the web on their own language browser. We choose placements that match with the media they watch most, whether it’s the news, sports, soap operas, or anything else.
Stream-lined video content for real people
There’s an advantage to having our team’s eyes on your video content all the time. All the extra work we put in, for instance, reduces the chance for fraud and false impressions.
In fact, we perform a random audit every few months for all our campaigns. Lately, we’re running at just 0.5% non-human traffic in a field where 15% is considered par for the course! We believe that when you pay by the impression, it’s important to optimize for real impressions.
Meanwhile, we don’t simply pick our placements and leave it at that. You can always expect white-glove service from us. Our media vendors are pulling the levers and actively optimizing your video advertising campaigns every day! That means more powerful impressions for your business.
Live Metal: Discover Amazon video advertising today
Amazon is everywhere these days. More users than ever are choosing the platform for online shopping as well as video streaming via Amazon Prime Video. With our Live Metal offering, you’ll have the power to reach your Amazon audience with the latest in digital advertising techniques!
Reap the rewards of a three-pronged approach and run a more dynamic campaign through the Amazon network with:
- Connected TV (CTV) Ads
- Digital Display Ads
- Digital Video Ads
Why choose an integrated ad agency for video?
Traditionally, digital video advertising is understood to be part of the over-the-top (OTT) advertising realm—those television-adjacent media services that users access through the internet, including connected TV and streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video.
And of course, that is the future of video advertising! But it’s not the only future. It’s far from the only way to use your videos to build an audience and convert leads into customers.
When you work hand-in-hand with our full-service, fully integrated, tech-enabled advertising agency, your digital video ads will have life beyond OTT advertising. They can permeate every aspect of your online presence!
Integrated means all our departments talk to each other. The right hand always knows what the left hand is doing! Once your digital video content has been produced, we can use it across all marketing channels where it makes sense to do so.
It’s a unified approach and a unified message. Here are just some of the ways we can use your video ads beyond the realm of OTT.
Video content can live on your website
Aside from video content being compelling in its own right—a boon for user experience—there’s another reason to make your website a home for video content.
Video content directly affects your page’s rankings on the Google search results pages (SERPs). The two things Google values most? They are (1) the quality of your content, and (2) its relevance to someone’s original search terms.
Google determines these qualities by scanning your page for more than just text. It looks for visuals, including videos, that show your page has varied content that connects back to the user’s search query.
Keep in mind, too, that video is generally the most effective medium for engaging an audience. That means it’s more likely to keep visitors on your page and website. Why is that important?
Well, bounce rate is also a factor in SEO. If a user clicks through to your website only to leave immediately without exploring the site or engaging with the content, it will hurt your page’s ranking on the SERPs.
Google wants to know that real people value your content. If they like what they find, they’ll stay a while and explore more—and Google will know!
Video for your social media account
If you’re not using your video ads on your social media pages, you’re missing out on one of the most lucrative conversion machines in your arsenal.
With a higher click-through rate and more shares, video content is more likely to lead to real, honest engagement with your social posts. If your goal is to drive traffic from your social media to your website (and it should be!), using videos in your post is the best way to do it, statistically speaking.
And remember this: The more effective your social media machinery, the more effective your SEO efforts will be.
No, social media does not directly contribute to SEO ranking. In other words, it’s not part of Google’s algorithm. However, social media does indirectly influence search engine optimization in a range of very real ways.
After all, when you distribute more content to a wider audience—and that audience shares it with an even wider audience—your brand will have better online visibility and your website will see more organic traffic.
That organic traffic does directly affect SEO—especially if Google senses users found information that was valuable to them (measured by how much time they spend on your site). And with that, we circle back to the importance of quality content on your website—including the most compelling content of all, video!
Video for email marketing / landing pages
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that your marketing emails make the perfect home for videos. Just as with social media, including videos in your emails correlates with higher click-through rates compared to emails without videos.
Most email clients do not support embedded videos for spam and security reasons. Instead, you can create a video thumbnail image, incorporate that into your email, and link it to a landing page where your video lives.
And while we’re on the topic, landing pages are the best places to use video! With video, that initial click through to the website from an email or paid search ad is the only click a user needs to connect with your message. (That’s the goal—to make the experience as effortless as possible for your prospects!)
Why videos are better than any other medium
Video has not (and probably will never) replace the written word in marketing. However, it has taken a big chunk out of traditional copy, and deservedly so.
In a battle of video vs. text, it’s clear you do need both. But as videos challenge not only text but also other mediums—images, infographics, podcasts—it’s worth considering why it has become the most popular content consumed globally.
Before we leave you, we’d like to finish with a few thoughts on why this is.
1) Video uses nonverbal communication
Yes, word choice, punctuation, and visual features—the hallmarks of traditional text-and-image content—matter. That will never change. But there’s something that matters more in conveying a message: body language and verbal tone.
You’ll only find that in video. Users can understand exactly what the speaker is communicating thanks to visual cues only present in a three-dimensional space. And because video can incorporate other visual aids—images and footage among them—it becomes even more valuable as a marketing and communication tool.
2) Video is made up of all other mediums
As we alluded to earlier, video can include all other forms of visual and auditory content. It’s not a matter of either-or. With video, you have the best of all worlds.
It can contain a podcast and an article all in one, not to mention an unending stream of text, images, and infographics. No other medium is as versatile, which is why video has secured its position at the top of the content food chain.
3) People watch videos
Videos are popular. Viewers are more likely to feel favorably disposed to watching a video from the get-go compared to other types of content.
Consumers are 27.4 times more likely to click-through online video ads than standard banner ads. If your video has valuable, concise, and engaging content—plus a good hook at the beginning—can build on this initial interest and keep viewers watching.
4) People share videos
Content should be created for people, not algorithms. That’s easy to say, but it’s a bit harder to walk the walk. Thankfully, video does half the walking for you.
That’s because internet users are more likely to share videos than any other form of content. Videos are quick to watch, and on top of that, they’re relatable—more instantly relatable than other forms of content.
5) Video is quick & high quality
It’s no secret that reading takes longer than watching. It’s not an intuitive skill—it’s something we have to be trained to do. It requires a higher level of attention and cognitive work when you really want to give viewers an effortless experience.
Even podcasts take longer to present content. Because there’s no visual assistance, they have to rely on the (often long-winded!) powers of explanation. It’s the visual element that’s often responsible for, and most effective at, compressing content.
Videos allow visual and audio to sit side-by-side and work together. If articles and podcasts can sometimes be too wordy and tedious to read or listen to, and visuals alone can be too simple to convey a message, both together is the best answer. They compensate for each other’s weaknesses.
6) Video is a call to action
You’ve probably heard it before: Always include a call to action in your content. Well, video is something of a call to action in and of itself.
What we’re saying is that video triggers action, and it does it better than any other medium. (Save for a live event… but that’s really just video without the screen as a middleman!)
Video creates a more authentic interaction thanks to nonverbal interaction (see point 1). So long as the speaker is judged to be as honest and forthcoming—i.e., the presentation is effective—viewers will be more open to what he or she has to say.
A call-to-action with a video produces more clicks than just a call-to-action button. In other words, video may be the missing ingredient if you want more conversions!
7) Video is convenient to produce
Nowadays, anyone with a smartphone can click “record” and speak about a topic. Of course, if you’re looking for quality that’s a cut above, you can always turn to Stream’s Full Service Audio & Video Production.
We can:
Tell your story organically through expertly crafted testimonial video
Use stunning visuals to make your product, service, or facilities stand out
Bring your brand to life with professional speaking talent or your own home-grown personalities
We also have one of the fastest turnaround times in the industry, so you can have your content aired or posted when it’s most relevant to your audience!
8) Video produces better search engine results
There’s less video content online than there is written content. That means videos are more likely to reach audiences that search for relevant keywords.
Videos are much more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results than text-based content. The exact numbers depend on the study—various studies have shown first-page rankings for videos to be 45 or 53 times more likely than for text-based content—but it’s clear that videos stand a better chance of being visible.
9) Video reaches the widest market
You’re not trying to reach everyone with your message—just the audience most interested in the products, services, and solutions you have to offer.
Still, it makes sense to start with the widest available market. That’s where you’ll find your people, after all. On the internet, video is the best way to reach the consumers your business caters to.
By some estimates, video now accounts for half of all mobile traffic. That’s more than any other medium can claim! If your business uses video, you’re primed to boost your exposure, grow brand awareness, and convert more customers.
Build connections with creative video ads
A medium at once visual and audial, digital video advertising can move your audience in so many ways. It’s time to embrace the possibilities of video ads with the digital marketing team that knows how to do them best! Reach out to Stream Companies today and learn what a difference video can make.