Digital marketers spend a lot of time encouraging people to enter the first step of their funnel—a click on their brand’s content. Once a user clicks, they’re exposed to your brand and are presented with the opportunity to engage with you on their own site.
One tactic for successfully obtaining this user action is to optimize content so that people will want to click.
There’s an important distinction between clickable content and clickbait. Clickable content is eye-catching to the user, while still providing real value, whereas clickbait is eye-catching without providing that same value.
US digital video ad spending is expected to grow 12 percent this year, and 9 percent in 2018—the only subcategory of ad spending that is growing. – J.P. Morgan
We always suggest that marketers strive for clickable content over clickbait—our number one goal is to provide value for users. For marketers though, if users are to see your content, they have to click somewhere. Social media posts, modules on the homepage of a blog, search queries, and promotions are all examples.
We remove this challenge if the user never has to click, but can consume video—a complement to clickable content. Video is an engaging, effective and non-intrusive alternative to clickable content for marketers trying to tell their brand’s story with content.
Marketers are already taking notice. A recent study by J.P Morgan found that US digital video ad spending is expected to grow 12 percent this year, and 9 percent in 2018—the only subcategory of ad spending that is growing.
Video is growing—there’s no doubt about that. Why so fast? What makes this new platform, often known for its expense, so valuable for marketers?
It’s valuable for a lot of reasons, but for one, you get more bang for your buck when it comes to the space you fill on the web.
Video adds another dimension to your marketing real estate.
When you run a traditional ad anywhere, the content you’re presenting is flat. To entice your audience, you usually get an image and a headline—maybe a search descriptor or a social media card—but the real estate you fill with your content is one dimensional.
Videos give marketers more in that same space—you get the length of your entire video to disseminate your message, imagery and brand. As advertising technology evolves, and native and programmatic video ads become more mainstream, more marketers are taking note of the value of video in this ad real estate.
According to a study published by eMarketer, programmatic video ad spending is continuing to grow in the US. By 2018, 74 percent of digital video ad inventory will be transacted programmatically, compared with 60 percent in 2016.
Even though video ads are growing, marketers sometimes still push back on video. We sometimes hear concerns like, “it’s expensive, we’ll get less traffic to our site, if we sponsor ads we’ll lose our brands,” and more, but the truth is that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Native video ads served programmatically have one huge advantage over others—they’re served on the open web. Here, you reach your audience when they’re open to discovering you, and when they’re most likely to interact with your ad.
This is how you actually make an impact with a video.
To ensure that your story effectively reaches your audience and leaves the impression you intend, you have to have quality video content.
eMarketer gathered tips from the following experts on how to make video impactful for your next video campaign.
Tip #1: Think of your audience first.
“Everything has to be audience-driven. With the amount of data that is out there and the amount of insights you can draw from an audience, you need to not just deliver against that audience, but get to the right members of that audience and reach them at the right moment.” —Mike Racic, iCrossing
Tip #2: Plan to distribute on different formats, for different audiences.
“There may be disagreement in the marketplace around targeting, and it may be sort of a dirty word, but there’s an entire generation of people—millennials—who believe that targeting is what makes advertising relevant to them, and they want that.
They don’t want to waste their time on advertising that has nothing to do with their needs or interests.” —Jen Catto, Tremor Video
Tip #3: Keep it simple for a busy audience.
“Build your spots so they convey everything you need to convey in 5 seconds, and that the next 10 or 25 seconds are bonus time. I see so many video ads today that within 5 seconds they’re still doing the build-up.” —Jay Friedman, Goodway Group
Tip #4: Your video should be more about your audience than your brand.
“In working with influencers, brands are trying to make sure the video doesn’t look like advertising. It has to be as authentic as possible and less self-centric than it might be in a typical advertising context.” —Zbigniew Barwicz, DubDub
Both the data trends, and advice from experts, show that video is here to stay. When it come to getting users to engage with your brand, we hope that clickbait will soon become obsolete.
As users continue to grow blind to banner ads, clickbait and other strategies that are sometimes seen as less than genuine, marketers will need to pivot towards new technologies as they advance.
Taboola is the world’s leading content discovery platform, serving 360B recommendations to over 1B unique visitors each month on the web’s most innovative publisher sites. To learn more about how Taboola can help you A/B test your site content, contact us or start your campaign today.