Creating advertising campaigns for Facebook can be pretty overwhelming.
You see, this platform is increasingly crowded with businesses promoting their products or services, so you need to employ valuable content that engages your audience and makes your brand stand out from your competitors.
When it comes to developing winning content, there’s no better option than using videos.
Facebook video ads, when used right, can have a huge, positive impact on your company’s overall marketing strategy. They can increase ad engagement, drive more conversions, and boost brand awareness – just to name a few.
However, crafting a successful video marketing campaign for Facebook is no simple task, as there are several crucial aspects to keep in mind. For instance, choosing a video type that aligns with your goals and target audience.
To help you get such a strategy going – or help you improve an existing campaign – we will dive into a few key elements all successful video ad campaigns should account for, as well as provide professional tips on how to make the most out of each one!
Let’s get started!
The Thing About Campaign Goals
It’s no secret that defining your campaign objective is of paramount importance. Since this is the first thing you have to select when creating ads on Facebook, you may be thinking too obvious of a tip. But bear with me for a second!
Even though the platform makes it seem like a simple selection, it’s essential to analyze your options and get a bigger picture of what you can achieve with each one of these goals before just clicking the one that “feels” most accurate.
For instance, “Traffic” or “Brand awareness” objectives may work better for smaller companies that want people to click on the ad to learn about them. On the contrary, those goals won’t do anything for an established brand that aims to drive more conversions. In those instances, “Catalog sales” is often a better option, as it allows you to retarget people by showing them a product they’ve already shown interest in or even added to their cart.
Instead of making the mistake of glossing over this choice, take some time and consider the different alternatives available and how each matches your objectives for this specific campaign. It is a choice that can have a great impact on how effective your strategy ends up being.
Adapting Your Video Content to Your Ideal Customer Profile
When using video ads on Facebook, you naturally want to ensure you get a good ROI, and the best way to go about it (if you are doing everything else right) is to use video content tailored to the audience you are trying to convert.
Large audiences on Facebook can be divided into three categories: cold, warm, and hot.
Cold, refers to those who have not engaged or noticed your content yet. Warm contains people who have previously engaged with your business. Lastly, hot refers to your existing website visitors or people that supplied their contact information (qualified leads).
Pro tip: you can get this information by installing a Facebook pixel on your website.
Needless to say, these audiences are very different from each other, which means that creating only one type of video ad for all of them would be a massive mistake. Luckily, within the Ads Manager feature on Facebook, you’ll be able to layer your audiences to make things easier.
For example, if your goal is to reach new people, you can exclude the warm and hot audiences, as they already know about your brand, and focus on the cold ones instead. Remember, effective segmentation is key to successful Facebook video ads.
Once you have that defined and configured on the platform, it’s time to choose or create a video that makes sense for that type of audience. So let’s take a look at some of the most popular styles of videos, divided by audience type.
and make them trust your brand, are ideal for these types of ads:
- Explainer videos are designed to inform people about a product, service, or company in a concise and engaging way. In less than two minutes, the format allows you to deliver a lot of handy data and simplify concepts. This style works wonders for a cold audience since it educates and engages people in record time. Moreover, it introduces your brand and offerings in a subtle but memorable way.
- Educational videos can be used to tackle people’s main points, help them understand and address the problem. As a rule, they should be specific and focus on only one topic. This style can be very helpful to target a cold audience because it helps you position your company as an expert in its field and, as a result, it generates trust.
Video Styles for a Warm Audience
As we mentioned before, people from this audience classification have already engaged with your brand in some way but haven’t made a purchase yet. Video content for this type of potential customer should bring them closer to a conversion, even if not yet outright, trying to make them go for a buying decision. Here are a couple of styles that excel at that:
- Product videos are crafted to showcase the benefits, qualities, and uses of a product or service. This video type gives you the perfect opportunity to showcase your product as well as your brand personality and creativity – by creating a compelling story around your offerings, for example. This style is a great option to use for the “Catalog sales” objective we’ve mentioned before.
- How-to videos showcase people explaining a product or a service process step-by-step. They often use animations to improve data retention and add a fun tone to the video without sacrificing targetability.
- Given that people from a warm audience know a bit about your offerings but haven’t taken action, these video types can help you make them jump to the latter stages of a funnel.
Video Styles for a Hot Audience
People from this type of audience are the closest to making a buying decision, given that they are already familiar with your business and products. They need a little boost to close the deal.
A good exercise here can be to analyze the potential reasons that have prevented such people from making a purchase. For example, the fact that they may not trust your offerings enough just yet, or aren’t sure about your product’s pricing. For instance, these two styles can lend you a hand:
- Testimonial videos share the perspective of one of your current, happy customers with potential clients. Following an organized structure, they aim to showcase the story of a customer who is satisfied with your offerings or whom your business had a positive impact on. This style is perfect for nurturing customer trust in your brand and getting your leads closer to a shopping decision.
- Commercials focus on the company and the product or service being promoted. They tend to be short and use storytelling to foster empathy. When it comes to a hot audience, creating commercial videos can be very handy and, since they are tailored to explicitly sell something, you can use them to leverage time-sensitive incentives, like a product discount.
A Note on Optimizing Your Campaign’s Budget
Once your video ad starts taking form, it’s also crucial to find ways to make the best use of your PPC budget, as this can make or break your strategy. That said, Campaign Budget Optimization or CBO, enables you to relax a bit and put things in Facebook’s hands.
This tool is especially useful if you are running different video ads campaigns for different targets and don’t know how to distribute your money to make the most out of it. In this case, you can tell Facebook the minimum or maximum amount you want to spend on each of them. This way, Facebook will distribute it equally and then add the remaining money to the audience that is estimated to bring the most cost-effective results.
Now, suppose you’ve created an explainer video to launch a dating app in February. Of course, you won’t be the only one. Facebook will be monopolized by Valentine’s Day ads. Thus, setting a higher bid can be a smart move to have the upper hand on your competitors. Moreover, it will ensure your video ad is placed in front of people more likely to buy it.
Ultimately, it boils down to your business and unique circumstances, so it’s a bit harder to provide more specific guidelines here. Our advice? Make sure you test your different options and iterate on what’s working to maximize your returns.
Parting Thoughts
As you can see, Facebook offers many tools to help businesses get as much as possible in terms of a return on investment. There’s not a unique formula, though. It all depends on your campaign objective and, of course, the audience you want to target.But one thing is for sure; video content remains an extremely powerful instrument to conquer the Facebook market. And it happens to be so versatile that you can, and should, use it for every traffic layer and every marketing goal. So, what are you waiting for to start creating top-notch Facebook video ads? Good luck!
