Facebook has grown far beyond being just the place people go to share cat memes and have heated discussions with their peers. In recent years, the platform has become a network where users discover new products, primarily through video ads’ consumption.
With its unique ability to drive engagement and conversions, Facebook presents excellent opportunities that e-commerce businesses shouldn’t ignore. So much so that startups, marketers, and animation companies are always putting all their creative efforts into developing content suitable for the platform.
Now, at first glance, launching a Facebook video ads campaign might appear to be very tricky. Users navigate the platform in a particular way, and Facebook offers you many features that, if unaware, could be easily overlooked.
To keep that from happening to you, we’ve compiled this guide where we cover all the essential aspects of effective Facebook video advertising. Giving you tips and tricks so that you can maximize your campaign efforts with minimum effort.
Facebook Ads by the Numbers
But just before we proceed to the nuts and bolts of video ads on Facebook, let’s look at some of the stats and trends that make the platform such a great place to promote your brand.
- At this point, we can confidently say that the Facebook community loves watching videos—with over 8 billion views daily, Facebook is the second-largest video hub only behind YouTube.
- Many marketers and SMB owners who have used Facebook say it has had a more direct impact on their business —about 8.4x higher— than any other social channel, so they plan to continue investing in video in the near future.
- The completion rate for 30 seconds video ads is higher than on other social platforms: while only 2% of Twitter users watch an ad to the end, 32% of Facebook audiences do.
- Similarly, Facebook ads drive engagement: users are 10x more likely to react, comment, or link click in a Facebook ad than they are on most other social platforms.
Based on these metrics, Facebook videos look like a promising option to add to your marketing toolkit. But what exactly makes the platform so good for advertising?
Figuring Out Your Demographics and Customizing Your Content for Them
The success of video advertising on Facebook depends on two crucial factors: the audience you choose to target and the type of video you give them. Let’s start with the first.
When you set up an ad to run, you can customize it to reach your ideal audience. Some of the most basic options include demographic variables, like the location, age, and gender of your general buyer persona. These are essential for your videos to be visible to customers within your reach.
But Facebook gives you a lot more options to specify your targets in more detail!
- Educational level and work experience.
- Key life events such as anniversaries.
- Financial behavior and purchase history.
- Interests in certain industries, hobbies, entertainment sources, and so on.
The idea is that once you define the basic outlook of your audience, you narrow it down further and further with advanced options based on their particular interests and behavior. This will ensure that your videos reach users who are generally open to your type of content.
Best Video Style for Each Stage of the Funnel
Once you zero in on your target audience, you want to give them content suited to their needs. Marketing on social media is not like traditional TV ads: rather than promoting a product directly, you should aim to build a relationship with your prospects.
How does that look in actual practice? The marketing sales funnel model is very useful to help you understand what videos you should give to your audience at any given moment.
Awareness Stage
You do not want to approach your audience cold by being overly promotional. Prospects who have no experience with your brand are far from ready to discover a new product, let alone buy it. But they are open to consuming content with which they can learn something new and better understand their problems.
At this stage, educational videos can help you establish yourself as a reference, a knowledgeable expert in the field. Animated pieces in particular, such as motion graphics videos, are great for addressing an important question or topic, in a fun and engaging style.
Consideration Stage
Once your audience has a better understanding of their pain points, they start researching online for solutions.
With the right product video, you can give your targets a taste of what your brand is all about. These videos showcase your product put into action. They are a reliable choice to give an accurate image of your solution, which users can then use to compare with other options out there.
Decision Stage
Having a pretty good handle of their problems and the available solutions, the main question that remains in your customer’s minds is who to listen to. Out of all the providers in the business, which one seems the most reliable and trustworthy?
You can effectively convey your brand’s values and mission with testimonial videos. Direct commentary from happy customers or your team provides personal insights on how your solutions can improve and ease the lives of others.
Advanced Feature: Retarget Audiences Based on Their Behavior
What makes Facebook video ads such a distinctive option is that the venue gives you the chance to make corrections and improvements as you go.
The platform provides you with useful and detailed analytics that will allow you to direct your videos to more and more specific audiences. Once you start running an ad, you will be able to see the behavior of audiences towards your content: your completion rates, total engagements, profile clicks, and many more features.
Armed with this information, you can use it to create custom audiences, lists of users who share similar characteristics. This way, you’ll have the ability to retarget them with more focused content that can drive conversions. Add to it the fact that you can leverage Ads’ comments, and you can deploy rather robust strategies on the platform!
With custom audiences, you’ll be able to follow up on your prospects by guiding them down the funnel with pieces that are ever more suited to the users’ level of familiarity with your brand.
The Perfect Video: Best Practices from the Pros
Now that we’ve covered the basics of how to launch your Facebook ad campaign, let’s look at some essential tips that will make your videos reach and resonate with your audiences.
Grab Users’ Attention Early On
When you’re writing your ad’s script, there’s one crucial issue you need to think about before delivering your main message to your audience: Why should they care? What idea or element can arouse interest in them and motivate them to watch the full video?
Make sure your opening has a hook that’s compelling enough to get your core message across quickly. Users tend to marvel at surprises: if you have a fascinating anecdote to tell, a provocative question, or an interesting fact that most people are unaware of, include in your ad from the start.
Keep It Short and Sweet
Life on social media goes by fast, and so should your videos. And now more, as Facebook has recently updated its viewing options so that users can only see a few seconds of the clip and then have to click to see the rest.
If you want a general rule of thumb, video ads should be no longer than one minute and ideally around 30 seconds. As the video is shorter, the chances that users will see the ad through to the end increase.
Go Mobile
Mark my words: the vast, vast majority of users who will see your ad on Facebook will do so through their mobile screen. Therefore, it is imperative to optimize your content to fit perfectly on a smartphone.
Your main goal is not to have parts of your video cut off by the shift from a large screen to pocket-sized ones. In general, the square view format works better for the smartphone experience than the conventional landscape view.
Design for Sound-Off Views
Most video views on Facebook happen without sound, so it’s ideal to create an ad that communicates your message without users having to listen to it. For starters, it’s good practice to add closed captions so that users can follow your message while in mute.
But equally important is that the video has a visual narrative. For example, if you are a footwear brand, you don’t want to simply tell viewers about the benefits of your new line. A better strategy is to show them in the video how resistant your shoes are to heat and cold, and the different activities they can do with them.
Wrapping Up!
Over the years, Facebook has gone from being a platform restricted to sharing photos and posts to a venue that both marketers and users rely on to promote and discover products.
Facebook ads allow you to narrow the audience your videos will aim at by using tags about their demographics, interests, and behavior. Once you have data on the reactions and views your ads get, you have the option to set up custom audiences to provide them with content more targeted to their needs.
The videos you should use depend on your targets’ familiarity with your brand. For those who are just getting to know you, you’ll want to give thought-provoking messages, while your most promotional ads will be more useful to those who already have some experience with your content.
Many businesses have already tried and succeeded with Facebook video advertising. What are you waiting for?
