I blame Kevin Costner! Do you remember the film ‘Field of Dreams’ starring Kevin Costner where he hears a voice when walking through his cornfield which says “If you build it, he will come”.
I often think of this analogy when clients make ‘build’ a video, upload it to the website or plonk it on YouTube and expect people ‘he’ to come and watch it. This might have worked in the past, but not anymore.
If you think about it, we live in a noisy content world. Look at the facts, over 300 hours per minute of video content is uploaded to YouTube. Five hundred million Instagram stories are posted per day. It’s getting tough to get your content seen by your audience. And even if you have a warm audience, they’re very likely to miss what you’re trying to show them.
Social media channels make their money through advertising. You may of heard the phrase “Pay to Play” and, like it or not, this is the world that we live in as marketers, and we need to see this as an opportunity. See this age of video ads as a Goldmine Era. What I am referring to is that you can reach a wide audience and not pay a lot of money at the moment, but this won’t last forever. All the social media platforms are offering video ads, which can be very highly targeted. But before you rush out there, there are a few things to consider to make this campaign effective.
The first, have clear goals. Do you want this to be a brand awareness campaign? Or do you want people to consider one of your products? Or you want a conversion and sales? This will shape what your video content will be.
The second consideration is to have a budget in mind. Now, you can spend just a couple of dollars, obviously, right up to hundreds or thousands of dollars, it depends on the size of the target audience and also their geographic location. But if you’re niche and know exactly who and where your audience is, you can run a very effective campaign for not a lot of money.
The third, measuring the results, and having an online campaign like this, will give you great metrics. So you need to consider what goals you want:
- Do you want just purely views?
- Do you want to promote people sharing and engaging with your content?
- Do you want people to click through to a landing page?
- Do you want to go straight for conversions?
Now, each platform has a slightly different setup, depending on these goals that you want to achieve. We are nearly halfway through 2019. The digital landscape is changing all the time. I would recommend you at least test some paid promotion for your video content. It’ll give you an unfair advantage over your competition. And believe you me, a lot of businesses are not doing this.