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Video advertising can be one of the best ways to build brand awareness and increase sales. Your success depends all on the quality of your video advert. Here are just a few tips for creating a compelling video advert.
Know your target audience
First, it’s important to consider who your target audience is and what is likely to appeal to them. Think about the age, the gender and the location of your audience. This is important for helping you determine what language to use in your advert, what types of visuals to use and the overall tone (does it need to be professional and serious or playful and funny?).
Consider the target platform
You should then consider what platform your advert will be displayed on. This can determine how long your video advert should be and how users will interact with it. For example, on sites like Facebook, video adverts are typically muted automatically, so it could be important to not rely too much on sound to grab people’s attention. A video advert on Spotify on the other hand could benefit from relying heavily on sound to get its message across given that people use this platform for streaming music and podcasts
Hook viewers straight away
On Youtube, video ads can often be skipped after several seconds, while video ads on Facebook and X are likely to be scrolled past if they’re not immediately engaging. This is why it’s important to make the opening seconds count. You should aim to grab the attention of your viewers and make them curious enough to keep watching. There are lots of tricks that you can use to hook people and hold their attention including:
- A motion shot that slowly reveals the subject of the ad
- A question which you then plan to answer later in the video
- A facial expression followed by a slow reveal why the person is making that expression
- A song that people want to hear the rest of
- A relatable problem that you follow up with a solution
Tell an engaging story
A brand story is another way to make a video advert compelling. What is a brand story? This is a story that helps communicate your values and personality. It could be a story of how your company started, a story of a customer having a problem solved by your product, or even a historical story related to your product or industry. Just make sure that this story is short and interesting. You don’t want to bore viewers with a long or predictable story as they likely won’t watch it to the end.
Wow your viewers with facts
Adding some fascinating facts to your video can help to make it more interesting and also more memorable. Try to choose facts that are surprising, shocking or amusingly obscure. These facts could be survey stats, scientific results, historical findings or cultural observations. Just be sure to use facts that are 100% correct – getting facts wrong could cause people to lose trust in your brand.
Make the visuals unforgettable
Some video adverts deliberately don’t make sense. Instead, they use vibrant or surreal visuals to simply make their advert memorable. This ensures that viewers remember your brand. Consider examples like the Cadbury drumming gorilla or the majority of perfume ads. Just make sure to get the atmosphere right – adverts for sweets and chocolate are typically playful and zany, while perfume ads are romantic and sophisticated.
End with a call to action
The call to action is important for converting customers. This is a prompt that encourages customers to buy your product or sign up to your service. Consider ending by displaying your website address, phone number or other company information. When sharing videos online, such videos could lead directly to your website when clicked on. Alongside a call to action, make sure you end by prominently displaying your brand name and logo. If viewers decide not to take action, they should at least be able to remember your brand.
Work with professionals
The quality of your video advert is a reflection of the quality of your company. A poor quality advert will put customers off. Therefore, unless you have extensive video production experience, you should always hire a video production company to help you create your advert. Live action adverts may require hiring a videographer and actors, while an animated advert will require hiring an animator and voice actors. There are video production companies that can provide all of these services for you.
Image Credit: depositphotos.com
