For a programmatic campaign that generates an impactful ROAS, your business goals and media strategy first should be clearly defined. This will impact creative development, attribution and performance. Most marketers often think of video as an effective way to drive awareness keeping visitors engaged on site and to promote social sharing. All to elevate your brand and not necessarily to deliver conversions. While your specific goals for each display or video tactic may vary, strongly consider taking full advantage of the opportunities that video offers. It is logical to apply video to a campaign as an awareness tactic, in our experience we see video playing an integral part of cross campaign attribution as well as driving lower funnel conversions. We’re seeing video assets drive primary conversions—appointment requests, seminar registrations, etc. While it’s sound logic to apply video only as an awareness tactic, in our experience we’re seeing video assets drive lower-funnel conversions and play an integral part of cross campaign attribution. In partnership with our sister agency, Primacy, and their client Middlesex Health, we strategically deployed video tactics at certain levels at the campaign to run on Connected TV (CTV) as well as Pre-Roll. For service line campaigns, we set up Pre roll and for brand we set up CTV and Pre-Roll. As a result, Video delivered 74% of total primary conversions while CTV delivered 8%. That’s 82% of primary conversions generated from video and the remaining 18% of conversions are from display assets. Visitors that engaged with the video assets converted at a much higher rate than those with a display asset. Here are our takeaways from this finding:
1. Engage Your Core Audience
Using Video to reach your target audience should be a large piece of the strategy. Structure your campaign in a way that will produce the best possible outcome by using data segments. Getting to your target audience this way, assures you that you’re reaching the right people at the right time. Secondly, it allows your brand messaging to make an impact during the decision-making process. According to a recent Google study, viewers are devoting more time to streaming services. For Middlesex Health, we started with key personas built from third party data segments, followed by campaign responder data to enhance our audience targeting, and then used these audiences for our CTV and Pre-Roll channels.
2. Halo Effect with Video
It’s becoming clear that video has earned the recognition of more than just brand awareness driver. Smart marketers will want to explore further how to use video assets to make an impact at all levels of the conversion funnel.
The Middlesex campaign structure is a prime example of upper funnel video asset driving lower funnel conversion because there is still a halo effect associated with video. Tracking the performance of your video assets, analyzing performance of video against other assets and channels will also provide with valuable insight on how to strategically structure your programmatic campaign.
3. Use the Right Mix of Videos
Video assets can come in all forms. Shorter videos may have more scale, are often not skippable and might not feel as intrusive. Longer video can have more of an impact because it allows more time to get your key messaging across while driving a compelling story. In either case, your video assets should deliver available information to your audience in a short period of time. Think through engaging content, appealing messaging and a strong call-to-action. And as with all creative concepts, there is always testing. Go to market with multiple videos to test; thjs is a sure way to find out what resonates with your targeting audience.
Final Thoughts
Today, we think through our creative strategy when it comes to video assets. Which tactic do you apply? When to layer in CTV or Hulu or simply to run Pre-Roll Video. When to use 30 seconds over 60 seconds or what video assets are more likely to drive cross campaign attribution. We pair the video creative concept with the tactics that will deliver the best results whether it is on brand awareness or, keep engagement at the consideration period or to drive bottom of funnel conversion.