A few weeks ago we attended another brilliant Grow with Google Breakfast Briefing about the importance of digital video for the future of online marketing. Waking up at dawn to attend the briefing required an intravenous injection of two litres of coffee, but it was totally worth it.
Source: YouTube – July Google Breakfast
Kelsey Bowers, a YouTube Specialist at Google, talked us through the evolution of the world of digital video and its forthcoming effects on online users’ habits. She also shared with us some mind-boggling stats and facts that you absolutely need to know. So, read on and prepare yourself for some groundbreaking numbers!
The Evolution Of Digital Video
14 years ago, Me at the zoo appeared on YouTube, the first video ever uploaded on the platform. The boy in the video is the site’s co-founder Jawed Karim and the person recording it is his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky. Little did they know that their low-quality video would have hit 72.2 million views in 2019.
Online video consumption has been growing steadily since then and it’s estimated that by 2021 will make up 82% of all consumer Internet traffic. With so much video content available, by 2021, 5 million years of video will be watched online every month.
Creative is Your Mightiest Weapon
Source: YouTube – July Google Breakfast
Kelsey Bowers’ presentation also touched on the importance of creatives for any successful marketing campaign: between 50% to 80% of your campaign’s success depends on creative. When the above slide appeared on the big Google Foundry screen, we actually felt the urge to hug her. Please, Kelsey, spread the word to the four corners of the globe!
We work with clients from different industries and backgrounds on a daily basis, but one message we keep repeating is that all of our marketing efforts and expertise are pointless without good creative assets. You can target the best possible audience, have the most engaging ad copy, but if you’re pushing a blurry image, that generic stock photo of a ‘diverse group in the office environment’ or a long, boring video featuring multiple shots of your conference room, your campaign is doomed to fail. Or to use up your advertising budget without generating any results for your business.
Be Strategic
However, high-quality content is not enough. Your content should also be tailored to your marketing objective and customer intent. Brand awareness, website traffic, in-store visits, leads or sales require a different strategy that should encompass your creative assets.
Source: YouTube – July Google Breakfast
Develop video content with your goal in mind. If you want to reach new customers, don’t jump into selling your products to a completely unaware audience. If your objective is driving leads, avoid talking about your company values, as the users you are targeting should already be accustomed to your brand and ready to take action.
According to a study conducted by Comscore, high-quality, relevant creative increases ad views by 5.8 times and nearly double purchase intent in comparison to low-quality creatives. 47.3% of the times, the probability that an ad will be looked at depends on the creative itself and 52% of the sales changes for brands are driven by creative quality.
What all these stats are telling you is: do not underestimate creatives. Before pouring more money in advertising spend, make sure to invest in a set of high quality, well-pondered creatives to inspire and attract your audience. An image is worth a thousand words but a video is worth a million!
Video Making Tips
Our knowledgeable YouTube specialist rounded up some of the best practices to create successful video content and we thought of sharing them with you. They’re created for YouTube advertisers, but we found that the same rules could be applied for social media video ads.
The top three principles of video creation are:
- Build for mobile: over half of video content is viewed on mobile and mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year. Make sure to use a tighter framing, bright footage and faster pacing and cuts.
- Use sight and sound: this could be slightly different for YouTube and social media, as most people watch ads with sound off on social platforms. Kelsey’s advice is to “give people a reason to choose to watch right away, and then to continue choosing to watch throughout”, while a social media geek would say: “design for sound off but delight with sound on” for social videos.
- Win in the first 5 seconds: capture attention within the first five seconds to drive more impact with business metrics and convey the main message of your ad within the first three seconds to engage the highest amount of viewers.
At the briefing, we were shown an amazing video creation guide for performance-oriented campaigns. Kelsey wanted to demonstrate that we should break free from the old-school precept of video as a driver of brand awareness only. Videos are powerful instruments to drive action too – if you know how to do it right.
Source: YouTube – July Google Breakfast
To sum up, the key takeaway we gained from this extremely insightful Breakfast Briefing is that video is the future and if you want your brand to be visible and successful you need video content. 96% of people say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service and 83% of marketers say video gives them a good ROI. The question is, will you be there?
Need assistance with implementing and optimising your video ad campaigns on YouTube? VROOM Digital can help, we are Premier Google Partners. Contact us!
