For marketers, the best part about video is its versatility as a tactic to support and increase the performance of your current ad campaigns. Oftentimes we see marketers use video on a campaign-by-campaign basis to support short-term initiatives. While this can be successful, it is a missed opportunity. The best way to experience the high-performance we see from video is to implement these ad sets into every stage of the marketing funnel.

To help you do this, we’ve pulled together the highest-performing strategies you can replicate in your own video campaigns to reach new customers, drive them down the funnel, and convince them to become longtime customers to your brand.

The need for video ads

Many marketers know that video ads are important aspects of their digital marketing mix. But it can’t be stated enough just how much they can improve the performance of online campaigns. In fact, over 50% of marketers worldwide list video ads as the type of content that receives the highest ROI for their efforts. This is likely because of video’s visual, dynamic nature that helps it stand out from the rest of the display ads most audiences normally see. It was even reported that 80% of users can recall a video ad they’ve seen within the past 30 days. This boils down to how people interact with video-related content. Oftentimes, video is simply more fun to view than the standard billboard or other static ads that we see on the sides of every site. Because of this, it’s thought that viewers retain 95% of a message when viewing it on video compared to only 10% when seeing it from a traditional ad. When you add all of this up, it shows how positive an experience video advertising can be for your potential customers. With more than half of online users view videos on a daily basis, we’re here to help you take advantage of this high-performing asset.

Strategies for success: the power of programmatic

The quickest way to up-level your video advertising strategy in the upcoming year is to think beyond the platform-specific approaches that have dominated the industry in recent years. While platforms like YouTube can be incredibly powerful, they don’t help you ensure you’re reaching your audience at the moments they’re looking to convert. Think of it this way: most users may look at YouTube videos when they come home from work, but they will almost certainly leave the site to look for a recipe, plan a trip, read an article, or another of countless options. Syncing your video ads to a programmatic vendor will allow your video ads to follow your customers to the sites they visit most across the web and social media to ensure you’re staying top of mind. With the constantly evolving AI-technologies associated with programmatic advertising, you’ll also ensure that your ads will be served to the customers most likely to be interested in buying your products or services at that time.

Strategies for success: brand enhancement

The second strategy necessary for expanding your video efforts is to think outside of the box. As cliche as this may sound, it’s necessary to stand out from the crowd to grab your viewers’ attention and educate them on your offerings, in the few short seconds you have. A good way to do this is to feature a customer testimonial from one of your brand advocates. You can also highlight individual products in the environment in which they are used so that users get a better sense of how they work so that they can start visualizing themselves using your products. While not always relevant, it is important to remember that many video-friendly platforms like Facebook and Instagram skew towards millennials. It’s a good practice to keep this in mind when creating your video assets. Beyond marketing-specific efforts, video ads are a great way to get your company’s culture out for recruiting or HR purposes.

Strategies for success: measuring performance

One of the biggest areas of focus we’ve noticed for marketers in 2019 is centered around campaign measurement and attribution. Simply put, if you aren’t effectively measuring how your ads are performing online, then you won’t be able to understand whether your budget is driving conversions or not. With a customer’s path to conversion growing longer than ever and consisting of multiple touchpoints across different devices, it can be incredibly hard to get a holistic view of what’s truly working. To combat this, look for a partner that can provide comprehensive measurement tools. Utilizing something like AdRoll’s Attribution Dashboard will help you to understand the most common paths your customers take to conversion and the time it takes them to complete this journey. Knowing this will help you optimize your video campaigns to ensure you’re decreasing the time it takes to influence a conversion while increasing the number of sales you’re driving.

If you’re not yet running video, now is the time to start, before the market gets too crowded and the prices rise. If you’re already running video campaigns, then it’s time to take a step back and figure out how you can take your efforts to the next level.

This article was originally published by Laura Smous